Sessions

If you’re trying to figure out how to use WordPress for your business or personal site, these workshops are for you. If you’ve tried to manage WordPress on your own and you’ve felt overwhelmed and lost, these workshops are for you. If you’re looking for guidance on how to navigate the WordPress ecosystem, plugins, themes, and site hosting and management, these workshops are for you!

In this session, you’ll learn how to set up a WordPress site from scratch. Bring your laptop! We’ll address topics like posts, pages, using the new block editor, themes, and plugins. We’ll also cover WordPress workflows for publishing, understanding local development, WP updates, how to “vet” a plugin or theme, and more. You’ll leave with a site and resources for further exploration.

Please come with:

• A laptop (fully charged) AND power adapter!
• Get Local installed: https://localbyflywheel.com
• Your favorite note taking tools

Some things that will need to create a finished website:

• Content for the homepage, about us and contact page
• Photos you want to use on your site
• Access to hosting, cPanel, and domain (if you want to push your site live the same day)

Handouts

• WordPress 101 – handout for AM session
• WordPress 102 – handout for PM session

If you’re trying to figure out how to use WordPress for your business or personal site, these workshops are for you. If you’ve tried to manage WordPress on your own and you’ve felt overwhelmed and lost, these workshops are for you. If you’re looking for guidance on how to navigate the WordPress ecosystem, plugins, themes, and site hosting and management, these workshops are for you!

Don’t fear the WordPress! In this session we will take WordPress by the horns and wrassle it to the ground! We will cover finding and installing a good theme, designing and laying out your website with a drag-n-drop page builder, choosing the right plugins, how to handle security, how to handle backups along with keeping your website up-to-date, Search Engine Optimization basics, and making the site live. Come prepared to get down and dirty!

Please come with:

• A laptop (fully charged) AND power adapter!
• Get Local installed: https://localbyflywheel.com
• Your favorite note taking tools

Some things that will need to create a finished website:

• Content for the homepage, about us and contact page
• Photos you want to use on your site
• Access to hosting, cPanel, and domain (if you want to push your site live the same day)

Handouts

• WordPress 101 – handout for AM session
• WordPress 102 – handout for PM session

Learning SEO for blogging might be like pulling a loose tooth – you don’t want to, but you have to. This talk is all about basic and practical SEO tips for WordPress Bloggers.

This is designed to give you SEO tips you should be using as a blogger, and not giving you tips that will make your brain do its own version of a 404 error. This talk is geared toward beginning bloggers, or content creators, or if you’ve been struggling in this area, and need a more solid foundation.

Everyone goes through a journey in their development career and everyone travels at a different pace. Obstacles exist along the way but they can all be overcome. Each step of your career has different expectations from others. Certain qualities will help you along the way including self reflection, asking questions, and taking on change. We will discuss my development career including the funny stories, the mistakes, and the take aways you can apply.

Quick and Dirty… How to get out of your WP DIY hole. We know WP is made for non-technical users, but what if you’re just stuck starting out. Here are the 10 most common mistakes and errors you have to know how to DIY and how to ask for help once you’ve tapped out of your personal skills and the depths of YouTube.

ADA, GDPR, HIPAA, CAN-SPAM, SOX, GLBA, CCPA, PCI, COPPA, OPDP, LGPD. Learn a few strategies for maintaining websites and other marketing initiatives that require some sort of legal compliance. This discussion will give a high-level introduction to several compliance standards and some general processes for brining a project into compliance.

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Have you ever had a client come up to you and ask why a WordPress page was slow to load? We’ve all had that happen at some point or another. Especially nowadays with the increased importance of page load times! (Everything has to be fast fast fast!)

But what do you do when someone asks you to fix such an issue? It can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. The issue could be anywhere. (It really can!)

So how can you troubleshoot what’s going on? There are a lot of tools at your disposal to help you figure things out. But that doesn’t mean that you’re any closer to knowing what’s going on.

We’ll look at the tools that you can use to solve this tricky issue. But we won’t stop there either We’ll also go over how to interpret what these tools are telling you. Because that’s how you’ll get to the root of the issue so that you can fix it.

You installed a security plugin, and you don’t get much traffic anyway since your business is small…so you don’t need to worry about getting hacked, right? Think again! Security incidents are on the rise, and small businesses are easy targets. You may not have a lot of money to invest, but you can learn a framework to help you get a better grasp on security for your website and your business.

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If you want to move beyond logging into the admin screens for your websites, this is the ticket into that world. Unlock automated testing, better update processes and so many other benefits by tapping into the power of your machine and machines like CircleCI with a lot of free support along the way.

