December 20, 2015 — Too many companies provide social services for “free,” quite literally banking on your data. WordPress is unique in that it charges (quite minimally) for the services it provides, and you own your data. I will explore various tools and paradigms — existing, and in the works — to develop and leverage your WordPress site as a central hub for your social data.

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December 20, 2015 — Follow along as I explain how I managed to pivot my WordPress development business from being an hourly/project-based WordPress developer with a plate full of different clients and projects to one with exclusive clients who all go through the same funnel and process month over month.

December 20, 2015 — In this talk, we outline the best practices involved in creating a multilingual site, then we will walk you through the benefits, drawbacks and pitfalls of current approaches to multilingual content with WordPress. Yes, we have (pretty much) tried them all. We hope that by the end of our talk, you will feel at ease if multilingual projects come your way.

December 20, 2015 — WordPress search is notoriously lacking. Why? MySQL is not search optimized. Elasticsearch is a scalable database that when coupled with WordPress produces extremely powerful results. This talk will cover what Elasticsearch is, why it’s important, and integrating it with a WordPress website using a 10up open source plugin called ElasticPress. ElasticPress has become increasingly popular in the WordPress community even being leveraged by popular hosting companies such as WP Engine.

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December 20, 2015 — HTTPS is The Way Forward™ for the web, as various web leaders are penalizing sites that still serve over HTTP. Search Engines are ranking insecure sites lower in search results. Browsers are limiting capabilities and stripping away features from sites serving HTTP.
This talk focuses on what HTTPS is from the very ground up, and some direction on how to set it up for your site.

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December 20, 2015 — Think your theme is secure? Your plugin API can be trusted? Think again. I’m going to show you how to make your site iron-cast by escaping your way to security

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December 20, 2015 — Join WordPress designers Sarah Whinnem, Michael Arestad, and Mel Choyce, along with moderator Mikel King, as they chat about designing modern WordPress websites and applications. What tools do they use? What are their thoughts on design trends? What do their design processes look like? What are the best techniques for designing responsively?

December 19, 2015 — Join this marketing seminar to gain a clear understanding of the must-have tactics to successfully build a website that builds business.
A bad website can kill a business. Outdated technology, confusing navigation and poor content are just a few reasons why websites fail.
If done right, a website is a lean, mean, lead-generation machine. If done wrong, you’re losing more than 50% of potential customers.

December 19, 2015 — In art class we were taught to copy the masters such as Da Vinci, Van Gough, and Caravaggio. This taught us skills like technique, form, & contrast. The same principle applies to learning any skill – steal from the masters and learn from it.
In this design-focused talk, we’re going to explore a few methods of sharpening our skills and intuition. Design, code, & user experience can all be improved when we take a deeper look into successful implementations. We’ll analyze some methods and steal a few things along the way – learning how to truly make it our own.

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December 19, 2015 — Rewrite rules are a thorn in many WordPress developers’ sides. In this session, we’ll discuss a simple way to add automated testing for your rewrite rules to help speed up your development and allow you to deploy your custom rules with confidence and peace of mind.