July 29, 2015 — In this session learn how to build an MVP (minimal viable product). We’ll start by stripping out all the bloat, get rid of all those widgets and start with naked content. Then and only then we’ll start to methodically add features, as they are needed. You will be amazed how much your visitors enjoy just reading your content and engaging with you through simple solutions.
Walk away with practical strategies around:
Building content driven websites
Gaining traction and increasing engagement
Elegantly monetizing your blog
Plus 5 experience tips that will make your website 1 of a kind
Stop adding features for the sake of adding features, stop following exhausted advertising strategies, and start focusing on providing better experiences for people.

July 29, 2015 — I compare the three most popular form plugins, Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms and Contact Form 7. With different business models the pros and cons are hard to see. I shed light and help you understand which would be best for you and your projects.

July 29, 2015 — Learn how to collect data, analyze data and optimize your WordPress website using various free marketing tools.

July 29, 2015 — What’s the most efficient way to sell images with WordPress? Why choose a WordPress plugin over an image selling platform like SmugMug or Zenfolio? See the differences between popular ecommerce plugins, their strengths and weaknesses. Watch as a WordPress website is created and setup to sell images in 10 minutes.

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July 28, 2015 — Setting up and maintaining local development and staging environments can be time-consuming, especially if you want to keep your dev environments up-to-date against an active production site. And if you use multisite this gets even harder. Stop editing your hosts file every 10 seconds, keep your database all up to date, and spend no time doing so. Also covered will be how this fits in with the BDN’s QA process.

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July 28, 2015 — Mat Marquis shares the tools and techniques that ensure that your content will reach your most demanding (and least powerfully equipped) users, without detracting from the experience of users on the latest and greatest devices—without limiting the creativity of your team, and without a massively inflated deadline. We discuss strategies for smarter asset delivery, techniques for avoiding potential points of failure, and start to cultivate development habits that help us deal with a vast landscape of unknowns from the very start of a project.

July 28, 2015 — CSS preprocessors make developing clean and semantic stylesheets effortless. My talk takes someone through a basic structure for organizing Sass within a WordPress theme, using the Bones theme framework as an example. I go through some of the benefits and cool tricks you can implement with this structure including breakpoint includes, variables, functions, nesting, and mixins. Finally I address perhaps the greatest hurdle to immediately implementing Sass in your WordPress theme — compiling. I take people through the common methods of doing this including Grunt, Compass, and WordPress plugins like WP-SCSS.

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July 28, 2015 — I’ve built a lot of sites, and it seems that the final 20% can be the hardest to complete. I want to teach designers and developers about the 80/20 principle and how it applies to their project workflow. Then I will talk about tools and tricks that I use to finish a project strong, particularly when building a custom theme.

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July 28, 2015 — This talk covers the ideas behind content migration, and introduce development strategies and examples that you can employ in your projects if you’re migrating from something other than WordPress, or if the built-in WordPress WXR import/export tool misses or mishandles important content on your site. With this in your toolkit, you can speak confidently to clients or employers about your ability to get them onto WordPress.

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July 28, 2015 — (How to stop ignoring that thing on your website called a blog.)
In this session we discuss the purpose of blogging for business (versus blogging as a business), how to make sure you are talking to the right people, how it can actually save you time in the long run, creating an editorial calendar, tips for using categories and tags, and easy ways for coming up with topics that will save you from staring at a blank screen wondering what to write about.

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