All Users | Business | Design and Front-End | Developer
Track: All Users
After Party: Wedge Brewing
Weather Permitting, we will be meeting at the Wedge Brewing Company in the River Arts District after the first day of WordCamp to mingle and drink some craft beer! There are also Food Trucks at the Wedge, so it’s a good spot to grab dinner as well.
The Wedge’s Address is:
37 Paynes Way
Asheville, NC 28801
Click here to open Google Maps.
After Party: Wedge Brewing
Weather Permitting, we will be meeting at the Wedge Brewing Company in the River Arts District after the first day of WordCamp to mingle and drink some craft beer! There are also Food Trucks at the Wedge, so it’s a good spot to grab dinner as well.
The Wedge’s Address is:
37 Paynes Way
Asheville, NC 28801
Click here to open Google Maps.
See One Do One Teach One, Making Website Videos with an iPad
How to create short videos for yourself or your clients with an iPad and a few other supplies. These are great for website mailing list opt-ins or webinar opt-ins on your WordPress websites.
Here are the links to the videos from the presentation.
Monsters of WordPress
The WordPress Multisite — what I call Monster Sites — is an often misunderstood creature.There is plenty of documented reasons why you should never use it, and beyond the knowledge of how to install and administer a Monster Site, there is little understanding of what it should and should not be used for.
Often, it is only when a developer ventures into using a Monster Site installation do they find out just why “monster” is an appropriate label. Without proper planning or preparation for its use, a multisite installation can be a disaster waiting to happen.
But what if you could prevent a multisite from becoming a monster by knowing why certain configurations work better than others? This is why I would like to approach WordPress Multisite from a strategic point-of-view by illustrating potential strategies, industries those strategies could serve, and some lessons learned in experimenting with some of these strategies.
Additionally, I would like to describe these approaches without the interference of heavy, technical details in anticipation of a broad audience. My hope is that I can help start a new conversation regarding a more strategic use of WordPress Multisite and tame Monster Sites once and for all!
Staying Connected: Securing Your WordPress Website
The bad guys are looking to take control of your WordPress website.
With WordPress powering almost 20% of all sites on the internet, it’s a ripe target for cyber criminals. Brute force attacks, malicious code, and site defacements are concerns for even the casual user. Hey, but there’s no need for panic. With a few code snippets, one or two plugins and some common sense practices, you can make your website more secure and make the crooks look somewhere else for an easier target.
WordPress Upgrades: Ready, Set, Go!
WordPress upgrades, they bring us new features, faster sites, and better security. But pushing that upgrade button can be a scary moment, unless you’ve ensured your site is ready and compatible. I’ll show you the best practices for ensuring your site is ready including a simple strategy that works whether you manage one site or hundreds.
Supercharge Your WordPress Site with Jetpack
Jetpack is a powerful, but sometimes daunting plugin for new users, so I’d like to unpack some of its most popular and useful features and give attendees some concrete things they can then go and try themselves on their own sites. I’d like to cover the basic areas that Jetpack’s modules can be grouped into, and then go in depth with some of the most powerful ones.
A Design Survival Kit for Non-Designers
For many WordPress users and developers, design can be challenging, confusing, or frustrating. It’s just not their thing. This talk will explain design fundamentals and provide quick, practical tips to help make WordPress sites more effective, usable, and professional-looking.
Optimizing Your Images to Improve Site Performance and SEO
Steve will discuss how you can optimize images within WordPress to improve the performance of your site, look great on Retina screens and improve your ranking on search engines.
Avoid Embarrassing and Costly WordPress Mistakes
We’ve all been there. From beginners to advanced users. So how do WordPress users and site owners stay out of trouble? The answer is simpler than you think. And even fun.
Essential SEO for Bloggers and Content Developers
The term SEO is thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean for bloggers and content producers? This talk will get to the heart of the matter. I’ll explain the new rules of SEO and teach writers how to cross the t’s and dot the i’s when it comes to SEO content development.
The Goldilocks Zone: Finding the Perfect Length for Blog Posts
One of the most common questions bloggers have is how long to make their posts. In this presentation, you will examine the needs of your personal or professional blog, as well as your writing style, and weigh them against how length affects share-ability and search rankings.
Track: Business
After Party: Wedge Brewing
Weather Permitting, we will be meeting at the Wedge Brewing Company in the River Arts District after the first day of WordCamp to mingle and drink some craft beer! There are also Food Trucks at the Wedge, so it’s a good spot to grab dinner as well.
