Sessions

A companion workshop to After the Post: SEO, Images, and Meta Descriptions, plan on bringing your favorite site and giving it the SEO tune-up it deserves! We’ll answer questions, provide recommendations, and get your site up to speed with SEO suggestions and tips.

Many of us build website for clients – most of us even get paid for it…

There is a lot of money in freelancing.  There is also a lot of pain and frustration.

Ever wish you could just ask someone how they did it?  You can!  Our panel has been there, done that, has the t-shirt, scars, and lessons learned to share with you.

With any luck you can learn from their mistakes and avoid making a few of them yourself!

There are a lot of ways to control how WordPress looks and “Themes” covers all of them…

• Commercially available themes, from ThemeForest for example.
• Frameworks such as Genesis from StudioPress
• Drag-and-Drop Builders from Beaver Builder to Bold Grid to the Visual Composer plugin.

How do you pick which is the best-fit for your project and your client?

Live critiques of attendee-submitted websites on 3 categories:

• Design
• Marketing
• SEO

Come sit on the hot seat and hold on to your hat! Sign up your website here!

I started my business in 2010 as a way to make money part-time while being a stay-at-home mom to my 1 year old daughter. Now, two kids and 7 years later, I’m running an agency full-time with my husband and trying to have some semblance of work/life balance in a business that never stops and a house with 3 kids.

This talk will be about my own personal experience – struggles and triumphs – over the past 7 years going from part-time freelancer to full-time owner of a business that supports my entire family. We’ll talk about finding purpose and striving for business success, and what that means when you’re a parent of young children.

In addition to sharing my own experience, I will be reaching out to other WP business owner parents and interviewing them to see how they manage work/life balance, and incorporating their advice and experiences into the talk. These interviews will be recorded so that audience member can watch them after the fact.

My first year in business, I made a whopping $12,000. Before taxes. You can bet I “celebrated” with a whole bottle of (cheap) wine and a lot of tears. I’d worked SO hard, only to feel like a failure. Five years later, and my rates have shot from $500/website, to over $10k/website. It’s possible, but it’s not an easy process. In my talk I break down how I improved my skills, created a better customer experience, and was able to raise my rates–and how others can too! It’s not all about code or design skills, the most overlooked soft-skills of customer service and communication played the biggest role in commanding higher prices. I want to help others utilize these skills so they can boost their prices too.

What Should the Audience Walk Away With

Tips on how to create a customer experience that allows them to raise their rates

Our success as freelancers is built upon the lessons we’ve learned from our biggest mistakes. In this talk, Nathan draws on more than 20 years of freelancing experience to share important lessons he had to learn the hard way and common mistakes we all can avoid.

Branding your business lies in large part on how well you’re able to convey why you do what you do, and to put it into a narrative that your perfect customer understands. This is a simple framework based on the Hollywood blockbuster model.

What Should the Audience Walk Away With

Understandings of (1) the legal environment, (2) the pov of people with impairments, and (3) how to make their websites more accessible.

Making the perfect post can take some time. Creating images, creating videos, SEO etc. This session will show you how to create an awesome post using tools that help to hack your productivity.

When I worked in corporate America, I never needed to track my time, being accessible while at work was a requirement, and everything was urgent. When I left corporate and started my own company, I was lost. I truly did not understand how to manage my time as a business owner, how to structure my day and what was taking away from my ability to get stuff done. Many Friday afternoons were met with dread because I had not accomplished my goals.

But why? What was getting between me and my goals, and how can I get more done in less time? Hence my quest to understand this dilemma.

We work and live in an immediate gratification, instant communication, driven to distraction era. A lot people struggle with “time management.” No matter what we’re working on, however, our most valuable resource isn’t our time; it’s our focus.

Distractions take away from focus and they come in many forms: mental, physical, environmental. These distractions are often misidentified as “urgent”, but they are really just “low value” tasks we’re choosing to handle now.

This low value/busywork has distracts us from our ability to achieve our short and long term goals.

But, there is goods news here. Focusing is a skill, which means you can always improve your ability to focus. And focus increases your productivity. It’s that simple.

During this talk I will discuss the three type of detractors to focus and way to build a rock solid routine to get more done in less time.

What Should the Audience Walk Away With

1) Better understanding of the role focus has on productivity; 2) Realization that they are not the only ones struggling with focus; and 3) Tips to organize their day to get more done in less time.

WordPress is the medium that makes it all happen, since it’s the perfect blogging platform. I’ll touch on helpful plugins that fulfill the promise of the title.

What Should the Audience Walk Away With

The ability to write a blog post that can actually do something for them, not just meaningless content.

eCommerce is one of the fastest growing industries on the planet and yet only a fraction of businesses have cracked the code to scalable profitability. This becomes more challenging in that it’s also continually changing. We’ll unpack how eCommerce has changed and how you can leverage it to your benefit, and cover the top things you need to know about eCommerce heading into 2018.

What should people walk away with

Better equipped to sell online and specific steps they can do to improve their ecommerce business.

I drive 49% of my traffic to my website with Pinterest. If we optimize our articles we get this high (picture arm up a little) if we DRIVE traffic to our blogs we get this much traffic

Have you ever wanted a piece of functionality that you could not find the right plugin for? Ever want to create a plugin are your own? During this tutorial we’ll talk about what WordPress plugins are and how to create them.

We will be creating a testimonial plugin together, walking through the beginning with a blank file and ending with a plugin that you can call your own. Bring your own laptop with you to follow along as we build and learn together.

Whether it is for re-using the same code or deploying a bug fix or just for better document management, one of the most important leaps any site builder will ever take in their path towards becoming a developer is learning a version control system, or VCS. Since Git is the standard VCS over 80% of developers, lets roll up our sleeves and dive in. The benefits far outweigh the efforts needed to learn this tooling. Once you start, you will wonder why it took you so long to unleash the power of this awesome tech.

This workshop will cover:

What is Git and why is it so widely used
The Git workflow
Setup and your first project
Collaboration with Github and Pull Requests

Additional Information:
We will be using command line tools for Git to learn these concepts.
You must bring your laptop.

Please do these three things before class:
1) Download and install git.  It is completely free and open source.
You can do this from: https://git-scm.com/

2) Start a Github account.  Simply go to Github.com and sign up.  This is a free service for how we will be using it.

As a developer, your day can be filled with menial, repetitive tasks that take up a huge chunk of your time. My days used to be no different, until I started leveraging WP-CLI to automate tasks for me.

In this session, I’ll show you a few specific examples where WP-CLI can save you tons of time by performing tedious, or repetitive tasks, and getting you back to the things you want to be doing.

In this workshop we will learn about JavaScript fundamentals like the DOM, Events, JSON and HTTP calls all using native JavaScript. Then we will introduce the WordPress REST API and look at how to use it in both WordPress themes and stand alone JavaScript applications. Come get a foundation level understanding of this important topic of JavaScript and API driven WordPress development. Some experience with jQuery or JavaScript is encouraged.

It seems like everyone is talking about content personalization these days and what they’re saying is true – If you want to increase online conversions you need to get personal.

At its most basic, content personalization means dynamically changing your site content in response to information automatically gathered about a visitor. And while personalizing your website may sound like a daunting task, this talk we’ll cover the basics and make it easy to get started.

Topics include: + When and why you should be personalizing
+ How to add personalization
+ Personalization best practices

Going back and forth with potential clients can be exhausting. There are so many questions to answer, and so many things to explain. Sure would be nice to have a way to streamline that. Oh hey! That’s what an intro packet is! In my workshop I teach how to create an intro packet that can streamline client screening and onboarding, while making you look ultra-professional and organized as a web designer. 🙂