As WordPress designers and developers, you know how to create websites that look great and function well. But what about the content that goes into those sites?

Google prefers quality over quantity when it comes to copy. But what makes for quality website copy? I can tell you what it isn’t—it isn’t keyword-stuffed content that sounds like it was written by a robot. Instead, quality content addresses your ideal customers’ real concerns, written in an authentic voice—your voice.

People crave connection over advertising. It’s time to learn how to write authentically by first focusing on your reader and then—only then—thinking about SEO. Gain the tips and insights you need to revamp your content marketing efforts for your company and your customers.

You’ll walk away from this session with several items you can implement on your own site and share with your customers, including:

• Why it’s important to create real connections with your audience
• How to write copy that sounds like you and resonates with your audience
• How to incorporate SEO without sacrificing your humanity

Key Takeaways: Your site’s design and development are bar none. But what about your content? Learn how to craft authentically written, conversion-focused website copy that puts your audience first and SEO second.

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Just as human beings need food, water, shelter, and safety before we can worry about higher level things, websites also have a hierarchy of needs. Servers, stability and compliance must be in place before you can meaningfully introduce quality and raise your conversions on your website.

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The famous five minutes install only gets you so far. What if you could enter a few data points and have a fully functioning WordPress site installed and running? You can with WP-CLI and your command line tools. We will show you how we automate site creation and go over some of the cool things WP-CLI can do to help you get your site up and running quicker.

You are jazzed about cranking out a WordPress site and the first thing you do is you reach for a theme. But wait is that theme you bought accessible? Will all your users be able to traverse through your site without any issues? You could run an accessibility test. Or even better, you could keep accessibility top of mind during the build process and make it a must have before launching a WordPress site.

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There is no shortage of beautiful, perfectly useless WordPress websites. Digital agencies litter the Web with artistic and clever designs that have no hope of generating a positive ROI. In this talk, I’ll share a highly actionable checklist to ensure all your WordPress websites produce sales leads.

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You might have a great idea for a plugin that you wish existed. Or, you might have previously developed something that was so useful you thought it would be cool to try and make that available to the public. But if you’re not a bigtime coder, this process might have felt intimidating. I’m in the same boat. But I was able to do it and I’ll tell you how. (hint: you don’t have to do it all yourself!)

Regardless of whether it is free or premium, users of your plugin (or theme) will at some point need support. Drawing from over a decade of mistakes and success providing support for several plugins, this talk explores what I found that works (and what doesn’t work) for providing user support.

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WordPress has some great internal APIs to work with WordPress things. Sometimes we need to move beyond $wpdb. We will take a high-level walk through the benefits of things like custom tables, elasticsearch, redis, and other external services. Some specific implementation examples will be provided along with the learning curve, risks, and potential real-world use cases.

In my career, I have used many open source projects. As I got more involved in open source I would often open issues and submit a one-time pull request to projects I used regularly.

More recently, I have taken on a bigger role being the gulp maintainer for WP Rig, providing continuous contribution and thought leadership rather than one-off contributions.

This talk will explore the benefits, and challenges, this has brought as well as lessons learned so that you too can level up your open source contributions and go from drive-by committer to regular contributor.

You’ve identified your actionable KPIs. You’ve segmented your audience. Your monthly reports give the client (or internal team) the data they want. What else is there?

Let’s discuss:

• Using Google Tag Manager to add event tracking and to simplify management of multiple sites
• Getting WooCommerce data into your reports
• Incorporating non-GA data into shiny Google Data Studio reports

Burnout is spreading throughout our industry. It’s time for us to acknowledge how this is impacting our lives and challenge ourselves to find a healthy work/life balance. This talk will help us reflect on where this pressure is coming from and provide ideas on steps you can take to make a change. Together we can redefine expectations and demand something better for ourselves. After all, you don’t need to be miserable. I should know, as I used to be that person.

Do you forget your phone or lose your keys all the time? Did a client ask you to do something and you forgot until they asked again? If you are feeling overwhelmed in your life or business, creating systems to organize the chaos will help you get things under control.

Not everything is as it seems in the world of distributed work. Cami will draw upon her more than eight years of experience working remotely for multiple companies, including six years of acting as a community manager for a global project, to serve as your guide to unravel the myths and mysteries of leading collaboration across time zones. By comparing and contrasting the communication techniques and organizational structures for large remote teams and communities, she will reveal how we can better cultivate strategy and efficiency in our communities, and inclusivity and transparency within our businesses.

