Why Expression is So Important Content/Strategy/Marketing
Understanding modes of Art thinking (namely Expression and Vulnerability) as a tool to achieve more fulfillment in the work we do. Measured by Connection and Action, this talk draws the line to explain why Expression (and encouragement of that expression) is so important.
Financial Forecasting: pssst the secret is working backwards Business Development
This talk discusses actionable items to better run your business using our company’s financial forecasting model as an example — open sourcing what works.
The underlying foundation of this talk includes our ability to have been operating for the past three years without outside capital, small cash reserves, and almost no debt. This is something most plugin developers can relate to. In other words, you don’t need venture capital or 18 hour days to launch a successful plugin.
In this talk I will discuss:
Working backwards—and what that means
How our firm used the “free downloads metric” to monitor paid growth in year 1 of Startup
How to plan internal “hours as dollars” against code-based (Plugin dev) assets and COG expenses
How to use Cash Flow projections, rolling three months, to plan for product development cycle budgets
How to conservatively project hires of employee, # 4-6 as well as future hires #7-12.
How to budgeting marketing on a quarterly basis using sales and renewal benchmarks
How to adjust projections (free v premium) as your business matures
Coopetition: Banding together with your competition to help grow your business Business Development
It’s common to view your competitors in business as barriers. However, if you shift your thinking to view your competitors as opportunities for collaboration, something unique can happen. In this talk, Tim and I share our experience from partnering with competitors in a crowded niche WordPress market, through “Coopetition”, to help us grow our business to over 7 figures annually and achieve success. In this talk we will be sharing our journey of how working together has helped explode our WordPress business. Through the world’s eyes, the people we partner with are competitors. We’ll be sharing some of the benefits of coopetition, as well as some practical ways that listeners can turn their competition into coopetition.
Why the Open Web Matters General WordPress/Beginning User
The internet is the single most effective information sharing tool in all of history. We can build on the work and progress of others in a completely unprecedented way. The implications for the progress of humanity are both serious and exciting!
But it’s also in danger. Find out why I think open systems and the open web will steer our future or how the lack of them will ruin it.
Which Way Does Your Duck face? Design
Do you know that if you have a picture of a duck having it face left or right can increase your conversions by 40%?
Think this sounds silly? It is but backed by research. Spend some time to learn about what a/b testing is, what things to test, testing methodology and the best tools to use for your site.
Everyone will get a handout of the very same checklist I use when A/B testing our client’s sites. One of our clients, an insurance company, increased leads by making just a small 2px change.
When you launch a website, you are guessing. Sure the guesses are educated based on experience and data, but you can maximize your ROI with good A/B testing.
Building Your First Plugin – A Complete Newbie’s Guide to Creating a Plugin Development
Many times WordPress users will face a problem that can only be fixed with a few lines of code. Online tutorials will suggest that you copy and paste the code into your theme’s functions.php file, but what happens to the code if you change your theme? (Hint: it disappears)
Creating a plugin is not something to be afraid of, and can help your site immensely.
This talk will cover everything you need to know in order to create a plugin to start using on your own site. You won’t need to have any prior PHP or other coding knowledge to walk away with something you can use right away.
Spinning up local sites with Local by Flywheel Development
Making changes on a live server is always risky. And when things go wrong it’s not easy to diagnose the problems. You can setup a staging server for changes, but you still have to deploy files, and that takes time.
Spinning up a local environment is essential for WordPress development. And it’s also very easy to do, thanks to Local by Flywheel.
I will show you how to quickly spin up a local site. We will cover SSL, debugging, database management, and other features to help you safely build better quality WordPress sites in less time.
You’ve Inherited a Website – Now What? General WordPress/Beginning User
This talk will provide an overview of the planning and execution of taking over an existing website. Sometimes we don’t get to start a project at the beginning. This talk will show users what to expect, and how to be prepared for it. Topics will include: Executing a safe handoff, initial housekeeping, planning for improvements, staging and deployment of changes, and ongoing maintenance.
