Sandi Batik is coming back to WordCamp DFW to teach us how to deliver a better eCommerce solution to our clients.

We often get clients whose first effort at an eCommerce site failed. It is usually a “Help me Obi-wan Kenobi you’re my only hope!” kind of phone call. As we analyze what went wrong with the first site, we usually find out the previous developer may have been a great coder, but just did not understand the client’s business model.

In her experience, some clients don’t understand their business model, especially those who are moving from a bricks and mortar business environment to an online store.

That’s why Sandi Batik structured the “Delivering a Better eCommerce Solution to Your Clients” presentation to give eCommerce developers a set of questions and checklists that would help them conduct an effective project discovery before they start writing code.

During Sandi’s talk, you will learn how a detailed client discovery gets to the real motivations, agendas, drivers, expectations, and goals of the eCommerce project.

By using a technical eCommerce project discovery processes, your team will avoid being surprised by time-released, headaches throughout the project. When expectations are clear on both sides, implementation is less stressful for everyone.

Sandi Batik’s presentation will include process checklists and other tools to help your team develop a robust project infrastructure to support your client’s business strategies and help them efficiently launch and manage their eCommerce operation.

Sandi Batik, and her partner, Nick Batik, have been building static websites with HTML and CSS since 1995. They were developing sites in Adobe GoLive in 2007 when a colleague started raving about WordPress and encouraged them to give it a try.

I think we were at Version 2.1 and the documentation was still sketchy. You pretty much kept the WordPress Codex open at all times, documented what worked, and passed it on.

That year, Pat Ramsey founded the Austin WordPress Meetup. It was about seven folks who meet at the Halcyon Coffee House, mostly sharing tips and tricks. As more members joined, the Meetup moved to Austin’s Conjunctured and later to CoSpace.

In 2010 Pat asked me to organize the WordPress Beginners group, while he and Nick organized the Advanced WP Dev group. We later added an Intermediate WP Developers group and an eCommerce Meetup. I taught the beginners through 2018 and, along with Nick, and Toyin Akinmusuru, continue to organize the WooCommerce Meetup.

Sandi Batik is a Deming Certified Quality Analyst who served in Colorado Small Business Development Office as a Minority and Women’s Small Business Development specialist. She was awarded the SBA Region VIII, M/WBE Procurement Advocate Award; and the SBA Region VIII,  Advocate of the Year Award for Women in Business. She uses that business development experience to provide data-driven solutions for her eCommerce clients.

In 2019, after working together for several years on various eCommerce projects, I joined Nick Batik and Toyin Akinmusuru to form a new company, LoneStarWP. I serve as the COO. Our agency develops eBusiness Solutions, including WooCommerce Stores, WordPress Membership Sites, Custom eCommerce Plugins, and offers Strategic Consultancy for eCommerce Projects.

It is always a pleasure to have Sandi Batik at WordCamp DFW. She’s attended several times and, last year, she presented a talk on ‘Avoiding Scope Creep,’ that included the observation that good project management starts with better client management. That presentation led to some intense discussion during the after-party.

Apparently client management is “a thing!”
I ended up writing out some crib-notes on the back of a napkin to help one of the attendees with an upcoming client meeting. He called me a few days later – the meeting went better than expected.

Sandi Batik told us that several of her online mentors are from the DFW WordPress community.

Every WordCampDFW is like a family reunion. It is an opportunity to spend IRL-time with friends and associates whose work I admire.

Being a contributing member of the Austin WordPress Meetup has blessed me with life-long friends and amazing professional associates.

WPATX is a diverse community of small business owners, bloggers, developers, designers educators, and publishers. Our members often expand our WordPress skills by working together on ad hoc projects. For advanced developers and beginners alike, it is reassuring to know that help and advice is only a Slack message away.

Tweet @sandi_batik during Sandi Batik’s talk using #WCDFW and ask her about her vintage cookbook collection!

I love to cook. It relaxes me. When I’m stressed or stuck on a problem I pull out the knives, cutting boards, veggies and I’m in my happy place. Somewhere during the process, I’ve solved what was bugging me. My dev teams are well fed, and there is always green chili stew, Texas Red, gumbo or scotch broth in the freezer.

Get your WordCamp DFW tickets here so you can understand how Project Discovery helps evaluate your client’s existing business operations to help you build a Scope of Work for developer/designer/content strategist and get a reliable time and cost estimate for a proposed eCommerce project. So valuable!