While contributing to the WordPress open source project Cami has picked up a thing or two about both leading and participating in remote teamwork. Let her share her favorite team-tested tools and platforms with you. Revel in her triumphs, laugh with her at her failures, and learn from the collective wisdom of other remote workers and WordPress contributors whom she’s met along the way.

What if one simple change to your process could propel your business forward with improving your profit and margins? Sometimes it’s what you don’t know that could be the one thing that keeps the lights on. Let’s look at seven key concepts to having a sustainable business model.

Design Systems are all the rage right now. Drawing from parallels within the culinary world, I want to explore 3 different perspectives that a design system can address within an organization. Most people only tend to think of the first perspective but doing so limits the impact a design system can have.

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Since the introduction of the REST API, developers have been seeking ways to leverage the benefits of WordPress for content creation, while offering new options for presenting that information on the client side. Native mobile apps, JavaScript front-ends, static sites – the possibilities are endless.

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits and limitations of going “headless” with WordPress, find out what the hype is about, and determine whether this approach is something that could benefit you or your clients.

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The digital ecosystem is evolving, and the role of a CMS in that ecosystem needs to evolve with it. What is the role of CMS and WordPress specifically in an ecosystem that is increasingly becoming omnichannel? Where do we need to push WordPress to continue to be a relevant tool in the future?

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Learn how to use Object Oriented Programming (OOP) to organize a complex custom RestAPI application into reusable chunks. We’ll also learn common performance pitfalls with the WordPress architecture and how to avoid them (beyond just caching).

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Modern browsers, JavaScript libraries, and CSS3 have made it easier than ever to create exciting, dynamic animated experiences within web interfaces. But we have also seen the unfortunate side effect of trying to do too much: websites that are resource hogs, eating up bandwidth and slowing load times to a crawl, all for effects that are ultimately just there for the “show” factor. This talk will discuss how to use these animation skills for good: to establish context, convey status, give feedback, and yes, even add a little delight. Along the way, we’ll discuss the principles of animation that guide everything from your favorite feature films to the actions of a button on your screen, and learn how deliberate animation choices can improve the experience for your user. We will also touch on the available tools in JS and CSS and how to choose which one is the right one for your animation task.

Addiction is isolating. Being a new mom is hard. Being a new mom to twins at the height of your partner’s battle with addiction while you try to start a business is insanity. Through brutally candid true-to-life stories, you’ll hear how it’s possible to fill yourself back up after running on empty for too long.

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GDPR is a requirement for doing business with the EU, and brings a whole new set of rules and things to be aware of.

If you have more work than you can possibly do and you regularly fantasize about cloning yourself, it may be time to hire. If you are working too many hours freelancing but still not making enough money, rethinking your business model could be the solution to your problems. We’ll explore 16 different business models for freelancers and how to get clients with each model. We’ll discuss business planning with the Business Model Canvas and the top 12 ways to prepare for hiring.

Groups of gutenberg blocks, “blocksets”, are the future of WordPress design AND content. They’ll be more flexible, and more portable. Instead of downloading, installing, and customizing a theme, you install a complete site where each page is a tailored collection of blocksets, complete with the content appropriate for your industry or purpose. Page level theming will become a real possibility. Meaning that instead of Lorem Ipsum, you’ll get the imagery and copy you need to have a mostly ready site.

Blocksets will be exchanged in public forums, and will be packaged and sold. If you like a page on someone’s site, for the first time you’ll be able to ask, “hey, can I get a json file for that page.”

We have a little ways to go before this is feasible, but we’re getting close. I’ll demo how blocksets work and why they are superior to themes. Then we’ll discuss some ways the WordPress community can get the ball rolling.

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Extending WordPress above and beyond the core functionality is part of what makes WordPress so powerful. However, the sheer number of plugins available can be overwhelming. A strategy for evaluating plugins makes both developing managing WordPress easier.

In this presentation, attendees will learn strategies and discover tools for evaluating one plugin over another. We’ll look at the difference between different types of plugins; do you get what you pay for when you buy a premium plugin? We’ll talk about managing plugins and updates, as well as evaluating plugin security by identifying plugin functionality that may be risky and researching plugin security history.

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Whether you’re using JIRA, Basecamp, Github, or any other software to manage tasks/bugs/tickets/features/milestones, you can make the process less painful, easier to follow, and more fun.

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Have you ever been driven up the wall trying to work with someone, to the point that you started to think you were crazy? Has someone told you your feelings were worthless? Have you spent forty-five minutes arguing about what to name something instead of solving the bugs? Then you, my friend, have been trolled. Even in WordPress we have our bad days, our moments when we lash out, and when we hurt others with our selfishness. It’s hard, but if you prepare yourself you can survive this and make it better.