September 29, 2016 — Content is king, and is an important part of driving targeted, quality traffic to your site. Studies have shown that content featuring an eye-catching visual perform better across social networks. You no longer have to be a graphic designer to create beautiful visuals – we will go through techniques and tools that can help you look great online quickly and easily.

September 29, 2016 — Boris crunches data. Small data, big data, noisy data, you name it. That’s what he has been doing since 2001. And he never stopped enjoying it and probably will never stop.

June 24, 2016 — Blogging is relatively easy – write some stuff, add some pictures, and click “Publish”. Getting people to actually read your blog and be part of your tribe is harder. Join the Snarky Gardener (a vegetable gardening blogger) and follow his 3 year blogging journey from WordPress.com site to where he is today. He doesn’t have all the answers but hopefully he can inspire you to take your blog to the next level.

June 24, 2016 — Does the thought of creating video content scare the crap out of you? Have you wanted to begin creating video content but don’t know where to start? In this session you will learn the basics of video production from the equipment to use and what makes great video content as well as resources to help you become better educated in editing and producing your video content.

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June 15, 2016 — Content creation is *hard work*, especially if you’re a small business or indy blogger. Your resources — money and time — are very limited.

And what if you’re new at this? Figuring out where to begin can be an utterly overwhelming experience. (Seriously – a search for “how to create content” returns 1,970,000,000 results on Google!)

We’re going to keep it simple in this session by focusing on everyday activities that’ll get your content-creation process up and running.

No vague theories. No motivational speech. No sales pitch. Just a simple, step-by-step approach using WordPress and a handful of free tools.

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January 19, 2016 — This session focuses on the do’s and don’ts of using the WordPress editor. Also, it will provide tips to improve a user’s content creation process, as well as how to fix problems that can occur.The intended audience is beginning users.

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December 14, 2015 — As designers we’re searching for the best – the best method, the best look, the best font. We have a continuous battle to create brands that are unique but that have a longstanding presence. We make tough decisions constantly, question our instincts, and settle. We fight and we strive to make long lasting beautiful, smart and informed design. How do we get there?

In this talk, seasoned Creative Director Sara Cannon is going to dive deep into the designers struggle. She’s going to share different processes that can make our work better. We’re going to discuss philosophy, methodology, and execution from the creative mind stand point. Hopefully by the end of the talk, you will be inspired to push your own creative limits and learned some tips on how to get there.

December 13, 2015 — I had a writer’s block and it was horrible: I felt uncreative, watched my blog dry up, crawled in the corner and cried. I felt like a loser. But I’m NOT a loser. So I fixed it. I created a blogging plan that involved only 10 minutes each day. My writer’s block disappeared, my blog stats climbed, and I now know how to turn it around when I find myself neglecting my site.

Whether you are a personal blogger or run a business website, this talk will give strategies for adding content without huge time investments. Learn how to eliminate writer’s block, create material relevant to your site’s purpose, compile content for later publication, and build a regular publishing habit.

December 11, 2015 — Building things is one of the most powerful kinds of learning experiences a person can have: so what do people learn when they build websites using WordPress? The answer depends on what’s in their toolkit.

Content development tools can be designed to help people understand the technical infrastructure of the Web while they build compelling content. One example of such a tool is our WordPress Plugin, Snowball, which helps people build immersive WordPress articles that integrate data and media while exposing them to basic computational features of web development like tagging, nesting, and CSS. We have developed Snowball to support journalistic presentations inspired by the New York Times, including their interactive article “Snowfall” and the more recent “Greenland is Melting Away.”

Our team includes members of Drexel University College of Computing and Informatics, Mozilla Foundation, and University of Nebraska at Omaha and is based at the Expressive and Creative Interaction Technologies (ExCITe) Center in West Philly.

October 26, 2015 — While WordPress as a whole has evolved in amazing and powerful ways, the mechanics of content creation have stayed pretty static for years. Title field, TinyMCE Wysiwyg, metadata inputs, and a featured image. These elements have been our building blocks, all presented in a relatively unchanged WP admin experience. The future of WordPress is going to depend on how that experience evolves and grows to meet the needs of content creators.

We’re going to discuss the recent explosion of page builders, panels and modules, visual editors, customizers and front end editors. Lets take a look at the pros and cons. What does it mean for content creators, designers, and developers? Even better, lets talk about what the future holds. I’ll use specific examples of how we implemented modularized dynamic content and rich long form editorial creation on enterprise clients including Fortune 500 retailers and Ivy League institutions.

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