Come hear how a small community of small businesses joined forces to combat the big box stores with their own eCommerce Marketplace shop.

AJ Morris will teach you how they handle aspects like shipping, orders, inventory, all while running their own retail store fronts – and you get to apply this to your own business!

AJ Morris has been helping small businesses work on getting their eCommerce side of the business up and running for the last 2 years.

Whether it was building the first managed WooCommerce hosting, or working with local small businesses, I have found that this is the client base I love working with. I continue to find success and build success with these clients as we get them up and running.

AJ Morris got started building with WordPress back in 2004 for his local school district.

We were in need of a website tool that would allow us to have weblogs (yes, I’m that old!) setup for our teachers. I fell in love with the ease of use WordPress brought to an older generation and found that for myself, it was incredibly powerful and easy to use.

AJ Morris has continued to use WordPress to build plugins, themes and websites for small businesses. Fast-forward to today, he’s working with WordPress and in the business for the last 8 years.

I’m putting every ounce of my work life into the WordPress ecosystem.

AJ Morris worked with one of the first drag-and-drop themes, Headway Themes, as his first true step into the WordPress community. That him me down the road of meeting some of the most influential people in WordPress. Today, he leads product and marketing efforts for one of the longest running WordPress plugin businesses, iThemes.

DFW was one of the first WordCamps AJ Morris attended as a sponsor.

 I loved seeing the community of DFW come together. It’s been one of my favorite teams camps for the last 5 years and one that I try extremely hard to attend every year. I have been able to speak at the last couple and have enjoyed the community of speakers selected.

AJ Morris says he has always found the WordPress community to be welcoming.

When I started attending WordCamps as a sponsor (I first started working at Liquid Web and was going to every WordCamp possible), I was glad to have friends already in the space. But even when they weren’t at the same WordCamps, I have always managed to meet new people and form new friendships.

During his talk at WordCamp DFW this year, Growing the Small Business Local Economy with Marketplace eCommerce, AJ Morris hopes attendees will see that retail shopping is declining and more and more purchases are happening online.

If you run a small business, now is the time to invest in building your eCommerce presence. If you are a freelancer or agency, he will help you understand how you can build affordable solutions for small businesses by pooling business resources together and working towards a common end goal.

Recently a group of downtown businesses of a small Michigan town came to me asking what they could do if they put their resources together to build an eCommerce store. They wanted a way to highlight each of the store’s uniquenesses while allowing them to manage all parts of the eCommerce shop individually among the store owners.

Together we came up with a set of requirements that each store needed to have and set out to develop this solution for them. We ended up with a WooCommerce and Dokan, a marketplace plugin that gave us a number of the features we needed to create the best shopping experience for customers as well as all the management tools for each individual business.

Don’t miss AJ Morris’ session so your can learn how to replicate this success story.

Tweet @ajmorris during AJ’s talk using #WCDFW and ask him about that time rode in a limo with Michael Bublé

Make sure you get your WordCamp DFW tickets – we’re only a few days away from the big event!

Are you one more bad month away from walking away from your WordPress business? The anxiety of unpredictable income can make you miserable.

In this talk at WordCamp DFW, titled “The Power of Recurring Income,” Nathan Ingram will explain how to stabilize your business with a growing stream of recurring income.

Over the years, Nathan Ingram has helped hundreds of WordPress business owners establish and grow recurring revenue in their businesses.

Growing recurring revenue is a personal passion, because it is the foundation of a successful business. It’s virtually impossible to be successful long-term without it. I’ve seen first-hand the difference it has made in my business and for others.

We are excited to welcome Nathan Ingram as a speaker. WordCamp DFW will be the 54th WordCamp at which he have participated, but it’s the first WordCamp he’s attended in Texas!

My first WordCamp was WordCamp Birmingham 2012. I remember being nervous in the days leading up to the camp. I wondered if I would fit in and if everyone would realize that I didn’t know much about WordPress at all. What I discovered was a community of people where I was immediately welcomed.

Nathan Ingram first began building websites for clients in 1995. And since then, he has used “just about all the common tools.”

I found WordPress in 2008, dabbled with it for a couple of years, and decided to use it exclusively for client websites in 2010.

Nathan Ingram has a small digital agency in Birmingham, Alabama where he creates and manages WordPress websites for clients. He also provides growth coaching to WordPress business owners.

