September 29, 2020 — This talk explores the evolving role of a WordPress administrator, and the opportunity to better serve your organization through thoughtful change management.

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April 15, 2017 — WordPress’s content management system is only one piece of a very large puzzle. Acronyms abound as a site prepares for launch—from DNS to SSL to CDN, you’re up against a series of technical tasks that need to go well to go live.

Once you get to launch, there’s a whole litany of concepts a site owner ought to understand: optimizing and maintaining SEO, keeping the site secure, monitoring performance, tracking analytics, and keeping everything up to date. Plus, what do you do when performance slows down, or your site gets hacked, or users aren’t converting like you expect?

In this session, I’ll give an introduction to everything from domain hosting to site launching to cleaning a hacked site—sharing proven tools I’ve used to help hundreds of clients. You’ll get a better idea of what you can manage on your own and better understand the things you can’t (or don’t want to).

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August 24, 2016 — The WordPress Administration area is no walk in the park. Just because it’s, perhaps, the most user-friendly of the big CMSs doesn’t necessary make it objectively easy to use. All sorts of things that can seriously break your site are mixed in with trivial options. And, once you start adding robust plugins, things can get complicated – fast.

There are many ways to make WordPress more palatable for the common user (see: non-developers) and reduce the risk of big-time accidents. In this session, I’ll show you how easy it is to remove things users don’t need from the admin area—all with your own plugin.

Don’t worry if you haven’t written a plugin before. Not only will I give you the working plugin to start with, but I’ll explain everything along the way.

Let’s make WordPress just a little easier and safer for everyone!

Take aways:

Make the admin area easier for the most common users.
Reduce the risk of “damage” by users.
Customize the admin with a simple plugin (code provided!)

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April 5, 2016 — Did you know that running multiple instances of WordPress on a single server doesn’t actually require multiple instances of the codebase? In fact, as of WordPress 3.9, you don’t even need multiple instances of a plugin or a theme! Multitenancy can eliminate massive maintenance overhead in the right situations, think server-wide, near-instant updates that let you stay secure without keeping up with multiple sites. And that’s just the beginning of how it can help. In this session, I’ll show you how multitenancy can save time and energy while empowering your users. It’s simple, but powerful.

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February 12, 2016 — Did you know that running multiple instances of WordPress on a single server doesn’t actually require multiple instances of the codebase? In fact, as of WordPress 3.9, you don’t even need multiple instances of a plugin or a theme! Multitenancy can eliminate massive maintenance overhead in the right situations, think server-wide, near-instant updates that let you stay secure without keeping up with multiple sites. And that’s just the beginning of how it can help. In this session, I’ll show you how multitenancy can save time and energy while empowering your users. It’s simple, but powerful.

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September 9, 2015 — Learn about current web trends, tools, and workflows from our panelists of expert designers and front-end developers.

April 16, 2015 — Every designer has their own process and tools for creating beautifully designed WordPress websites. Join Ali Green, Jill Anderson, Cliff Seal and Tom Tortorici as they discuss their tools of the trade. From inspirational resources to future design trends, we’ll cover designing for WordPress from beginning to end.

April 15, 2015 — The WordPress Administration area is no walk in the park. Just because it’s, perhaps, the most user-friendly of the big CMSs doesn’t necessary make it objectively easy to use. All sorts of things that can seriously break your site are mixed in with trivial options. And, once you start adding robust plugins, things can get complicated fast.

There are many ways to make WordPress more palatable for the common user (see: non-developers) and reduce the risk of big-time accidents. In this session, I’ll show you how easy it is to remove things users don’t need from the admin area—all with your own plugin.

Don’t worry if you haven’t written a plugin before. Not only will I give you the working plugin to start with, but I’ll explain everything along the way.

Let’s make WordPress just a little easier and safer for everyone!

Presentation Slides »

December 5, 2014 — This session takes a fresh look at web content by seeing it through the eyes of the user, and discusses methods of improving users’ experience by employing simple and effective psychology alongside common-sense SEO.

June 1, 2014 — This session shares tips on becoming a better WordPress consultant, and on empowering clients with WordPress. Bad or lazy development practices set your clients up for failure, because other developers have to start over when they inherit your work—or, worse: the client’s site breaks and you’re not around to fix it anymore. You can do better.

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