April 17, 2021 — A panel discussion with women in different roles from the WordPress world.

June 3, 2019 — This year’s keynote is a panel featuring Lee Drozak, Joe Howard, Beth Soderberg, and Tara Claeys. They’ll discuss building their businesses in a discussion moderated by organizer Charlie Reisinger.

June 2, 2019 — If you are new to WordPress or have just been using it “out of the box,” you may want to learn about some easy ways to add useful functionality to your website using popular WordPress Plugins. This talk will briefly review what plugins are, and how to select and install them. Tara will share her “go to” plugins for adding things like forms, events, and image galleries to your WordPress site, as well as go over plugins which will help your website perform better.

This talk is designed for WordPress Beginners.

Presentation Slides »

January 23, 2019 — Self-Respect in Business: The Fine Line Between Nice and Too Nice and How to Ask for What You’re Worth

“Being too nice literally increases your chances of being hurt, used and or taken for granted.”

Nice people are reputed to finish last. In business, being nice can increase the chances of success, but being too nice can cause a business to fail when your service and skills are undervalued and profits are not achieved. We don’t want to burn bridges, but we need to stand our ground. Studies show that self-respect encourages respect from others. In this talk, we will review ideas and practices I’ve seen work in developing and conveying self-respect. When we don’t value ourselves and our work, we tend to charge too little for the work we do, and struggle with asking for what we are worth. Self respect includes establishing boundaries to manage client expectations. We will look at tools that help manage client expectations by improving communication, organizing workflows and detailing contracts. To that end, you’ll learn how to apply these tools to business practices—allowing you to be nice, but not too nice.

Presentation Slides »

January 23, 2019 — How To Add Bells And Whistles To Your WordPress Site With Plugins

If you are new to WordPress or have just been using it “out of the box,” you may want to learn about some easy ways to add useful functionality to your website using popular WordPress Plugins. This talk will briefly review what plugins are, and how to select and install them. Tara will share the top plugins for adding things like forms, events, and image galleries to your WordPress site, as well as go over plugins which will help your website perform better.

This talk is designed for WordPress Beginners.

Presentation Slides »

December 6, 2018 — When I started learning and playing with CSS, I didn’t know how to use the browser inspector (I use Chrome). The first time someone showed me how to use the Inspector, I was hooked on “playing” with code and learning how css properties relate to each other.

In this talk, we’ll focus on debugging tools in the Inspector for non-developers. We’ll play with the Inspector to edit some CSS on “live” websites without actually editing the code. We’ll discuss ways to make the most of using the inspector to save time in development by visualizing changes on the front end before editing the code in the style sheet. This talk will also be helpful for designers who want to give developers specific edits, such as font size, padding and margins.

Presentation Slides »

November 10, 2017 — The number of tools available to speed up, streamline and organize tasks can be overwhelming, and new apps and software seem to be launched every day. A combination of “Fear of Missing Out” on the latest and greatest things, and “Shiny Object Syndrome” can result in hours of distraction and rabbit holes, playing with, trying out and testing new “toys.”

This talk will review some of the best tools to help general productivity, as well as some tools specific to the web design/development workflow. We will discuss tasks that need tools and those that may not, as well as how to know when a tool is not worth using or when it is/is not time to switch to a something new.

November 21, 2016 — A practicum in successfully building a freelance business around WordPress.