Sessions

Trevor Freeman

This presentation would cover some basics of Search Engine Optimization for WordPress. I would begin with an intro to SEO and primarily focus on some On-Site and technical factors to improve a site’s visibility to Google and other search engines. The presentation would include: Mobile-friendly themes, Google Analytics, URL structure, Sitemaps, SEO Plugins, Schema, and Page Speed.

Sunday 4:15 PM

Adam Sink

During this presentation, we’ll take a look at how we designed and grew our Managed WordPress product at GoDaddy. Best practices, pitfalls, lessons learned, and a look toward the future as the largest Managed WordPress host.

Sunday 4:15 PM

Matthew Dorman

Detailed steps to build custom JSON API endpoints using WordPress REST API for your next WordPress site.

Sunday 3:20 PM

Calie Waterhouse

Sitting in front of a screen all day and getting nothing done? You’re not alone. Procrastination? Distraction? Waning interest? Instead of giving up, get productive! Here’s 25 tried & true tools & widgets to get more done in less time.

Sunday 3:20 PM

Greg Taylor

Now more than ever good content will not get the job done. Learn the traits of content: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly & The Superb, and make something happen for your site.

Sunday 2:45 PM

Dallin Harris

Pricing, estimating and setting proper up-front expectations with clients on interactive projects continues to be one of the biggest challenges agencies are facing today. In this session, we’ll explore the pros & cons of various billing models and root issues that cause problems in pricing & estimating processes. We’ll also take a look at how to position your services, set proper delivery expectations and how to set your build team up for success.

Matt Adams

These days development needs to compliment design. So many designers have broad skills with branding, print design, and web design. Speaking developer and communicating that design vision to be executed is tricky. Having spent years working with both designers and developer, I want to help our design oriented audience learn to plan an amazing WordPress site that can be developed into a great theme. All while keeping the designer and developers from killing each other.

Sunday 2:00 PM

Ruth Carter, Esq.

Open Q&A with lawyer/blogger Ruth Carter on the legal dos and don’ts of social media. Topics can include copyright, trademark, FTC compliance, privacy, defamation, employment issues, business formation, and contracts. This is your time to get answers to your burning legal questions about blogging and social media.

Sunday 2:00 PM

Ashten Fizer

Building a WordPress website is not like building the Field of Dreams. Just because you build it, does not necessarily mean that “they” will come. In order to build a following for your brand or business, you must engage your audience or target market. This stands true across the board for the average WordPress user as well as the developer. We’ll take a look at the importance of proper and timely engagement, as well as what the average WordPress user can utilize in order to create seamless and streamlined avenues for engagement, right now. We’ll also take it a step further and discuss what the average developer can implement in order to make engagement much easier for the users having the websites developed.

Sunday 11:40 AM

Josh Eichorn, Neill Feather, Jarrett Gucci

Moderated by Brandy Lawson

A panel of experts cover the latest in keeping WordPress sites secure.

Sunday 11:40 AM

Adam Silver

Growing your business is about building trust and whats more trusting then your voice? Where writing a blog post may not come easy to people, speaking is very natural, and intimate. Podcasting is growing (once again) and it’s not that hard to do! In this session I’ll show the workflow, best practices and ways to monetize.

Sunday 10:50 AM

Betsy Cohen

You’ve heard the buzz words… Perhaps you’ve considered incorporating agile concepts into your WordPress shop’s processes. But is it the best methodology for small teams? Does it even work for freelancers? For managing multiple projects? For support? The best project management methodology is the one that works. And that’s going to be different for every team. In this talk we’ll look at the principles & tools of agile development — including sprint, scrum, and burn-down. We’ll share examples of how small businesses and freelancers can adopt specific agile processes to increase productivity and create better results for clients.

Sunday 10:50 AM

April Holle

Finally figure out what metrics you should measure based on your specific goals, learn how to properly track specific visitor actions throughout your WordPress website as well as automatically keep count of each successful important website actions as Google Goals within Google Analytics, and then use these data points to guide the direction of the overall layout and content to create your very own data-driven WordPress website.

