November 17, 2020 — Using Site Health for Good
Site Health is a lesser-known addition to WordPress that was added in version 5.2. Many people see it as an annoyance, but this talk will walk you through the beauty of the centralized information it can give you and how you can make it even better by adding the Health Check and Troubleshooting plugin from the WordPress.org repository. Troubleshooting is a great way to rule out plugin conflicts that may be causing problems on your website.

8 Easy Things To Do To Protect Your Web Site
Don’t bury your head in the sand when it comes to protecting your website from bad stuff ever happening to you. Keeping your website safe and sound is a shared responsibility. In this presentation, Bud Kraus will share with you a common sense approach of practical you can can take to make your site more secure.

Back Up Before You Crack Up
Having a solid backup strategy can save your life in times of an extreme website crisis. No one wants to lose any of the hard work they have put into their site and why should you ever have to if you are backing things up.

November 17, 2020 — Web Components in WordPress
Creating a consistent look across an organization can be hard when applications are written in multiple frameworks. This talk will cover how you can utilize web components in your WordPress application. By using web components you can standardize the look across properties in your organization.

Pattern Libraries for the Non-Designers
Some people call them design systems or pattern libraries. Either way they seem to be the province of designers and something that is just handed to developers. But what if you work more or less alone, having the job of both builder and designer, making decisions about design for clients all on your own, or your designer doesn’t supply enough information to easily test. A pattern library can stream-line your process by showing you and your clients a site-wide system of recurring or common design options: colors, fonts, buttons, testimonials, call outs, etc. Without including distracting content or navigation structure, it makes for easier approval of design elements.

WordPress in a Headless World
WordPress has been a key part of the development of today’s web, but with the rise of the JAMstack, where does WordPress fit in? This talk will cover about how WordPress compares to the headless options available today and how WordPress is still one of the more powerful solutions available for a great CMS experience.

October 22, 2020 — In this lighting talk, I’ll go through 10 tips for designers, developers, and marketing gurus how to run their WordPress projects effectively. Some will be knowledge and expertise, some will be tools, some will just be common sense 😉

October 22, 2020 — You picked a web host and set up your WordPress site – everything is cool! Until it isn’t. Maybe your site isn’t loading. Maybe your theme looks all kinds of broken. Maybe some jerks graffitti’d over your latest travel adventures! Now what?

Step one is determining whether your WordPress config is the reason or if you’ll need to contact your web host for a deeper dive into your hosting environment.

Different companies may offer different levels of technical support, but there is a basic and universal approach to getting your WordPress site back up and running again as quickly as possible. You’ll learn who to contact and why if and when your WordPress site ever runs into trouble.

October 22, 2020 — This lightning talk discussed a process of creating a custom news vertical for WordPress.com

October 22, 2020 — This lightning talk was a journalism-focused walk-through with the founder of a hyperlocal Local Switchboard NYC podcast.

Presentation Slides »

October 5, 2018 — Own your journey in the tech skill rollercoaster: This talk is a prompt to get you to own your space in the tech world, embrace change and learn to love the journey.

Managing remote small teams (without going crazy): Black Studio is a company born in 2002 and from the very beginning, the staff has been working remotely. In this talk, the founder provides some lightning tips about how to successfully manage 30+ projects at the same time, while keeping (almost completely) your mental health.

Freelancers! Don’t Freak Out!: In this talk I share my favourite quotes from my guests.
I expand on them.
And hopefully you learn from them, smile at them, nod knowingly at them or feel inspired by them.

February 25, 2018 — This track consists of five short sessions focused on Blogging and Social Media.

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Use These 5 Basic Blogging Skills to Rock Instagram

Jessica Rhae

Don’t be intimidated by Instagram. Many of the core tools used grow a successful blog also apply to this social channel. You’ll walk away from this session with 5 strategies you can use to skyrocket your success

SLIDES: https://2017.seattle.wordcamp.org/files/2017/11/WordCamp-Pres-J_Williams-Instagram-10_22_17.pdf
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How I Repeatedly Broke my WordPress Site – and How I Cleaned-up The Mess

Steve Case

What happens when you start building your site without considering what you want it to do? What happens when your web hosting company is part of the problem?