User Stories Made Simple General WordPress/Beginning User
How well do you know who you’re building for? A formal process of user story development is great for anyone, from solopreneurs to large distributed teams, to have a clear idea of what problems they’re trying to solve. In this talk, I will outline the steps you should take to create clear, actionable user stories, and avoid pitfalls that can derail your project.
Blast, Drip, and Nurture—Automated Marketing to Your Website Visitors Content/Strategy/Marketing
By most accounts, marketing automation is the greatest thing since… well, since email marketing. The ability to qualify leads and build demand in a fully automated workflow frees us marketers from the high-pressure requirements of constant writing, email development, and deployment tasks.
It also enables us to more appropriately personalize content and send messages that are both timely and relevant. In this session, Blast, Drip, & Nurture, we define the differences between email blasts, drip emails, and nurture emails and how you can use automated-marketing solution to subjugate these tasks for subscribers.
SEO Panel Content/Strategy/Marketing
An Ask-Anything Panel about SEO from women who have used it to build their businesses. This discussion includes SEO best practices, breaking myths, favorite tools and things to look out for in 2018. Moderated by speaker, Tanya Moushi.
Imposter Syndrome: Stories from Two Different Perspectives General WordPress/Beginning User
Imposter Syndrome affects minorities and Women in Tech at a much higher rate than in other professions. Dashon Hawkins and Sheila Hoffman will share their own experience on this important topic.
No Limits: You’re a dev rockstar and don’t know it. – Dashon Hawkins
This is a straightforward, looking from the outside in dive, that is designed to inspire and motivate all levels of developers especially those who have intermediate or advanced level skills in WordPress who at one time or another have felt or are currently feeling ‘Imposter Syndrome’. This is primarily fueled by some in the global web development community who look down their proverbial noses at WordPress/PHP development. We briefly explore the history of computer science covering such notables as the (grand)mother of higher languages and go into the core challenges that have faced the tech industry when it comes to the lack of diversity and openly discuss how to overcome barriers that we can together overcome in this market. This all leads to a shocking revelation at the end that is the focal point of that speaks to the power of redemption and triumph through many layers of adversity that should leave everyone in attendance encouraged to go further, dig deeper within themselves and share the message of empowerment to any and everyone they come across in the future in order to break the tech barrier. This is exclusive for WordCamp Phoenix to evangelize that Tech is for all.
Finding one’s strengths & defining a niche – Sheila Hoffman
Sheila started doing print design using rub-on transfer letters and cutting up magazines for paste-up fliers in the ’70s when she was running Recreation Centers for the US Army in Korea & Germany. She turned that into a business as a “graphic designer” in the ’80s when everyone was doing Desktop Publishing with Pagemaker. To keep up with the times she taught herself Frontpage and then NetObjects Fusion to make websites for her print clients in the ’90s. By the early 2000s she figured out how to add WordPress blogs to her HTML sites. And finally, she took a 3-hour workshop in WordPress and started creating WordPress websites for clients in 2010, initially with premium themes and pretty quickly using page builders, currently in Divi. This seems a non-traditional path into the WordPress community. How has being a self-taught woman of a certain age played into her career path? How does imposter syndrome impact this journey?
WordPress for Everyone: Delivering Inclusive Design Design
WordPress has always been about websites, but it’s not just about websites. It’s about freedom and possibility. When we build websites for ourselves and others we are democratizing publishing for everyone regardless of language, ability, or economic wherewithal.
At Automattic, we believe Inclusive Design is essential to this mission. We’re inspired by the work of Kat Holmes and her clear articulation of design as needing to be increasingly inclusive — especially in the technology world.
Inclusive Design is for those who want to make great products for the greatest number of people. A philosophy of openness that matches the freedoms of WordPress, yet also offers a practical approach to growing your business. To reach more people, to find a larger addressable market by recognizing exclusion and learning from diversity. As Kat says, “Solve for one, extend to many.”
In this talk I’ll share the most important principles of Inclusive Design illustrated with stories from product improvements in our work at Automattic for WordPress.com and Jetpack (https://design.blog/inclusive/).