Sunday 10:00 AM

Brian Murphy

Website maintenance is an often overlooked part of website ownership. Small business owners may go months between logging into their dashboard. This talk will discuss things to look for and their solutions when coming across a neglected website.

Sunday 10:00 AM

Joshua Brown

WordPress is a great platform to build a business that gives you the freedom to dream, create, and live the life you’ve always wanted. This session will be packed with practical tips on how we hacked a business from thin air and turned it into a profitable company that is making an impact around the world. You’ll learn about coding and life hacks, productivity & networking tips, and gain the confidence you need to get started building your business and making a dent in the universe today!

Saturday 4:30 PM

Emanuel Costa

According to Google, 55,000 sites got compromised per week. As we know, WordPress runs majority of the content-driven websites in the world. It then became the number one target for hackers and phishing scammers. In this presentation you will learn the What, How, Why, Where, by following an up to date security checklist with steps to prevent and avoid your WordPress getting hacked.

Saturday 4:30 PM

Giselle Aguiar

The WordPress website is the center a company’s marketing. Combined with blogging, social media helps with search engine optimization and driving traffic to the website. A well-set-up site has easy-to-find social media share and follow buttons as well as widgets to make it easy for visitors to do what you want them to do.

Saturday 3:55 PM

Edwin Smith

For when you need a custom solution where the default WordPress installation process and code management just won’t work. Make updating core and managing plugins easier through code driven development.

Saturday 3:55 PM

Andy Fragen

Some plugin or theme projects won’t ever be in the official Plugin or Theme Directories. Still, it would be great to be able to send client’s updates. Wouldn’t it? We’ll talk about little about development but mostly about direct deployment from your git host.

Saturday 3:15 PM

Alex Vasquez, Brandy Lawson, Scott Buscemi

This is a round of lighting talks on implementing automation so you can focus on the important things instead of repetitive and tedious tasks.

Saturday 3:15 PM

Tanya Moushi

This talk provides a framework for differentiating yourself by running a business with humanness, and understanding what clients actually want: care.

Saturday 2:20 PM

Ward Andrews

There are five rungs to the UX Design Success Ladder, it starts at functional where basic WP templates and development driven plugins reside. If you’ve had a user experience designer work with your site, plugin or template, you’ve likely stepped into the second step, usable. The great UX work starts after that, as we strive to climb the ladder to comfortable, delightful and meaningful. Learn ways to think about elevating design for websites, templates and WordPress products for UX success. We’ll also review real-world examples and open up Q&A around design thinking and execution.

Saturday 2:20 PM

Chris Klosowski

All businesses and stories start as a idea. WordPress is a democratized platform for that inspiration, where ideas are empowered to evolve into meaningful products and stories that shape and create the world we want.

Saturday 1:30 PM

Aaron Campbell

Cody Landefeld

Approaching e-commerce without giving consideration to Amazon is paramount to eating your lunch in the tiger cage at the local zoo. That’s not to say it can’t be done—because it can. You just need to be very clear about your strategic planning and what creates your competitive advantage. We will touch on these topics for store owners to help differentiate and win!