The Wedge’s Address is:
37 Paynes Way
Asheville, NC 28801
Click here to open Google Maps.
After Party: Wedge Brewing
Weather Permitting, we will be meeting at the Wedge Brewing Company in the River Arts District after the first day of WordCamp to mingle and drink some craft beer! There are also Food Trucks at the Wedge, so it’s a good spot to grab dinner as well.
The Wedge’s Address is:
37 Paynes Way
Asheville, NC 28801
Click here to open Google Maps.
Online Writing Best Practices
Writing for the web is not like writing for any other media. An art and a science, it involves placing keywords correctly and in the proper density; it involves writing engaging copy that can be easily scanned; and it involves promoting the writing for maximum visibility. Learn how to attract an audience for either personal or professional content from a professional writer, using WordPress and selected plugins.
Takeaways
- Learn how to correctly use keywords so they work
- Learn the tricks of writing online content
- Learn how to promote your writing online, for free
Training Day: Preparing Clients for their WordPress Experience
Once you’ve designed, coded, and deployed your clients amazing new WordPress site, the job feels “done”. We’ve all dropped the ball here, so my goal is to provide a guide to efficiently training your clients on how to use and maintain their new site. This makes for happier clients with more successful businesses. Oh, and you don’t get a call 6 months later because they “broke” their site.
Takeaways
- Learn how to efficiently train clients on how to use & maintain their WordPress site
- See how getting the client “into the dashboard” early on makes a huge difference
- Get a glimpse of my process for providing training in person or remotely
Customer Service and the Freelancer
There is so much information put out there about growing a business, about SEO or marketing in general. One area that doesn’t get much love is customer service. So you can get the clients in the door, you want to do a great job but at the end of the day you’re stressed out. In this talk, I want to discuss ways to provide an excellent customer service experience while keeping you sane and your bills paid.
Takeaways
- How to manage expectations of clients to benefit you and your client
- How to organize yourself to complete projects on time
- How to chose your clients for a good working relationship
Moving up the food chain: Finding, pitching and executing on 5 and 6-figure projects
Once perceived as a mere blogging or small website tool, WordPress is an enterprise-grade CMS … stable, secure and scalable enough to be used on large websites. emagine is a leader in at acquiring large, lucrative WordPress projects and would like to provide insights and considerations for doing so.
Takeaways
- How to identify the most lucrative prospects
- How to pitch large projects (value proposition, differentiation, overcoming objections
- How to execute (IA, Project Management, Resources, post-launch support)
A Look behind the Curtain
This presentation is geared towards individuals looking to start or grow a WordPress design/development company. Topics covered will include:
- When and how to hire help
- Tools and services that help automate and streamline
- Project Management
- Time Tracking
- How to identify what makes your company unique in a sea of competitors
Takeaways
- Should you become an employee, a freelancer, or a business owner?
- What tools are vital to the success of the business operations?
- Mistakes and mishaps that you should try to avoid
How Social Media Can Accomplish Your Business or Organizational Goals
Just in case you forgot: Facebook and other social networks actually
serve a business purpose. If you want to generate a strong social
media ROI over time, connect your business goals to your efforts on
social media. Shift your energy to YOUR BUSINESS rather than the of
unending grind of creating content, and learn how to combine your
creativity with what your clients and customers want to produce
results. Then learn how to implement the right social media tracking
and reporting systems, so once you establish your company or
organizational goals, you’ll know when you’re hitting them. Find out
what data to evaluate regularly to refine your social strategy and
make sure it’s performing for your business and your bottom line. Make
social media work for you–without the burnout, aimless effort, and
inefficiency that waste the money and resources of so many businesses
and nonprofits.
Takeaways
- Learn an easy method to associate each social media site your business or organization uses with specific and even measurable financial, marketing, and communications goals
- Learn how to use Google Analytics data and other social site
statistics to guide your strategy for reaching your social media
marketing goals - Learn how to communicate with your team that you have designed a
results-oriented social media plan, and what data they can expect to
review each month or quarter - Take home a list of recommended social media tools designed for use
with WordPress
Resources and Lessons for using WordPress in your business
Every business that uses or intends to use WordPress faces common obstacles. These may include finding qualified developers to build a theme, finding particular plugins to achieve a task or not knowing where to find help online to fix an issue.
In this talk I will discuss many of these common pain points I have seen businesses have. I will share resources where you can find solid answers from the WordPress community. You will also learn some important concepts behind maintaining your WordPress site, as well as questions you can ask a developer if you are looking to hire.