Workshop – Taming The Whirlwind – Growing Your Business While You’re Busy With Client Work Business Development
In the life of most freelance business owners, there is an ongoing battle between strategy and execution. We struggle with trying to improve our business with better systems and processes in the middle of the chaos of daily activity. This talk offers a simple strategy that you can implement to move your business forward in the middle of the whirlwind.
If you can never seem to find time to redesign your own website or launch a new service because you’re too busy with client work… you’re not alone, and this talk is for you!
Attendees will leave with a (1) better understanding of why it’s so hard to move our businesses forward when we’re busy with client work, (2) a clear strategy to address this very common issue, and (3) the motivation to make it happen!
Workshop – Get a Personality! Differentiate your brand in a sea of ‘sameness.’ Content/Strategy/Marketing
Do your customers know what makes your organization different? How about your staff and partners? If you don’t communicate competitive advantage at a brand level, potential customers choose based on a personal connection (or worse…lowest price). In fact, differentiation is one of the hardest aspects of marketing to nail – particularly for small businesses who often boast essentially the same offerings as the big guys.
The values you hold high and your brand’s personality traits are the biggest players in brand differentiation. They should inform every inch of your website and every campaign your run, from your visual identity to your messaging. This workshop with Resound’s managing partner, Mike Jones, will help you flesh out your firm’s values and personality traits – the ones that create a human connection with your audience. It’s time to stand apart and be authentic to your organization’s real culture.
Workshop – Getting your WooCommerce Store Launched General WordPress/Beginning User
In this workshop we’ll cover everything from how to get your store configured, to the tips and tricks for making it find-able and how you can bring traffic to it. We’ll talk about the various things you can do to optimize it for speed and performance, and cover what integrations may make the most sense.
Workshop – Using proper Object-Oriented Programming in your Plugins Development
Many WordPress developers initially got into programming through WordPress. While it is an often undervalued fact how easy WordPress is to start developing for, it is not coded very efficiently, making the realization of bigger development projects much harder on the flipside. But did you know that you can still use proper OOP techniques when developing WordPress plugins?
While WordPress itself is far away from object-oriented, you can still build your own APIs that are abstracted away from the main software’s core and more straightforward to use than those ones. This would also allow to easily port your project over to another system, as the main concepts are no longer directly intertwined with WordPress.
This workshop will explain some of the core concepts of object-oriented programming with the example of creating an abstraction layer around the WordPress Admin Menu API. It will highlight different approaches, particularly based on using different PHP versions. By the end of the workshop, you should have a reusable admin pages API implementation for any of your projects requiring it.
While it is not necessarily required to have a laptop with development environment set up with you, it is strongly recommended to bring one. The workshop will be given using a GitHub repository. If you wanna actually play around with the code and use it, you should furthermore have a development environment on your machine, with the command line tools “git” and “composer” installed.
Workshop – Getting Started With WordPress General WordPress/Beginning User
This topic will take the WordPress novice on a guided tour of WordPress, including a closer look at account options and common WordPress terminology. We’ll cover finding and modifying a theme to align with the user’s desires, setting up pages and menus, and navigating through the dashboard, as well as the care and feeding of your new WordPress website over time. We’ll also include some tips and tricks to make your blog posts and pages look as professional as possible.
Discovery, discovery, discovery, discovery! The most import part of the project Content/Strategy/Marketing
When a project goes wrong, most of the time it fails as a result of mismatched expectations. This can be avoided for most clients by following a repeatable and thorough discovery process. Understanding how to ask the right questions up front can mean the difference between happy clients who are eager to give you more business and nightmare clients who can never be satisfied.
This session will focus on:
- Asking the right questions
- Controlling the conversation
- Creating maintainable expectations
- Using discovery throughout your business
Lessons Learned in the Fast Lane: Developing and Supporting a High-Interest Plugin Development
Lessons learned from developing and maintaining the GitHub Updater plugin. How I deal with bugs, feature requests, issues, PRs, user support, and more.
Everything I learned about plugin support I learned in the operating room. Interacting with surgical patients and their families involves a similar skill set as maintaining an open source software project. I’m not so certain that the reverse is true so as the saying goes, “Don’t try this at home.” But come find out my surgical pearls to software support.
