November 14, 2014 — In this session, Kathy Cano-Murillo, the Crafty Chica, shares how she took her knowledge and experience from being a newspaper features reporter and applied it to create her award-winning blog, CraftyChica.com. She also shares her comical-yet-insightful lessons learned, as well as her insider tips that elevated her blog to a lifestyle site that spun off a series of books, a product line, web series, brand partnering and more. She shares her best practices for pinpointing a mission statement, and creating engaging content to support that. While Kathy‘s blog is grounded in DIY, she shares how she takes liberty with that “creativity” theme and applies to food, shopping, diary, entertainment, books and more.

November 14, 2014 — Finding your blog’s voice isn’t as simple being honest, honoring the audience’s interests, and crafting the best tone and structure for a story; except that maybe it is. Trace the evolution of my blogging voice through personal and professional blogs, group blogs, corporate blog ghostwriting, and blog awards. Hear stories of how writing and design choices, gaffes, and observations become blog voice. Because, in the end, finding your blog’s voice is about both a journey and a destination.

November 14, 2014 — Jenny Lawson writes the award-winning blog, thebloggess.com. Her book, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened ( A Mostly True Memoir), was a #1 NYT bestseller its first week out. Pretty much every post on her blog gets hundreds of comments from real humans, despite the likelihood that you’ll snort coffee out your nose reading her stuff.

WordPress community organizer and longtime blogger Jen Mylo will interview Jenny.

November 14, 2014 — This presentation focuses on understanding the position of clients within their own business/organization and asking key questions to further understand their design requests in order to create effective design solutions.

Presentation Slides »

November 14, 2014 — When it comes to getting a business off the ground, there are lots of decisions to make. From finding the right theme / plugins / host, figuring out fonts, writing good copy, finding great images, and getting your site ranked, it’s tough to know where to begin. In this session Andrea provides a list of steps and to-dos to help you get started and get your business off on the right foot.

Presentation Slides »

November 14, 2014 — Underscores has become the go-to starter theme in the WordPress community. It serves as a common denominator to reproduce bugs for WordPress Core, it’s what WordPress Theme Review Team administrators point theme authors to, when asked how to improve their review process. It’s also the starter theme of choice for many premium theme shops, selling on Theme Forrest or WordPress.com. What sets it apart from other projects that are built for the same purpose? How did it get to the point it is today? And what might the future look like. Get answers to all these questions and explore the secrets of its success.

November 14, 2014 — Lighting Talks:
The WordPress community has always been one of our largest assets, but the changing dynamics of security online have also made it our best defense. This talk covers the threats facing the WordPress ecosystem and the Internet today, how the WordPress community is combatting them, and what you can do to help keep us all safe.

November 14, 2014 — Lighting Talks: Blogger Basics
Is shopping on your site user friendly? Are you losing people because your checkout process is too complicated. Creating a delightful shopping experience can increase your sales by more than 50% and build customer loyalty. Whether you’re a blogger looking to generate more revenue for your writing or selling products, Pamelaexplains how to increase the income on your site by creating a great user experience.

November 14, 2014 — Lighting Talks: Blogger Basics
The most important first step to writing for the web is understanding that you will forever be writing to dual audiences. Join Josepha for a look at what to do, and not do, when it comes to optimizing your content for search engines.

November 14, 2014 — Lighting Talks:
Learn how to better use photography on your website in this fast-paced tour of WordPress image tips. Get the most out of the built-in features in WordPress, learn how to select and prepare images for the web, and discover how strong photography can help your website.