Takeaways
- Resources for choosing a good theme
- Resources for finding solidly built plugins
- Questions to ask any theme or plugin developer you intend to hire
The Business of Blogging: Does Your Business Need a Blog to Succeed in Content Marketing
By the end of the The Business of Blogging, you’ll be able to answer the question: Does my business need a blog? I’ll cover what it takes to build a blog, how much time it takes to sustain a blog, and common blog mistakes businesses make. Session attendees will also learn about content marketing and how to curate great content without having a blog. I’ll include resources and WordPress plug ins that make blogging easier. And, we’ll learn how to hire a Virtual Assistant if you don’t think you can do this alone!
Takeaways
- Common blog mistakes businesses make and how to avoid them
- Resources to find content if your business doesn’t have a blog.
- Tips on finding and hiring a great Virtual Assistant to help you with your company’s social media, blog, or content marketing
SEO goes local
This session will focus on how local search engine optimization (SEO) differs from traditional SEO, and why it is so important to local businesses. Local SEO benefits a range of businesses, including those where the customer comes to you, where you go to them, and even home-based businesses like WordPress developers and designers. I’ll outline the key components of local SEO and explain how you can use your WordPress site to strengthen each of them.
Takeaways
- How local SEO differs from traditional website SEO
- The major components of local SEO
- Ways to optimize your site for local SEO
How to Optimize Contact Forms
Contact forms are an important tool for website visitors to connect with you. Learn contact form best practices including the elements of a contact form, how to test a contact form, confirmation messages, how to incorporate a contact form into website design, and how to track contact form submissions. Get introduced to popular contact form plugins.
Takeaways
- Gathering Data improves your site and business (and that isn’t a bad thing)
- How contact form design and placement contributes to conversion
- Contact forms have many uses including bug reports, newsletter signups, and lead generation
Track: Design and Front-End
After Party: Wedge Brewing
Weather Permitting, we will be meeting at the Wedge Brewing Company in the River Arts District after the first day of WordCamp to mingle and drink some craft beer! There are also Food Trucks at the Wedge, so it’s a good spot to grab dinner as well.
The Wedge’s Address is:
37 Paynes Way
Asheville, NC 28801
Click here to open Google Maps.
After Party: Wedge Brewing
Weather Permitting, we will be meeting at the Wedge Brewing Company in the River Arts District after the first day of WordCamp to mingle and drink some craft beer! There are also Food Trucks at the Wedge, so it’s a good spot to grab dinner as well.
The Wedge’s Address is:
37 Paynes Way
Asheville, NC 28801
Click here to open Google Maps.
Design Panel
Come learn about current web trends, tools, and workflows. Our panelists of expert designers and front-end developers will answer your burning questions!
Moderator: Corey Bullman
Responsive Images Without a Plugin
Retina screens will soon become the new standard for resolution but not all users need to be served a giant image. The giant image looks crisp on a retina screen but it also creates bloated page load. In the talk we will dive into how to support responsive images without using a heavy WordPress plugin. We will go step by step, breaking down how the picture element works, browser support fallbacks, native wordpress image resizing and serving the correct image based on viewports and pixel density. We will finish up with the future of serving images based on new media queries.
Takeaways
- Setting up WordPress to resizes your images can be done natively with little to no coding.
- Responsive images are more performant and already supported in modern browsers.
- How to use the picture element in your WordPress theme.
Demystifying Accessible WordPress Websites
There are over 20 million blind adults in the United States, approximately 10% of whom use screen readers to access the internet. Likewise, roughly 8% of men and 0.5% of women have some form of color blindness. Many government contracts are beginning to require websites to be accessible and many companies who are not legally required to build accessible websites are starting to do it regardless. What goes into making a website accessible? How can you determine whether or not your website is? This presentation will discuss both tools and techniques that can help you build accessible websites.
Takeaways
- Accessibility is so much more than just screen readers.
- Accessibility can do so much for your website in terms of SEO (ranking, search-ability, search engine karma, etc).
- It’s really not that hard, and doing even one thing is better than nothing at all. And it’s never too late to start thinking about it.”
Make WordPress Your Own Using Child Themes
Part of the power of WordPress are the themes that can be used to easily and quickly change your sites design, but a pre-made theme will never be a perfect fit. I will show you why and how to create a child theme to be Different, be Independent, be Yourself!
