June 28, 2015 — You’ve been meaning to start using Sass in your projects, right? But it looks hard…is it really worth figuring out? Yes, yes it is! Sass is “CSS with superpowers” and a wonderful entry point into larger development concepts and best practices. We’ll talk about what Sass is, how to get started, and identify some key features you can apply to your own work.

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June 28, 2015 — Using typography effectively with WordPress. “I like TwentyFifteen, but I don’t want my site to look like all the other sites out there, what are my options?” This talk covers:
• How you can make your site subtly (or not so subtly) stand out amongst the crowd.
• Some basic dos and don’ts of implementing typography.
• What tools are out there for you to use.

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June 28, 2015 — When creating a website, you can edit a menu to include not only pages, but also category archives that can create a more complete experience for small businesses. This is not just how to do it but WHY you should do it. This gives an in depth look at the justification for placement of content on your website and wayfinding.

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June 27, 2015 — This talk is a step-by-step guide to building a successful membership site with WordPress. The 30 minute talk is highly-practical and will give you a blueprint to launch your first membership site. It provides resources to allow you to dig deeper into the topic allowing you to make decisions about payment gateways plugins and business strategy

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June 27, 2015 — It seems that designers and developers speak different languages: developers are fluent in How, while designers are fluent in Why. Both are extremely important to a project, but this difference often leads to communication breakdowns. This talk gives developers insight into the design process, including vocabulary, problem-solving methods, and workflow, and outline some simple methods to avoid “fail points” along the way.

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June 27, 2015 — Security doesn’t have to be hard. This talk covers a few simple steps you can take to help keep your site safe from attackers as well as provide a checklist of items you can carry with you across all your web projects.

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June 27, 2015 — In this presentation learn just how easy it is to integrate the WordPress customizer into your themes. Also explore ways to extend the customizer to make it do more than what’s available out of the box.

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June 26, 2015 — The focus of this beginner-friendly talk is how to quickly improve your site’s SEO without making it a full-time job. Talking points will include testing your site for SEO trouble spots, submitting your site to search engines, and reviewing common on-page content mistakes.

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June 26, 2015 — How do you set up an informational site that has over 700 pages and is constantly growing? How will anybody find anything? By crafting the menu and template pages to show categories of items and allowing the user to filter the results. Through the use of custom taxonomies, template pages with custom queries and a faceted search result, we walk through how a site can be setup so that it can grow and maintain it’s consistent structure. Even if your project only has 70 posts, being able to cross-reference them with multiple terms so that no matter how they look for things, the information will be found, is very powerful.

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June 25, 2015 — This talk shares strategies on how to best develop engaging content and then you will learn how to effectively integrate social media into your personal branding strategy to develop stronger connections, gather information, find opportunities and demonstrate your knowledge.