Sessions

  • Diversity and Inclusion Panel

    Presented by Deepti Boddapati, Elisha and Elyssa Fernandez, Desiree Johnson, and Treva Marshall

    Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation are essential in our WordPress community, so it is critical that we become familiar with the best practices, requirements, and challenges of what effective initiatives look like, without discrimination, tokenization, or appropriation. This panel opens up a dialogue where we will explore the perspectives of underrepresented populations from different ethnicities, age groups, gender identities, abilities, socioeconomic status, and varying cultures, including customs, values, ideas and beliefs.

    October 19, 2019 at 9:00 am CDT

  • SEO for WooCommerce

    Presented by Stevica Golosin

    On-page SEO for WooCommerce websites:

    • How to make a good website structure?
    • What is website theming?
    • What is a mobile-friendly website?
    • How to write good content?

    Based on my presentation on 1st WooCommerce Meetup at Belgrade June 2018.

    October 19, 2019 at 10:00 am CDT

  • Succeeding as an Introvert

    Presented by Aaron Campbell

    It can be challenging to be an introvert in a world built for extroverts. A lot of introverts have been told at some point in their career to “be more extroverted”, as though introversion is bad — but it’s not bad, and being an extrovert is certainly not required for success.

    Ever wondered how the dopamine pathways in your brain affect how and when you’re able to focus? Probably not, but science can tell us a lot about how our brains work and we can learn to leverage that information to help us succeed.

    Aaron will take both a scientific and experiential look at introversion and extroversion, how they differ, how to tell where on the scale you are, and what advantages each has in today’s workplace. He’ll walk through his own journey of learning to leverage the strengths of his introversion and share what he does to help him navigate the parts of life and his career that are harder for him as an introvert.

    October 19, 2019 at 10:00 am CDT

  • Take Commands With Custom WP-CLI Commands

    Presented by Dave Ryan

    WP-CLI gives developers powerful tools to rapidly manage WordPress sites, automate repetitive tasks and diagnose problems from the command line. But if you aren’t building custom commands, you’re leaving tons of time-saving potential on the table!

    In this session we’ll explore best practices for creating custom command line interfaces, combining and reusing commands, plus other tips & tricks.

    Experience with WP-CLI will be helpful, but not required to attend.

    October 19, 2019 at 10:00 am CDT

  • Adventures with Gutenberg

    Presented by Deepti Boddapati and Nathan Blair

    All WordPress users at Indeed were excited for the release of Gutenberg. Every group had different hopes for it. The WordPress users hoped that Gutenberg would allow them to mix and match blocks to create entire pages without developer involvement. WordPress developers hoped that it would help them componentize features on the site.
    Deepti and Nathan developed the proof of concepts to evaluate Gutenberg for Indeed. This is their experience working on a high interest project and going from React and Gutenberg beginners to Indeed’s resident experts.

    October 19, 2019 at 11:00 am CDT

  • Over-delivering: The Art of Exceeding Customer Expectations

    Presented by Kyle Van Deusen

    While many people think over-delivering means giving away things for free, working longer hours, and charging less, that couldn’t be further from the truth. It starts with setting the right expectations & setting your projects up for success.

    October 19, 2019 at 11:00 am CDT

  • Setting Up Your E-Commerce Store

    Presented by Sara Graybill

    Join us as Sara Graybill with Graybill Creative walks us through setting up an e-commerce store using WordPress and WooCommerce. By the end of the meetup you will have a basic store set up and you’ll be ready to start selling!

    October 19, 2019 at 11:00 am CDT

  • The Content Approach

    Presented by Victory Harbin

    Having a website that looks nice isn’t enough anymore. Everything from the imagery to the words on the page have to speak authentically to your client’s target audience in order to convert the way it should. We’ll discuss building a process around content.

    October 19, 2019 at 11:00 am CDT

  • The Power of Recurring Income

    Presented by Nathan Ingram

    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, Nathan will explain how to stabilize your business with a growing stream of recurring income.

    Key Takeaways:

    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
    October 19, 2019 at 11:00 am CDT

  • Small Changes that Make Big Impacts

    Presented by Patrick Garman

    People seem to think you need a magic wand to scale WooCommerce. And they use tools that promise them huge gains such as caching tools. The goal is to help people realize that the small decisions they make in their site can have much larger impacts. One checkbox, one plugin, these small things could make your site run slow, be insecure, etc. Sometimes it’s about doing the smart work instead of the hard work.

    October 19, 2019 at 1:00 pm CDT

  • Create Custom Page Builders with Gutenberg and ACF Blocks

    Presented by Cory Webb

    The new ACF Blocks tool is a powerful PHP framework for creating custom block types. In this talk, I will show you how to use ACF Blocks to build a custom page building experience to meet the specific needs of your customer’s site.

    October 19, 2019 at 2:00 pm CDT

  • The Balancing Act: Design (UI/UX) vs SEO

    Presented by Stefanie Young

    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. This talk will cover the requirements of SEO while keeping UI/UX in mind. Learn to write well, retain users and create a UI/UX individuals have come to expect.