Takeaways
- How Customize WordPress the Right Way
- How to Find and Modify Individual Element’s Style Code
- What to Do When You Don’t Have a Clue (how to solve your design challenge when you aren’t sure how to change it)
A Need for Speed: Performance Driven Front End Development
User’s of today’s web expect the sites they visit to be smooth, interactive, load quickly, and run well. The focus and priority of the Front End Developer, should be optimization of the front end experience for every site we create, for every device, and for every user.
In this talk, we will cover how front end performance affects User Engagement and Experience; best practices for performance driven front end development; and tools to measure front end performance.
Takeaways
- Front end performance affects the User Engagement and Experience for a website.
- Front end performance testing is a continual process and should be considered with every line of code that we write.
- Websites that load slow lead to increased user frustration and lower engagement.
Tech Support for Graphic Designers
Many graphic designers take on website projects like they would a print design project. This can work for simple projects, but what happens when the client introduces additional features like data integration, automated processes, custom features, reporting and more? How do you identify when a design change will break the mobile responsiveness of a website?
Having an understanding of some of the common technical issues can give you more confidence in winning a complex development job and stopping issues before they happen.
Takeaways
- How To Win More Business
- How To Manage Technical Issues
- How To Bring In Outside Help
Listen to your users — Your data pipeline
Each time someone clicks onto your site, their actions tell a story. When you listen to these stories, patterns often emerge.
Your data pipeline (collection, processing, analysis, etc.) is critical to understanding how real users find and use your site and enables you to rely on more than intuition that you’re improving their experience when iterating on a design.
Learn how to listen to your users!
You will have:
- an introduction to web analytics with some basic data science concepts and tools used to instrument a data pipeline
- an ethical and effective methodology to choose the types of data you’ll collect
- an understanding of how to form a hypothesis about design changes, build hard evidence, and confidently decide if the data support it
WordPress Theme Building Blocks
Why use complicated themes when you can create your own? Sometimes a simple theme is the best idea. Getting into theme development seems daunting at first… but simple themes can be pretty easy to create once you understand how WordPress works… and the basic building blocks of themes; required template tags, common functions, and php template/theme files. This session will help you make sense of the basic code and files you need to make a simple theme… and explore some of the features you can add on to make more advanced themes. We will also dive into the template hierarchy, custom template files, useful functions, child themes, and customizing loops. Lots of code will be demonstrated, so it is best that you have a good foundation in HTML at least.
Takeaways
- Discover the difference between pages and posts
- Learn about the theme hierarchy and basic theme development
- Access a small library of theme development building blocks
Your Theme is Showing
You’re here because WordPress has become the number one content management system in the world. Many folks have made a fine living at developing plug and play themes for companies like ThemeForest, and others have made a living at using these themes. Many of these ‘premium’ templates, however contain bulky code, overly trendy design elements and an overall aesthetic that screams, ‘I bought this template for $50’. In this session, we discuss the benefits of expandability through simplicity when creating a WordPress website. ”
Takeaways
- If you choose a plug and play theme, choose carefully
- What are the pros/cons of pre-built themes vs custom themes?
- Ways to future-proof your custom theme
Website Design with UX in Mind
Great UX is a competitive advantage. Don’t let terrific content be crippled by bad design. Make smarter choices to help your users be successful and happy at your website.
Based on usability research and UX principles, we’ll discuss what we know about users in terms of both big-picture concepts and nitty-gritty details. For example, learn how people interact with photography on websites and what kinds of ideas they have in their head when they arrive at your homepage.
By looking at website examples, we will uncover common problems that website designers and owners make often (but can be avoided). You’ll walk out with practical tips that you can immediately use to make your website visitors happier.
Takeaways
- Learn the types of visuals that engage website users
- Discover important characteristics of website users that can inform all design decisions
- Study mistakes made by others that you can avoid on your website
Track: Developer
After Party: Wedge Brewing
Weather Permitting, we will be meeting at the Wedge Brewing Company in the River Arts District after the first day of WordCamp to mingle and drink some craft beer! There are also Food Trucks at the Wedge, so it’s a good spot to grab dinner as well.
The Wedge’s Address is:
37 Paynes Way
Asheville, NC 28801
Click here to open Google Maps.
After Party: Wedge Brewing
Weather Permitting, we will be meeting at the Wedge Brewing Company in the River Arts District after the first day of WordCamp to mingle and drink some craft beer! There are also Food Trucks at the Wedge, so it’s a good spot to grab dinner as well.
The Wedge’s Address is:
37 Paynes Way
Asheville, NC 28801
Click here to open Google Maps.
Development Panel: Connecting WordPress with APIs
Our panel members will be discussing ways to connect WordPress to other systems (and vise versa) using APIs. They will also cover a bit of the wp-api project – and share some experience working with WordPress, APIs, and front-end tools that use them.