Background for this talk available on GitHub at [GitHub Updater](https://github.com/afragen/github-updater)
How To Run a Successful WordPress Agency Business Development
Getting in your audience’s shoes General WordPress/Beginning User
Eat, Blog, Love: How I stopped waiting, and started doing Content/Strategy/Marketing
Two years ago I made a fundamental shift in my life. I decided to stop waiting for things to happen to me and decided to start doing them. Life is short, and I wanted to be the woman who lived life to it’s fullest instead of wishing things would just turn out in my favor. It’s a simple concept in theory, but to practice it day after day can seem impossible. Where do you even begin?
WPGraphQL: Interacting with WordPress Data in a new way Development
In this talk, we will look at what WordPress looks like as an Application Data Graph and how WPGraphQL enables a GraphQL API for WordPress and allows us to interact with the WordPress graph via GraphQL queries and mutations.
In previous talks, (WordCamp US 2017, WordCamp for Publishers 2017, WordCamp Orange County 2017) I’ve talked a lot about the history of WordPress APIs and how GraphQL compares to them and helps solve some problems of using other APIs.
This talk will focus less on the history of why WPGraphQL came to be and how it compares with other existing WP APIs, and focus more on how to use WPGraphQL, how to extend WPGraphQL to work for your site.
We’ll start by looking at basic usage of WPGraphQL: querying posts, pages, terms, etc. Then we’ll explore some features of the query language such as variables, aliases, and field arguments.
Then we’ll look at Mutations (creating, updating and deleting data) and we’ll discuss how WPGraphQL handles Authentication and Authorization, and other features like fragments.
Throughout the talk we’ll look at the internals of WPGraphQL and how it goes from a request to the WordPress server to resolving data back to the client, and how it makes use of core WordPress technology to efficiently resolve data.
Headless and Brainless WordPress Development
Now that WordPress has an amazing REST API, there is a lot of buzz around “headless” or “decoupled” sites. However, these are mostly covered with “how-to” and not “what this is” articles. My presentation aims to provide a higher level insight into what it means to be using WordPress, JavaScript and the REST API, all in tangent. It will go into the pros and cons of using limbless, headless and brainless WordPress.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand the differences between Limbless, Headless, and Brainless WordPress configurations
- Structure their next non-traditional WordPress site with confidence using the proper solution for the task at hand
- Begin using WordPress as a development platform for cutting-edge web solutions
Gutenberg: Changing the Landscape of the Open Web Design
Gutenberg transforms how we think about content in WordPress and will ship with WordPress 5.0. In this session, we’ll discuss what Gutenberg is, why we need it, and where it is today. Finally, we’ll look at where the community is taking Gutenberg, including major improvements to site customization.
Content for the Modern World Content/Strategy/Marketing
On the internet, content is king. Whether you are writing content for your business or a large corporation, you must know and respect your target audience. Targeted content is one of the best ways to grow your brand and the old tricks of the trade will no longer cut it. Content for the Modern World takes a deep dive into the new and emerging content marketing trends. Since content patterns are ever-changing, we’ll discover new ways to keep up-to-date with channels to follow and helpful and efficient tools. Have you been struggling to create viral and click-worthy blog titles and email subject lines? We’ll talk about what trends to look out for in 2018, how to create content that resonates and converts, and current SEO tips and tricks to be found on the web.
Introduction to automated WordPress deployments Development
Do you dread deploying new WordPress code for clients? *raises hand* It’s weird to feel that way. Deploying WordPress code isn’t rocket science after all (or maybe it is and no one told me!).
It tends to come down to opening our favorite FTP client and pressing the upload button. Easy-peasy, right? Of course, not! (Things are never that easy…) You’re also refreshing the web page in the browser while praying that you don’t get a white screen of death.
It doesn’t have to be that way. You can deploy your WordPress code with confidence! It just comes down to creating the proper workflows and the right automation.
This is what you’ll learn in this talk. We’ll go over what makes a successful deployment workflow. You’ll also get an overview of the tools that you can use to automate deployments. It’s everything that you need to get started on your quest for safer WordPress deployments!
