Sessions

Presented by Sheryle Gillihan

Sheryle isn’t certain yet what the details of her Saturday keynote will be, but she does know that she wants to talk about purpose and community. And she hopes people come away with “the confidence to start something.”

Presented by Scott Kingsley Clark

As we use WordPress, we begin to become more comfortable with easy access to plugins, themes, and services that provide us with many different positive outcomes. However, if we don’t think long and hard about what our needs are about our content structures — we will make mistakes that cost time and money that could burn our bridges. In this session, we will prototype a website or application with live interaction from the attendees.

Presented by Brennen Bliss

This session will cover how Brennen went from WordPress template user to digital agency owner, all while using WordPress as the framework for his business’ growth. One of the key points will be how to figure out if WordPress is the smartest choice for client projects. Considerations include the limitations of the platform, customizability, and even using WordPress as a content framework and utilizing the REST API for content delivery. Brennen will also comment on the value of the community, and what it means to digital agency clients (if, anything at all). And he’s done all of this while still being in High School. That goes to show how far WordPress can reach.

Presented by Tanner Moushey

Most developers have some experience with jQuery, but few of them understand the principles of Javascript and how to write and debug Javascript code. This session will cover best practices for writing object-oriented Javascript, benchmarking, and debugging.

Presented by Lori Calcott

A session on advising your clients on the next steps for generating traffic to their site. The session will serve as an overview of the search marketing space including SEO, Paid Search, Facebook Advertising, and Local Search. The overall theme will be to help designers and developers address the questions they get from clients on how to generate traffic to their site.

Presented by Susan Ramsey

Are you a blogger looking to take your site beyond the basic theme, but don’t have the budget for a custom website? With a little bit of knowledge, you can customize your own site; by doing it through the browser, you’ll immediately see where to make the changes, and get the instant gratification of seeing the updates immediately.

Presented by Erin Flynn

Erin’s first year in business, she made a whopping $12,000. Before taxes. You can bet she “celebrated” with a whole bottle of (cheap) wine and a lot of tears. She’d worked SO hard, only to feel like a failure. Five years later, and her rates have shot from $500/website, to over $10k/website. It’s possible, but it’s not an easy process. In this session, she will break down how she improved her skills, created a better customer experience, and was able to raise her 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. Erin wants to help others utilize these skills so they can boost their prices too.

Presented by Adam W. Warner

Mindfulness – “The quality or state of being conscious or aware of something.” Security can seem intimidating and complex for many, but we shouldn’t (and can’t) let that stop us from doing everything we can to secure our WordPress sites and ourselves. After all, our websites are often part of our livelihood. In this session Adam addresses the “big picture” of personal and website security and breaks down the fundamental tasks needed for a strong security plan online. He provides an actionable checklist on what attendees can implement immediately to better secure themselves online in addition to their WordPress websites. After attending this session, attendees will have a better understanding of personal security online and how it affects website security as a whole, as well as steps they can take to mitigate risk in the future.

Presented by Todd McKee

UAMSHealth.com has used WordPress as their primary content management system for several years. In the last couple of years, they have started centralizing content areas to avoid duplication and errors. UAMSHealth.com serves as the primary hub for news at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). Their latest efforts involve syndicating the news through the WP Rest API. This session will cover how they started (syndication plugins that push posts to other sites), where they are now (content syndication of posts through REST), and where they are headed next (additional Custom Post Types and beyond). The session will dig into a little code and examples to show how it works, but prior knowledge is not required.

Presented by Isaac Irvine

In this session, you’ll learn how to leverage social media and blogging to tell stories that inspire clients and potential clients to take a deeper look at your business. These are steps anyone can take and start using today – at WordCamp!

1. Be Authentic.
2. Your customers/clients are ALWAYS the hero of your story.
3. Get involved in the WordPress community.

Presented by Jeff VanDrimmelen

VR adoption is skyrocketing. VR alone is expected that to grow from a 7 billion dollar industry to a 74 billion dollar industry in the next 4 years. Many content creators are already creating immersive VR content. We need to find ways to make this content accessible to users both on a desktop and in virtual reality. In this session, you’ll hear about the current virtual reality devices, software, and content, and about how to integrate that into your websites for a more immersive content experience.