We’ll look at a real-life example of how to make wise choices while planning your site, what can happen when you don’t make the best choices – and how to clean up the mess, regardless of who or what caused the problems.

As our example, we’ll look at what happened when a simple site evolved into a WordPress site, and what happened while trying to get them to play well together.

This journey will be both fun and educational. No experience required!

SLIDES: https://2017.seattle.wordcamp.org/files/2017/11/WordCamp-Seattle-2017-Steve-Case.pdf
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WordPress Redirect Links: Your New Best Friend for Influencer Marketing

Lyndal Cairns

WordPress redirects are a much underused tactic in marketing campaigns. At NTEN, we gave unique addresses to partners in a marketing campaign, which allowed us to track the web traffic that came from them. That info not only helps us make better decisions about marketing partners but is also really useful to share with the partner as a win, so we can keep them engaged and more likely to keep sharing. This small piece of WordPress tech can have a huge impact.

SLIDES: https://2017.seattle.wordcamp.org/files/2017/11/WordPress-Redirect-Links-Your-New-Best-Friend-for-Influencer-Marketing.pdf

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Proper Care and Feeding of Trolls
Kimberly Gauthier
Many bloggers don’t worry about trolls. “I’m not big enough to attract a troll,” I’ve been told. If you’re thinking of that combative person who hides behind a fake name or anonymous profile, spewing insults and political rants, that’s only one of many kinds of trolls. In reality, a troll can be a family member, a friend, or a passionate person who believes they are saving the world from your lies.

Whatever troll you’ve attracted to your blog, it can be stressful and be distracting for both you and your readers. In this session, I’m going to share the steps I take to protect myself from a trouble maker.

SLIDES: https://2017.seattle.wordcamp.org/files/2017/11/Proper-Care-and-Feeding-of-Trolls.pdf
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Counting down: What not to forget when you launch your website

Joshua Lynch

You’ve completed the famous five-minute installation of WordPress, customized a theme and published some content, but now what? We’ll cover the essentials of launching a professional site with WordPress, and some helpful tools for quality control, SEO, security, webmaster tools, analytics, monitoring, and maintenance.

SLIDES: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1sRqvwS-j8Vc3UrIjPDS8z91OWHclX1dLOI68cCmRlSM/

November 15, 2017 — How often do you change your website? It’s a valid question! We’ve just finished a little refresh here at ZEAL and it got me thinking about the people I meet weekly who want to get a brand new website or even a little website refresh themselves. I also meet people who are building their own sites with WordPress or Wix or even our builder software who just don’t know why it’s not converting customers.
I’d really urge you to think about the following, either as someone who is refreshing their own site or considering hiring someone to do it for them.

These are really the basic 7 reasons why sites don’t convert. Of course, there are loads more reasons but look at these ones first!

June 5, 2016 — Why switching to WordPress Coding Standards will make you a better developer by Dave Green

WordPress Coding Standards have been around for a while, yet many developers don’t write code with them, let alone know they exist. This was the case with me until September 2015 when I made the switch, and now I wish I’d dived in earlier! In this talk I’ll explain what they are, how they will help you write better, cleaner and more secure PHP code and why you should be using them for all WordPress projects.

See the slides for Dave Green’s Talk Why Switching WordPress Coding Standards will make you a better Developer

Be a better developer with code review by Philip John

Code review may sound boring – as developers we want to *write* code, not read someone else’s. But if there’s one thing we must do as developers it’s continually learn, and code review is one of the best ways to do that. This talk will help you improve as a developer by talking about code review, what it is, and how it can improve the security, scalability and readability of your code.

Building a SaaS product in WordPress by Elliot Taylor

Last year Elliot put his focus from his agency business onto developing his product business YoGrow. The talk will discuss some of the benefits of moving to a product business and how YoGrow uses WordPress and WooCommerce as a foundation.