October 9, 2015 — If you make WordPress sites for a living, you’ve probably worked with clients, and you’ve probably been through the occasional tough project. Collaborating with your clients and forming a true alliance with them is delicate art. But, this talk won’t focus on what seems to go wrong with these collaborations –– it will focus on how to get it right.

We’ll compare assumptions that developers and clients often bring to a project, and look at how they are similar in some ways (e.g., the excitement of creating something new) and different in others (e.g. features that may strike clients as simple, but are actually difficult to build, and situations where developers assume a content management task will be easy for the clients, when it’s actually heinous).

We’ll also talk about a comparative wish list of skills and attitudes developers and clients tend to wish the other had, and we’ll talk about the anatomy of an ideal collaboration and the sorts of shared ideas and exchanges that can happen at every phase of a typical web product cycle, especially the initial discovery phase, where we identify the known knowns, the known unknowns, and as many of the unknown unknowns as we can.

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October 9, 2015 — What will happen to your website when it gets hit by a huge traffic spike? It will almost certainly go down if you are not prepared. Discover how to set up WordPress on Amazon cloud, covering vertical and horizontal scaling. Amazon offers many different components, but testing them can be time consuming and exhausting. Learn how to choose the right instances’ types and sizes, how to separate web server and database tier, and how to make them highly available with auto-scaling.

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October 9, 2015 — All websites we build have a goal, usually to convince a visitor to do something we want in one way or another. Optimizing websites for conversion requires knowledge about how we humans work, how we make decisions and how we can predict our irrational behavior and use it for good. In this session, we’ll explore working techniques and methods of high converting websites and landing pages, building ourselves a tried-and-tested toolset to make our website achieve business success.

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October 9, 2015 — As working remotely is getting more and more popular in the WordPress industry, many of us are choosing to work from co-working spaces. But is everyone familiar with co-working etiquette?

In this talk, Franz will present some insights on how to be a good co-worker, boost your productivity in a co-working environment and nurture the co-working culture. He will share the most common challenges he has encountered whilst working from a co-working space and how he overcame them.

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October 9, 2015 — Maintaining any business for 20 years is difficult. But keeping a tech business running strong for 20 years is a big challenge. Zeek Interactive just turned 20 and Steve will discuss how to stay ahead of the game in an ever-changing tech environment.

October 8, 2015 — My talk will be on developing WordPress themes using Sage WordPress starter theme based on HTML5 Boilerplate, gulp, Bower, and Bootstrap. I will go through the theme development process, then I will be guiding the audience through starter themes and reach Roots Sage project and present how to develop / test / finish theme development process.

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October 8, 2015 — Learn to embrace the client dynamic and avoid one of the most common mistakes in running a creative business. Treat your client as an adversary and you will foster a short term relationship that is contentious and unfruitful.
As design professionals, we need to let go of the “artist” persona and embrace the creative entrepreneur as one who solves not just design problems but business problems.
Learn how to:
Pivot when you are getting negative feedback
Define objective goals to reduce frustration and endless revision cycles
Talk about money
Charge for value versus time

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October 8, 2015 — In this session, we dig into what it means to really satisfy a client (with a fun dip into some cognitive psychology), develop a process to find out what the Target is so you can hit it every time, and discuss why it’s easier, more profitable, and more effective than trying to “Wow” everyone you work with.

October 8, 2015 — This talk covers the use of premium content development and services like Rainmaker Pro, ZippyCourses, Optimize Press and Premise to set up automated and password protected content and marketing systems to sell information to users. Heavy emphasis of the class will be on content development and delivery, which ultimately is why WordPress is the best tool for self-hosted e-learning platforms.

October 8, 2015 — What are some of the ways to quickly get a WordPress site up and running with the minimal amount of effort?
Templates, page builders, and emerging technologies will be covered. Many tips and tricks will be reviewed helping those who suffer from the lazy find a way to become part of the WordPress community.

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