Presented by Amanda Giles

Stepping into theme development can be daunting. Sure, anyone with a little PHP skill and a basic understanding of the loop can create theme templates, but there are a number of things you can learn which can take your theme development to the next level. We’ll discuss the skills that can take you from a beginner theme developer to a master.

Presented by Lindsay Halsey

A hands-on 2-hour workshop on how to invest one hour in your or your client’s website and positively impact the organic search results via SEO. We’ll start with the basics – the anatomy of a search engine results page and keyword research. Then, we’ll dive into a process that can be utilized on any WordPress website to prime it for SEO success via page titles and meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, search engine verification, schema markup, and more. Bring a website that you’d like to optimize for this hands-on workshop.

Presented by Ani King

Whether you operate a business, do freelance design and development work, or blog professionally, chances are you have customers or consumers, and their experience matters to you. Organizing around customer needs, wants, and expectations can feel like an endless exercise in herding cats, but using the fundamentals of project management can help you build the experience you want your customers to have, and then take steps towards improvement.

Presented by John Peterson

This session will cover PageSpeed and why it’s so important to have a speedy WordPress website. Discussion will include:

• Concepts the beginner attendees will need for the session.
• The business case for having a speedy website.
• Reinforcement of the business case with industry studies.
• Google’s PageSpeed metric.
• Lots of free ways a beginner WordPress user can optimize their website.
• A few preferred premium tools to optimize WordPress websites.
• The importance of HTTPS.

Presented by Carrie Dils

Carrie will be giving the Sunday keynote speech. While she wouldn’t give a hint about her topic, she did have one thing to say about it. “I hope they come away inspired to take one action, and I’ll let them know what that one action is during the keynote.”

Presented by Sean Jackson

There is a lot more to optimizing a WordPress site than just installing and configuring an SEO plugin. To truly succeed in gaining more search traffic, WordPress admins need a proven roadmap of tactics and techniques to help propel them forward. And this session will show them how. In “Beyond the Basics,” attendees will receive a detailed a comprehensive framework for generating results from not only search engines, but social media as well. This framework is based on the tactics and techniques currently used by the in-house media team at Copyblogger as well as the marketing team of StudioPress. Unlike other SEO presentations, “Beyond the Basics” is specifically crafted for WordPress admins; helping them wade through all the “guru” speak so that the can focus on activities that work – from someone who manages SEO for some of the top destination media sites in the WordPress ecosystem.

Contributor Day happens all day on Sunday, concurrent with other sessions. But you are welcome to come and go or stay all day, as you wish. You don’t have to be a developer to participate — anyone can contribute!

Presented by Peter Walker

Do you need another stream of income? Setting up an online business? Monetizing your blog? Come and find out the details in setting up your own business, from choosing a business name to SSL certificate, ending with what happens when you do your 5 minute WooCommerce plugin install.

Presented by Aaron D. Campbell

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.

Presented by Chris Lema

Having coached hundreds of people who have launched commercial products into the WordPress ecosystem over the last several years, Chris will share a series of insights and suggestions for people who are looking to bring their first product into the market.

Presented by Cathy Rueter

This session is not so much the mechanics of blogging with WordPress as it is what to know to actually put words on “paper.”

1. Prep steps – how to prepare yourself to blog
2. Up, down and all around – Where to find blog ideas
3. Blogging beauty basics – how to make your blog look nice with some basic WordPress tools
4. The red pen and other fun tools – how to make your blog stand out
5. Bringing it all together – blog information and resources

Presented by Aaron Edwards

A brief introduction to WordPress Multisite and it’s uses. Aaron will share his experience in building and managing large Multisite networks to provide tips and tricks for all levels including:

• overview of multisite and features
• minimum hosting requirements
• recommended free plugins
• creative ways to leverage multisite
• advice on painless backups, development environments, and upgrades

Presented by Sara Graybill

It’s not enough anymore to put together a website and expect people to just show up. In this session, we’ll go through creating a digital marketing plan that will help you figure out who your target market is and what you need to do with that information.