The Anatomy Of A Hacked Site General WordPress/Beginning User
In this talk, I discuss the roadmap of a typical WordPress site getting “hacked”. From start to finish, we look at how victims can be identified, how sites are breached, how persistent backdoors are established, and how the attackers will exploit the compromised site.
I avoid getting too overtly technical in my descriptions, instead opting to focus on the mindset and overall process of the attack. This enables less-technical website owners to get a stronger conceptual grasp of what exactly goes on during a breach.
It can be overwhelming for inexperienced webmasters to adequately defend against a threat they don’t understand. This talk defines these threats in a concrete way, which is much more compelling than the nebulous concept of “hackers” in general. Viewers leave the room empowered to take a proactive outlook on the security of their web presence.
Overcoming Your Fear of Sales Business Development
If your fear of public speaking is greater than the fear of dying, the fear of asking for the sale cannot be far behind. Many business owners languish in low volume when, with a little bit of knowledge and practice, they can be kicking their sales into overdrive. We will cover classic sales techniques and update them for the digital age. We will also dig into the psychology that not only keeps some of us under-pricing but keeps us from closing the deal, at all. You don’t have to be cheesy, sleazy, or greasy to be a great salesperson. You will learn to sell with style and walk away with increased confidence to go out and make more money.
Yes, And: How improv basics build stronger teams, foster creativity and make the creative process more fun and less frustrating Content/Strategy/Marketing
After spending several years working in a large advertising agency I found the most useful tools for creative collaboration and building teams in an improv class. In this session I’ll share how to apply the basic rules of improv to build collaborative teams, who come up with more creative ideas and have more fun while doing it.
Workshop – Getting Started With WordPress (cont.) General WordPress/Beginning User
Workshop – Getting Started With WordPress (cont.) General WordPress/Beginning User
Workshop – Getting Started With WordPress (cont.) General WordPress/Beginning User
Workshop – Get a Personality! Differentiate your brand in a sea of ‘sameness.’ Content/Strategy/Marketing
Do your customers know what makes your organization different? How about your staff and partners? If you don’t communicate competitive advantage at a brand level, potential customers choose based on a personal connection (or worse…lowest price). In fact, differentiation is one of the hardest aspects of marketing to nail – particularly for small businesses who often boast essentially the same offerings as the big guys.
The values you hold high and your brand’s personality traits are the biggest players in brand differentiation. They should inform every inch of your website and every campaign your run, from your visual identity to your messaging. This workshop with Resound’s managing partner, Mike Jones, will help you flesh out your firm’s values and personality traits – the ones that create a human connection with your audience. It’s time to stand apart and be authentic to your organization’s real culture.
Workshop – Using proper Object-Oriented Programming in your Plugins (cont.) Development
Workshop – Getting your WooCommerce Store Launched (cont.) General WordPress/Beginning User
Workshop – Getting your WooCommerce Store Launched (cont.) General WordPress/Beginning User
Workshop – Taming The Whirlwind – Growing Your Business While You’re Busy With Client Work (cont.) Business Development
Workshop – Taming The Whirlwind – Growing Your Business While You’re Busy With Client Work (cont.) Business Development
What The West Wing can teach us about building products Business Development
From idea to developing a product delights you as a developer. But how do you get it out there for others? How do you market and sell your product? How do you know what to price it at or how to support it? Enter the world of product management and in any software business this is a fundamental necessity to making your new product into a successful venture.
Opening Remarks
Closing Remarks
Leveraging Viral Videos on Social Media to Get More Clients Content/Strategy/Marketing
This session is led by video marketing expert Isaac Irvine. Isaac has been working at GoDaddy since 2007 and has a lot of experience in the social media and marketing world! In his session, Isaac will be going over what makes a video go viral and how it can lead to increased brand awareness for your company. The world we live in today is saturated with content–and Isaac will provide you with tangible steps you can take to make your videos stand out. You’ll walk away with a better understanding of how to create brand awareness through video content, how to spot the potential for your content to go viral, and how to determine what you should invest to get your content seen by a larger audience!
All-Star WordPress Panel: Runways to Success