He will be teaching our WordCamp DFW attendees:

1. Why recurring income is crucial
2. How to package, price and sell a WordPress management plan
3. Easy to use worksheets to help you create new services for recurring income
4. The difference recurring income can make

Nathan Ingram is the Host at iThemes Training where they offer free, live WordPress training multiple times each week.

It’s like being at WordCamp all year around! WordPress as a software is excellent, but its community makes it even better. I’m an avid supporter of WordCamps. I’ve had the privilege of speaking to the WP community at WordCamps across the U.S., Canada, and Central America. And I’ve been an organizer for WordCamp Birmingham (WP Y’all) for the last few years. Everywhere I’ve been, the WordPress community is always amazingly open and friendly.

Tweet during Nathan Ingram’s talk using #WCDFW and ask him about Growing up in Alabama, and being a huge fan of the Crimson Tide and all things college football.

To learn from our expert speakers and be part of our community, make sure sure you get your WordCamp DFW tickets here!

Do your palms get sweaty when someone mentions analytics? What do all those Google Analytics numbers mean anyway?

Heather Baker is coming to WordCamp DFW and will answer these questions in her talk “Google Analytics Essentials: 10 Metrics to Get You Started,” and she’ll identify 10 essential metrics – why they are important, what they can tell you, and how you can find and track them.

Heather Baker’s hope is that people walk away from her session excited about digging in to their Google Analytics dashboards. She’s confident that everyone who attends her session will be taking data-driven steps to improve their websites and create better experiences for their users. That could be you!

I’m such a numbers geek and I love digging into analytics. You can find so much great information to help make better decisions about your business and your marketing when you know what to look for.
So many people find Google Analytics to be very intimidating or confusing. They know they need it, but they don’t really know what to do with it after they install the code. I really enjoy being able to “demystify” Google Analytics for people and help them find key metrics to revolutionize the way they do business.

Heather Baker has spoken at WordCamp Atlanta and various Meetups, usually on Marketing related topics such as content marketing, Google Analytics and sales/marketing funnel, so we are fortunate to have her in our speaker line up at this year’s WordCamp DFW!

The Dallas Fort Worth area has been my home most of my life, but I didn’t get really involved in the WordPress community until after I moved away. For me, WordCamp DFW is like coming home. And being a native Texan, I’m always excited for the opportunity to support Texas events!

Heather Baker started really getting involved in the WordPress community after she moved to the Atlanta area with her husband and three dogs in 2015.

The local community was very open and welcoming. At the time I was just a marketer using WordPress in a corporate environment, with a few friends and family sites on the side. But I never felt like I was any less than the developers, entrepreneurs or agencies who live in WordPress day in and day out.

She’s been building websites for fun since the mid-90’s and went through the whole progression from Geocities to Blogger. In 2005, her husband was in a motorcycle accident that put him in the hospital for several months. Heather Baker started a WordPress blog to share updates with friends and family.

Since then, I’ve built sites for friends, family, and clients, in addition to helping optimize WordPress-based marketing funnels.

Heather Baker has used WordPress in a lot of ways through various industries. At one company, she used it for an internal employee newsletter-type solution, at another, she created a customer event support site.

She’s helped many individuals and small businesses turn a static site or blog into the lead generating, sales inducing, business building tool it was intended to be. The specific wins created for those people and businesses are great achievements for her.

For anyone who hasn’t been out to a Meetup or WordCamp, I highly recommend that you take a step out of your comfort zone and give it a try. There’s a great community of people out there who want to walk with you and help you to greater heights on your WordPress journey.

Tweet during Heather Baker’s talk using @heatherthedogs and @mesquitefields with the hashtag #WCDFW and ask her about her traumatic snapping turtle incident as a child. It caused her to have an unhealthy fear of non-chlorinated bodies of water that she’s slowly been able to overcome. Today, she love kayaking with her husband around the various creeks, bayous, lakes and gulf in the Houston/Galveston area.

Go Astros!

Don’t wait to get your WordCamp DFW tickets so you can learn from Heather Baker. See you there!

It’s wonderful many people earn a living using WordPress: launching sites, building plugins, and designing themes, but sometimes we find ourselves in the middle of running a business we thought was just a fun hobby.

