October 31, 2014 — In this session Christoph Trappe of Internet Marketing Association shares his ideas for steering your blog toward digital excellence by sharing authentic stories that align consumers with your business goals. Trappe discusses strategies for defining content goals, getting buy-in from key people in an organization, shaping messages in a new and authentic way, and measuring results.

Presentation Slides »

October 30, 2014 — Most service professionals (designers, web developers, consultants, etc.) charge the customer by hour. The problem is there is no correlation between how long something takes (the hours) and the result the customer wants (the value). No one ever asked a car dealer how long it took to make a vehicle.

What is really important to the customer, even if he does not realize it, is the result your craft will help him achieve. If you insist on identifying the value first, you can help the customer make better choices and contribute to a real impact on his life and business.

So, how do you do it? There are four core steps to learning to determine value and start pricing. In this session, you will learn the four steps and how to implement them in your business. Explore the fear that comes with a new business model, questions you should ask the customer, and how you can set a price based on the value you help create.

Presentation Slides »

October 29, 2014 — How do you coordinate with clients when you are 10 time zones away?
What do you do when a client needs you but you’re flying over an ocean?
How do you get work done when living in a new place every week?
Daniel Espinoza shares what he’s learned about running a sustainable WordPress business while traveling the world with his family.

Presentation Slides »

October 29, 2014 — The theme of your site at minimum controls how your site looks and many times may offer a multitude of the functionality. The basics of understanding how WordPress themes work is understanding patterns in the 3–5 core files that are required for a theme.
This sessions walks you through a cursory overview of each of these files so you understand how they all work together to create a WordPress theme.

Presentation Slides »

October 29, 2014 — Making the leap to writing your own WordPress plugin can seem impossible, but you can make it easy! In this talk, I’ll show you how to write the simplest possible WordPress plugin. The plugin won’t be able do much, but after writing it you will. You’ll learn how to add your own javascript, css, and php while making sure that all the code you write works correctly with WordPress and any other plugins you run.

The truth is that working with WordPress plugins opens up a new universe of creativity and it’s easy to feel a little overwhelmed by it. Some of the best plugins can have thousands of lines of code and might even interact with several web services. If that’s what a plugin needs to be, how could anyone ever get started? The solution is to figure out a Minimum Viable Plugin and start learning by creating the smallest plugin we can get away with.

You’ll be surprised how far you can go just by writing simple plugins, too. Sometimes, you just want to slightly tweak the functionality of WordPress, or even another plugin, and a simple plugin will get the job done. We’ll look at a few other small plugins I’ve written that make the WordPress sites they run on a little friendlier or just work better.

And, after you’ve built the simplest possible plugin, you can try developing the second simplest possible plugin on your own. We’ll talk about a few ideas you might like to try next. And once you’ve made a few simple plugins, you’ll find yourself making plugins that might have seemed to hard to even begin before. There’s a while lot of plugin development to do after you make the simplest possible plugin, but it’s an excellent way to get started.

Presentation Slides »

October 28, 2014 — Get a head start on the next step in your WordPress career by considering advantages, challenges, and tips from three job types in the WordPress economy.

Paul will share stories of the good, bad, and ugly from 7 years as a freelancer, 3 years as an agency co-founder, and 1 year as the Director of Recruiting at 10up.com, the largest WordPress agency in the world.

Want to step into freelancing? Take your business to the next level? Grow your team, or score the perfect agency job? This is the talk for you.

Presentation Slides »

October 28, 2014 — Cory Miller is a former newspaper journalist turned full-time entrepreneur. In 2008, he started iThemes, which builds web design software and offers cutting-edge web design training for thousands of customers around the globe.

Named the 7th fastest growing company in Oklahoma City in 2011 by the Metro 50, iThemes employs over 20 people around the globe with headquarters in Edmond, Oklahoma.

Presentation Slides »

October 28, 2014 — I this presentation Susan Ramsey discusses best practices for choosing and understanding how best to extend the functionality and design of your WordPress site using themes and plugins.

Presentation Slides »

October 28, 2014 — When many of us take the dive to set up our first WordPress site, whether it’s for yourself or a client it’s easy to lose enormous amounts of time. For many veteran WordPress developers it is very easy to forget that first experience of stumbling through the dashboard, or sifting through countless plugins. Marc walks through the process of getting a domain to launching a basic site.

Presentation Slides »

October 28, 2014 — Accessibility is a growing concern in the WordPress community at large. Accessibility in web design means creating a site that everyone can use. The U.S. Census Bureau says that over 47 million Americans have a disability of some kind. The UN and the World Bank say this adds up to 650 million people worldwide. That’s around 10% of everyone in the world. At some point in our lives, disability will affect most of us, no matter who you are. Every decision you make as a developer affects hundreds of thousands of people (or more!).

The mission statement of WordPress is to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software. WordPress ‘out of the box’ is already a great way to make a website accessible. As theme developers we can do more. People who can’t see or hear, others that can’t use a mouse, people who use special assistive devices to access the web — these people need to access websites. As theme developers, we need to know about accessibility.

Accessibility Statement: “Accessibility is the degree to which a product, device, service, or environment is available to as many people as possible.” Cynthia Waddell

There are 2,655 themes in the WordPress.org theme repository. Only 12 of those themes have the tag ‘accessibility-ready’. We can meet those accessibility guidelines with just a few extras steps. We will start with basic things like creating readable headlines and adding alt text to images. From there we will cover some of the information in the Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 Guidelines.

Trisha will provide real world examples from the perspective of her visually impaired son.

We are all responsible for making our part of a project accessible. You will need to shake things and change your processes a bit in order to achieve accessibility.

Presentation Slides »