January 6, 2016 — There are four ways to give back to the WordPress community that don’t involve writing code. Learn how writing, speaking and teaching can not only help you share your knowledge and grow the community, they can also help you gain a better understanding of your beliefs and values.

January 6, 2016 — We live in an age when power has shifted from corporations and companies to the common user. With the rise of the Internet and social media consumers have a newfound voice that echoes over slogans and advertisements. Poor customer care comes with an incredibly high cost: 89% of consumers have stopped doing business with a company after experiencing poor customer service. A customer is 4 times more likely to buy from a competitor if the problem is service related vs. price or product related. Focus on customer care has an incredibly high value: 81% of companies who deliver superior customer care outperform the competition in market share; 60% of customers will pay more for better customer care and customer retention is 5x more profitable. In this talk I will guide you through the process of recruiting, training and motivating a high-performance customer care team, as well as demonstrate the value in investing in centralized in house systems, automation and tools that help your customer care team deliver an outstanding quality of service to positively impact your bottom line.

January 6, 2016 — Development is clear cut. It works or it doesn’t. The code is well-written or it’s a mess. Design on the other hand, is subjective, with the success of a project often based on the client’s ideas, perceptions, opinions, and personal experiences of what good design is.

As a freelancer, I have sold well over a million dollars in design services alone, and the journey has been good, bad, and at times, down right ugly as I learned along the way.

In this session, we’ll skip the sugar coating and I’ll share with you the mistakes made, lessons learned, and contract changes implemented. You’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of the role design plays in business, how to sell design, and how to navigate the sales process with clients.

If you’re a designer who rocks at design but feels a little less confident selling your services, you’re a business or agency owner who now find themselves selling design, or you’re a developer who wants to better understand pitching design to clients, this talk is for you.

January 5, 2016 — A logo should not cost the same as a cup of coffee (read: fiverr.com) – as WordPress designer/developer “unicorn” we often get stuck with a client who wants “just a simple logo”. The problem is logos are not simple, they are very important – and they are on every page of your website. This talk will offer guidelines on how to judge a good from a bad logo and offer some inspiration/steps for others to follow to build their own brilliant logos.

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January 5, 2016 — WordPress is easy! Ads are… not so much. Are you curious about some of the basics of the industry? Maybe you’d like to earn some revenue from your site? In this session we’ll look at options for monetizing your WordPress site.

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January 5, 2016 — An excellent topic for developers using WordPress for the first time. Also suitable for people building a website for the first time. This is a case study of a first-time WordPress development project for the website defeatharper.ca. My talk will outline how the ideas behind the site evolved as the requirements changed and the environment it was designed to play in kept shifting. How did we manage the change? How do you keep forward progress in development?

This was my first “real” WordPress project as a developer. I will be sharing my trials and tribulations in trying to get WordPress to “act like a proper CMS”, and then my ultimate insights into the “WordPress Way” of doing things. I have mixed feelings about the two major plugins we used, and will share those findings with you as well.

January 5, 2016 — To start a company is a noble thing! To start an online company, nobler still. A distributed workforce (or even a workforce working in an online “space”) has special requirements. There are nearly endless possibilities where expansion and direction are concerned, but finding and maintaining a workforce in those environments is a task that can be made simpler through a few key components.

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January 5, 2016 — “We’ve all built a ton of WordPress sites. We’ve also managed them all too. You’ve probably heard about WordPress Multisite Networks, and all the awesome things it can (and can’t) allow you to do.

With great power, comes great responsibility. During this talk, Taylor will step through the do’s and don’ts of Multisite Networks. He will share how WordPress Multisite can be your best friend or worst enemy… but usually both… at the same time.”

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January 5, 2016 — My presentation will focus on sharing practical tips and advice based on my experiences in becoming a core contributor. While there will be some technical aspects of how to contribute, my intention is to share what I have learned along the road to getting my first props and to provide practical, real-world advice on how to get into core contribution. My audience would be developers of any level who want to start contributing to core.

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January 5, 2016 — WordPress developers have been refining their development workflows and toolkits for almost 12 years now. As game changing server technologies like Facebook’s HHVM start to creep into the WordPress hosting space — WP Engine, Pagely & Kinsta all offer HHVM-ready plans — those workflows need to be expanded.
I’ll be introducing you to a new Vagrant-based WordPress development environment (HGV) that includes debugging and profiling tools and allows you to test your code in both PHP & HHVM environments.
vIf you’re interested in attending this talk, a passing familiarity with the command line helps, but isn’t a hard requirement.