October 26, 2014 — Stop plopping text on a page and think about new ways to present content. Create a library of design patterns that you can reuse (portfolios, testimonials, staff directories, and more) and pair them with Custom Post Types, Taxonomies, and the Custom Field Suite. With a bit of prep work, you can create a reusable toolkit for building sites that more functional and purposeful while making your own work more efficient.

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October 23, 2014 — There are many things that solo developers do that break down when placed in a team environment. We’ll walk through some of the best practices and things to keep in mind when going from freelance to working in a team.

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October 21, 2014 — As nearly one in four websites is powered by WordPress, there is an amazing responsibility to maintain quality control standards before launching your site. Southern Web’s Drew Barton will share in rapid-fire more than 30 tips that should be included in every WordPress site launch checklist. In order to provide security and maintain quality, these WordPress must-dos will help ensure you and your visitors will have a strong impression of WordPress as a blog, as a CMS and as a development platform.

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October 21, 2014 — WordPress is an easy way to get started building your minimum viable product. We’re going to discuss a few examples and ideas of using WordPress to quickly create a new project. We’ll then cover a few ways that you could get started, even with little to no PHP knowledge.

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October 20, 2014 — There’s a thin line between a content-rich WordPress website and a content-cluttered one. When your list of posts or pages goes beyond a few screens, it’s a sign that you might want to do some spring cleaning. In this talk, I’ll share strategies to reviewing your existing content, purging or updating old posts, and how to re-structure your content plan to help keep things organized in the future.

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October 18, 2014 — Making a website is more then making pretty picture and some sales jargon. You have to fully understand the project, your audience, current traffic trends and the even more important – the business goals before every writing a line of code.

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October 18, 2014 — To successfully market your product or service, you have to follow all of the rules, right? Be active on social media, publish regular updates on the blog, make your site look like bigger brands, and so forth? It’s becoming evident that the widely-accepted rules we’ve internalized are nothing more than suggestions made by companies that might have succeeded in spite of their tactics rather than because of them. In this talk, we’ll discuss how to build loyalty and trust into your marketing strategy by harnessing your best strength: who you are and what you do.

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October 17, 2014 — Copyrights, trademarks, privacy policies and open source licenses, oh my! From copyright and trademark concerns to determining how to comply with the range of open source licenses software publishers use today, the number of issues that a web developer can face in trying to determine how to comply with it all can become daunting. This session will present best practices to avoid some of the common pitfalls, and how to make the process a bit less painful in the future.

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