Using WordPress as a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) Platform
WordPress now powers nearly 25% of the web, but the vast majority of those websites use WordPress as a CMS. In our transition from a plugin to a hosted platform with OptinMonster, we decided to use WordPress as our application platform. This talk gives a practical overview of how we use WordPress as the application backend and the obstacles we had to overcome to make it scale to serve 10s of millions of API requests every day.
Twitter: @jthomasgriffin
Empathetic Development in WordPress
Developers should keep content editors and administrators in mind when making backend decisions concerning how content and settings are edited. We should also consider how the decisions we make now affect people who will touch our code after shipping – other developers, support staff, and our future selves. We’ll discuss the importance of making better decisions, as well as tips on how to do so.
Save time in the future by making decisions that eliminate support requests and minimize technical debt.
Using WordPress as a Content Framework
WordPress has plenty of options, both built-in and third-party, to be used as a content framework to create delightful administrative experiences that will improve your workflow and impress your clients; both those who use the site and manage content. Using WordPress’ built in Custom Post Types, Custom Taxonomies, and the Advanced Custom Fields plugin; learn how to use these to your advantage to create a great WordPress Dashboard UI and to better organize content for the admin-user and the end-user, and to streamline the entire editorial workflow with little development work necessary to make it happen.
If the structure of WordPress leaves you wanting more, coming into WordPress from another platform, or new to theme development in general; this will help demystify WordPress and help you make WordPress work for you rather than working around WordPress.
Creating a Tournament-style Bracket System
I will be talking about how I built a tournament-style bracket system for the NYPost’s Decider.com using the Polldaddy API and Fieldmanager.
I presented the topic in flash-talk form recently, which can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4un-BEcYBw
Aside from the brackets themselves (voting, round creation and procession, match-ups, modal navigation), I’ll touch on some related aspects of the development process such as:
Custom fields, storing data, leveraging available services/functionality, scalability.
Put a little Backbone in your WordPress
Backbone (and Underscore!) are bundled with WordPress – explore how you can leverage their power to deliver complex user experiences while keeping your code organized and maintainable.
~ When and why should you use Backbone?
~ How can WordPress help?
~ Backbone fundamentals
~ Backbone in core
~ A sample Backbone project
~ Using the JSON REST API
Turn Your Code Into A Plugin
The ability to seek out forums where others are asking questions, debating techniques, and solving problems similar to our own is one of the best things the internet has given us. In particular with WordPress, there are many active users participating in numerous forums helping each other out every day.
Almost without exception when custom functionality is discussed in WordPress forums, the proposed solutions will either advise readers to put code in the theme’s `functions.php` and/or `style.css` file. While there are good reasons that these two files are the default point for code insertion (everybody’s got ’em, after all), there is great value in isolating pieces of code that are general enough to “do one thing and do it well.”
In this talk, we will walk through a fictional case study that illustrates how one might go from “adding code to the functions file” to creating an original plugin. We’ll begin with a specific solution that applies to a single site, and we’ll end up with a generalized piece of functionality (i.e. a WordPress plugin) that can easily be ported from site to site regardless of the theme being used.
Debugging in PHP
The art of debugging code requires a good understanding of the codebase and logical deduction skills. A good debugging tool is like a code mentor that can walk you through the code and help you better understand what is going on, but the deductive reasoning is still up to you. In this session, you will learn how to use Xdebug, a PHP debugging tool to:
– Step through the code line-by-line
– Set breakpoints to pause the code at any point
– View the variables that are in scope when the code is paused
– Watch variables and functions as you step through the code
– Change variable values as the code runs
– Investigate the call stack to see the files loaded and functions run
– Surface hidden issues in your code
As a bonus, you will learn a few tips for helping you track down your next bug with better deductive reasoning as well!
Database Interactions with WP_Query and $wpdb
This session will teach developers how to write custom WP_Query loops, the different functions available for interacting with WP_Query objects, and how to use each function appropriately. We’ll discuss the cases where WP_Query doesn’t fit your needs, and how to deal with the global $wpdb object directly. And we’ll look at the most useful methods available with the $wpdb object, and discuss responsible usage and implementation there of.
Solar Powered WordPress
I’ve been working on a solar powered WordPress stack that combines the power of the sun with a Raspberry PI to power a WordPress server. The purpose of this demo is to encourage people to think about “other” ways to use WordPress and expose people to Raspberry PI, linux etc.