Saturday 11:35 AM

John Gough

Here’s the tl;dr version: you can make an off-the-shelf theme look as good as a fully custom design if you know what you’re doing. We can safely say that most people who use WordPress have used a consumer template at some point. Some use them build a personal site, make a few modifications, and never touch it again. Freelancers and agencies set new templates up on a monthly or weekly basis for clients. There are WordPress developers whose main source of income is from templates they’ve developed and sold through sites like ThemeForest or Template Monster. Using a prebuilt theme has huge advantages: time savings for developers by using prebuilt CMS features, client confidence from knowing beforehand how a site will look and behave, and user-friendly interfaces that have often been tested and improved over multiple versions. But despite their ubiquity, there is plenty of resistance to using templates. Many clients and designers think that a site that “looks like a template” is cheap, unrefined, and should be inexpensive – regardless of how much time was invested into feature development or customizations. So how do you get the benefits of using a theme, and still satisfy your freelance clients and website’s visitors with a unique, fresh design? In this talk we’ll go through the major hurdles and show you how to overcome them with confidence: – What does a “template-y” site even look like? We’ve heard that feedback before. We may have even said it as we surfed the web. But what styles, elements, fonts, colors, or UI patterns are distinctly “template-y”? Knowing is half the battle. – How to choose the “best” template for your project Most people browse template sites looking for something that looks like the site they want to build, but that’s the wrong approach. A prebuilt theme is a tool, first and foremost, and you wouldn’t buy a saw based on the color of the blade. You pick the right tool for the job. – The right kind of planning “Well begun is half done” Aristotle famously said. Once you’ve picked a theme and are familiar with its capabilities and limitations, you can plan based on what’s possible, rather than trying to make a site that fits into the demo layout. Let’s talk about how to do that in a modular, time-saving way. – Let’s talk specifics We’ve talked about what not to do, and how to get started off on the right foot. Now we’ll go through side-by-side comparisons using real templates to show you how common components can be used to deliver outstanding results. By the end of the talk, you’ll be able to sit confidently down in front of your next project with a better approach to planning and design, and produce a better website. Wow your clients! Impress your friends! And keep all the time-saving benefits of an excellent prebuilt theme, but don’t sacrifice how it looks or performs.

Saturday 11:15 AM

Mike Jones

We designed and built a peer-to-peer e-commerce platform for JWalkyn.com. It was an eye-opening experience pushing WordPress to the absolute max to create this unique site to help people buy and sell their favorite Air Jordan shoes.

Saturday 11:15 AM

Cory Jenkins

Many members of the WordPress Community use or are a part of a distributed workforce of designers, developers, content creators, and project managers. Having the right tools in place and establishing a good workflow for incoming projects is essential to success. Otherwise you risk dropping tasks, miscommunication, and overall disorganization–all of which can drastically affect your company’s bottom line.

Saturday 10:30 AM

Ash Rhodes

A “listicle” style presentation on the best practices for traffic generation. Current plan is to cover: Frequent updates, Interesting titles, Tagging/Categorization to maximize the resources of the WordPress.com Reader, Commenting/Personal Branding, and using Publicize/Social Media/Personal Network.

Saturday 10:30 AM

Mary Baum

Never let it be said that this flying fat broad has body issues. Oh no. How many times have you needed to tweak a category of posts to make some element fit a little better? Or had a site with some content aimed at fashion-conscious adults – and another set of posts aimed at their kids? You could use all sorts of fancy taxonomy – custom post types or multisite, or some other foolishness. But I just don’t have the patience. But I do have a secret weapon. Body classes. They’ve gotten me out of more styling jams than Janet Jackson’s wardrobe staff. (Wait. That’s not saying much, is it?) Let’s take a look at how a good look through all those classes on your body tags can lead you to a world of styling options – with no malfunctions allowed.

Saturday 9:45 AM

Stacey Harris

In this session The Stacey Harris shares why content alone is not as valuable as you’d like. Real talk time, is a gorgeous website and valuable content still gorgeous or valuable if no one sees it? The answer is no. Get real about what it takes to share your content on social media in a way that makes sense, and actually connects. No douchebag tactics allowed. Come ready to engage and ask questions. I’ll answer as many as I can.

Saturday 9:45 AM

Perri Collins

Today’s relationships are created with information, not people. Buyers are searching for information that will help them make an informed decision. Businesses that provide that information win. By providing relevant, useful content to your customers, you are creating something of value for them, and they will ultimately reward you with their business and loyalty. From content types to SEO, here are 10 things to keep in mind when creating your content marketing strategy.

Saturday 9:00 AM

Jeremy Scott

Saturday 9:00 AM