October 6, 2015 — Themes shape the entire WordPress experience, and there are seemingly endless options to choose from. But with all these options, how do you know which theme is the best for you? This talk will explore the vast spectrum of WordPress’ theme dom, from the simplest default themes to the most involved custom creation, including theme option panels, theme repositories and marketplaces, and which types of themes are best for which purposes. Sé will also cover the must-haves (and the red flags) to look for when choosing your next theme, when you should (or shouldn’t) build a custom theme, and how to structure your site so you can go from theme to theme without losing your content (or your mind).

October 6, 2015 — Every technically minded person needs to know how to communicate technical knowledge clearly and effectively. This talk examines the fundamentals of “explaining hard things to humans,” including:

– What makes technical communication uniquely difficult, and uniquely important.
– Avoiding two major impediments to technical communication: arrogance (relating to gaps in knowledge as a hassle or irritation) and breeziness (attempting to gloss over gaps in knowledge).
– How and why to make technical communication both audience-aware and strategic – tailored to both the knowledge level of the audience and the goal of the communication.
– The value of analogies in technical communication.
– Principles of clear technical writing.

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October 5, 2015 — The eagle has landed. WP-API 2.0 is here, opening up new horizons for how websites are constructed with WordPress as a CMS. More and more developers are discovering the benefits of “decoupled” website development: where the front-end is built as a separate system from the CMS itself.

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October 5, 2015 — Often user interface and user experience gets mixed up for both the client and the web developer. These are things we need to help both our developers and clients know in order to ensure making great experiences on the web for end-users.

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October 5, 2015 — A tenth of a second can make a huge difference with how many people stay on your site. What about a whole second? Or two? Or *five*?

Find out what HHVM is, how and why it’s being used by the biggest sites on the Internet and how you can use it right now to improve not only the speed of your site and how that can improve your conversions.

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October 5, 2015 — The reason you run WordPress is to publish content that people will visit. How do visitors find you? What do they like best about your website? Google Analytics is the best free reporting software you can get. This talk will introduce you to setting it up in WordPress, applying essential filters, and creating the best reports to measure and improve your website traffic.

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October 5, 2015 — I’ll give an introduction to the WordPress REST API and Angular.js in the form of a high level overview (why they exist, what problems they solve, the future of the REST API), and proceed to walk through building theme components with the REST API and Angular.js. I’ll discuss the concerns leading a theme author to chose to build asynchronous components, such as caching issues. Live examples of REST API/Angular.js components will be discussed, with examples of how I built them. Time permitting I’ll conclude by building a REST API/Angular.js theme component live, though will likely do it Emeril Lagasse style (here’s a directive I baked earlier!) due to time constraints.

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October 5, 2015 — WordPress offers a lot of power as a CMS, but all too often we can lose sight of the most essential of those three letters—the Content. Whether you’re a web designer, web developer, or end user of WordPress, potential pitfalls abound when planning for the structure and delivery of content is left until the eleventh hour. Using examples from real projects, I will demonstrate how taking a content-first approach to our WordPress work allows us to better harness the awesome power underneath its hood, and save ourselves and our clients from massive (and expensive!) content headaches down the road.

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October 5, 2015 — How to identify the most lucrative prospects.
How to pitch large projects (value proposition, differentiation, overcoming objections.
How to execute (IA, Project Management, Resources, post-launch support.)

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October 4, 2015 — WordPress has plenty of options, both built-in and third-party, to be used as a content framework to create delightful administrative experiences that will improve your workflow and impress your clients; both those who use the site and manage content. Using WordPress’ built in Custom Post Types, Custom Taxonomies, and the Advanced Custom Fields plugin; learn how to use these to your advantage to create a great WordPress Dashboard UI and to better organize content for the admin-user and the end-user, and to streamline the entire editorial workflow with little development work necessary to make it happen.

If the structure of WordPress leaves you wanting more, coming into WordPress from another platform, or new to theme development in general; this will help demystify WordPress and help you make WordPress work for you rather than working around WordPress.