Mike Demo joins our speaker lineup with his talk “Accidental Business Owner: Now What?”, in which he will prove that a little planning goes a long way in changing your hobby to a hustle.

So, how do you take your WordPress side hustle to a full-time gig? In this talk, Mike Demo will discuss how to recognize your hobby isn’t just a hobby, how to build in steps and processes to help it scale, and how to know that the timing is right to launch.

A successful hobby is the path to a successful business.

At WordCamp DFW, Mike Demo will share how you can do a few easy things and be more productive and profitable. He has met lots of who find themselves owning a WordPress business “that just sort of happened,” and he wants to help!

Mike Demo has been involved with Open Source for years and loves sharing his expertise with the WordPress community.

My first CMS was PHP Nuke then Mombo and Joomla where I was a board member for a time. At Word Hosting Day 2016, I started talking to BoldGrid and became their first Open Source Evangelist.

Mike Demo has built hundreds of WordPress sites in his former agency life and has done fun hacking projects like placing WordPress Widgets into Joomla module positions!

We are happy to welcome Mike Demo to his very first WordCamp DFW! He’s attended WordCamp San Antonio:

Each year after the event we would go to Sea World on Monday. My job allows me to travel all around the world and connect to our community. I have made new friendships and seen amazing places.

Tweet during Mike Demo’s talk using #WCDFW and ask him about being a huge Disney fan and his experience co-hosting the popular MousePlanet Disney podcast for many years.

Get your WordCamp DFW tickets here and see you soon!

If a website is really pretty but no one can find it, what’s the point?

Same can be said for sites that have high authority in search results, but users bounce as soon as they see the layouts, or lack of.

Design tends to be overrun when there is unorganized content and SEO is overrun when design kicks content to the curb.

In her talk, The Balancing Act: Design(UI/UX) vs SEO, Stefanie Young of iNNOV8 Place, will cover the requirements of SEO while keeping UI/UX in mind.

Since starting her own website development firm, Stefanie Young has been able to create high-end stores with customizations to WooCommerce, extremely complex databases with frontend and backend data tracking and experiences, and she has also managed to create civic solutions with the City of San Antonio through her designs and website solutions.

We are so thrilled that Stefanie Young is speaking at the 2019 WordCamp DFW and that she will use her experience to help you learn to write well, retain users, and create a UI/UX individuals have come to expect.

Stefanie Young has spoken at 4 WordCamps now and she loves giving back to the WordPress community.

Each time has its own unique experience within the local cultures and audiences. I also learn from the questions brought forward by the audience.This community has been unbelievably welcoming and full of opportunities. We have had some of our best advice and mentorships come from the WordPress community, especially through local providers and firms like Pressable and Webtegrity.

Stefanie Young has a strong desire to speak to our WordCamp DFW audience because there are little problems that she comes across on a regular basis that her and her team have had to solve and they want to share how they are overcoming issues so the community as a whole can grow and expand their expertise as well.

We run into the issue of usability versus how pretty a site is versus what Google can read. It’s a headache but needs to be addressed with just about every client that we meet with. If we’re dealing with it, there’s a good chance several others are as well. Client’s don’t understand what goes into the mess that is SEO, content, Google tracking, and UI/UX. I want to break down the expectations, put it out there in layman’s terms and making these topics easier to talk about within our community.

Stefanie Young has the goal to help you talk about these issues without freezing up. She feels that these topics are typically far more important to clients than to any developer.

I want the audience to leave with a mindset that leads them to think about these things before design and before development. I want to give them a sense of operation and website deployment options that help their projects run smoother and have a higher turn around on launch for traffic, keywords, and Google usability scores.

Stefanie Young originally got into WordPress while working at the local newspaper in San Antonio.

Their websites and online presence were terrible. They were using one of the base WP themes and trying to create customizations in all the wrong places. This caused major issues and crash times to occur. I took the time to self teach a bit of HTML, CSS, and PHP before enrolling myself in a local coding program at Codeup.

After graduation, she was hired into a WordPress Expert role and quickly had to turn around web solutions, design, and customizations within the WordPress realm given its demand for small to mid-size businesses.

I have been in love with WordPress from day one!

Tweet during Stefanie Young’s talk, using #WCDFW and ask her about her life as an avid competitive gamer in the semiprofessional MOBA scene, mainly in League of Legends.

To learn from our expert speakers and be part of our community, make sure sure you get your WordCamp DFW tickets here!