Presented by Tom McCracken

Everyone knows ROI is the holy grail. You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Those who become adept at tracking and optimizing real results will drive decisively more successful projects (and bigger budgets). Google Analytics is a remarkable platform. But the standard install just doesn’t cut it. Unlocking Google Analytics powerful extended features is the key to measuring what really matters:

• Are people actually reading your content and watching your videos?
• What posts, topics, and authors resonate most with your visitors?
• Is there a drop off in the user experience between mobile and desktop?
• Is your new site design really making a measurable difference?
• Social media or search engines? What marketing channels work best?

This session will show you how to transform Google Analytics from the standard maze of vanity metrics hardly anyone looks at to an invaluable ROI compass. You will learn how to leverage GA’s extended features to measure a wealth of meaningful interactions such as conversions and visitor engagement. We will score posts, topics, authors, and more to uncover what content is the most effective. Finally, we will look at how to integrate this data to enable everybody on the web team to make smarter, more results-oriented decisions. If you are serious about delivering more impactful websites and online marketing, this is a talk you don’t want to miss.

Presented by Alex & Marie Juchniewicz

How the power of using WordPress gave Alex and his wife the ability to share their story with thousands of people when they lost their son at 38 weeks in the womb.

Presented by Kevin Fontenot

Every day your potential clients are inundated with advertising messages and calls to action. With the average conversion rate hovering around 2% and only going lower, your business must do something different. Your prospects need to know that you are accessible and ready to help them. Sure, you can do that with live chat, but chatbots let you go even further to identify the prospects that are and aren’t a good fit. In this session, Kevin will lay out the exact funnel that he uses at TrainedUp to get 25% of visitors to engage with their chatbot.

Presented by Elisha & Elyssa Fernández

In this empowering, high energy session, you will learn:

• Elisha’s & Elyssa’s story: How We Wrote Our Book in LESS than 60 Days When We Were 9 and 10 Years Old and How You Can, Too!
• Why you Need to Write a Book NOW (the benefits a book gives you)
• Top 3 Excuses of All Time when Writing a Book and how to Get Rid of Them
• 10 Proven Strategies to Move Forward with your Book and Have confidence
• Self VS. Traditional Publishing: Which One is Right for YOU?

…and more important tips to write your book quickly, efficiently, and successfully with confidence, and all the tools and resources you need. You will leave with a clear understanding of why and how you should write your book so you can start helping those around you and making a BIG difference in the world!

Presented by Laura Dapkus

Many non-profits don’t realize that they have a problem until a volunteer half-finishes a website and disappears. Whether you create WordPress sites for others or as a non-profit employee or volunteer, this session will help you use WordPress to engage donors and volunteers, represent the organization as a good steward of donors’ money, and protect its security and reputation. Non-profits also have unique project management and maintenance needs, and we will discuss these as well.

Presented by Chris Silver Smith

Do you do social media with only a vague idea of how it may benefit your site? Or, perhaps you feel that it only has nebulous value for you? Some people have said that social media does not impact rankings in Google and Bing, but they have based that upon poorly-understood statements from search engineers and only a shallow analysis of social media platforms. From the perspective of deep experience in search engine optimization there are indeed some elements of social media that may be leveraged to obtain definite benefits and visibility in search engine’s results. In this session, both the technically advanced and novices may learn techniques for increasing the visibility of both websites and blogs through the use of social media. This will focus heavily upon Facebook and Twitter, but we will also touch upon some other primary social media networks.

Presented by Matt Hayman

A glance at overcoming the two major obstacles in sales: Prospecting and Freeing up cash.

Prospecting topics that will be covered: How to find new clientele, How to retain the clients you have, Tips & tricks, and Differentiators.

Freeing up Cash topics that will be covered: How to get clients to agree to your price, How you can help your clientele free up dollars, Tips & Tricks, and Differentiators.

Presented by Adam Fout

Over the course of this presentation, you’ll learn what content marketing is, why it’s so powerful and effective, how it can help you increase your website’s traffic and grow your email list, how WordPress makes content marketing simple, and how to get started without investing a single dollar — you’ll also get some suggestions on valuable, free content marketing resources located across the web, and you’ll walk away with a clear idea of how to get started.

If you’re new to WordPress, if you’re just getting your blog up and running, if you’re starting a business and wondering how to make an impact online, this is the presentation for you.