    October 19, 2019 at 2:00 pm CDT

  • Understanding Website Health, the BIG Picture

    Presented by Kimberly Lipari

    Folks like to talk about maintenance and tools and themes for their website but don’t often have a really great understanding of how all of these components work together. Building a great site is not a random collection of metrics and code you find online. It should be built from the bottom up with scalability and sustainability in mind. I will introduce a Website Health Pyramid that ties together all of the seemingly independent strings many follow. Website owners and website managers can gain an overview of how to approach their website health long term. This pyramid can be great for leveling up your own game as well as a useful foundation to explain development or maintenance concepts to clients.

    October 19, 2019 at 2:00 pm CDT

  • Google Analytics Essentials: 10 Metrics to Get You Started

    Presented by Heather Baker

    Do your palms get sweaty when someone mentions analytics? What do all those Google Analytics numbers mean anyway? We’ll identify 10 essential metrics – why they are important, what they can tell you, and how you can find and track them.

    October 19, 2019 at 3:00 pm CDT

  • Growing the Small Business Local Economy with Marketplace eCommerce

    Presented by AJ Morris

    Come hear how a small community of small businesses joined forces to combat the big box stores with their own eCommerce Marketplace shop. You’ll hear how they handle aspects like shipping, orders, inventory, all while running their own retail store fronts.

    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.”

    October 19, 2019 at 3:00 pm CDT

  • Theme Designer and Developers Guide to the WordPress Customizer

    Presented by Nick Batik

    Gutenberg and the Customizer are the future of WordPress. You’ll learn how to use it to customize and extend your theme or plugin – filled with lots of practical examples and code samples for how it can be used.

    October 19, 2019 at 3:00 pm CDT

  • Influencer Marketing | The Marriage Partnership that is Actually Working

    Presented by Keisha McKinney

    Whether you are a brand, maker, or small business owner looking to expand your business or a blogger/ social media influencer looking to expand your income, no doubt Influencer Marketing is on your radar. But it is a big concept that sometimes seem overwhelming and too complicated to dive into. This session will explore the basics of understanding the tool of Influencer Marketing whether you are the consumer, the influencer, or the brand and look at ways to protect yourself while exploding your voice in an authentic way.

    October 20, 2019 at 9:00 am CDT

  • WordPress, The Automated Way

    Presented by Michael Perrin

    This topic will show the benefits of a fully automated deployment process and how to implement it with tools like Docker, WP-CLI and a small one that I have developed to manage data. My mantra? No manual clicks whatsoever in the web interface for deploying a WordPress project!

    October 20, 2019 at 9:00 am CDT

  • 5 Things to Avoid When Launching an e-Course

    Presented by LaToya Frazier

    Many online and offline businesses are looking for ways to create passive income. e-Courses can help you quickly expand your reach far beyond your current audience and is in demand in every niche. Although every launch is different there are several things that should be avoided for a successful launch. Topics covered in this talk includes how to know if your idea is a winner (or not), why promotion is critical and how not to feel as if you’re being pushy, testing and advertising failures.

    October 20, 2019 at 10:00 am CDT

  • Accidental Business Owner: Now What?

    Presented by Mike Demo

    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. How do you change your hobby to a hustle?
    A successful hobby is the path to a successful business. So, how do you take your WordPress side hustle to a full-time gig? In this talk, we’ll 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.

    October 20, 2019 at 10:00 am CDT

  • Everything I Wish I Knew Before Using WordPress As A Headless CMS

    Presented by Dave Ryan

    Large companies have used WordPress as a headless CMS for a few years now, but lately it’s easier than ever for developers to leverage technologies like the WordPress REST API and WP-GraphQL with React and Vue to build JavaScript front-ends instead of traditional WordPress Themes. There are some great performance, security and developer experience upgrades gained from decoupling, but also some hazards I wish I knew before starting headless projects. In this presentation we’ll explore a few of the best tools for going headless and how to solve some of the problems you’ll encounter along the way.

    October 20, 2019 at 10:00 am CDT

  • From Volume to Value: How To Charge What You Are Really Worth

    Presented by James Bullis

    When technicians go out on their own, I think they have a hard time understanding what they are worth. They probably learned their skills in school. Hopefully, they have some hands on experience. Then they typically go out on their own in order to experience more freedom. Then reality sets in. They get afraid because it seems like everyone is competing with them. They probably think that the best solution is to charge a lower price. They can always work harder. What they typically experience is no freedom at all. They start wishing they had their old job back and they fail.

    My goal is to stop this cycle. I have been on this same journey and over the last few years, I have had to take my time to understand the right mindset that it takes to run a business. During this time, I also developed a process to make it easier to run my business. And finally, I found some tools that help me stand out no matter what I charge for my services.

    October 20, 2019 at 11:00 am CDT

  • Keeping Youth Safe In The Changing World Of Technology

    Presented by Elisha and Elyssa Fernandez

    In the ever-changing world of technology, it’s a growing concern among teens on how to keep safe from the dangers in cyberspace. Elisha and Elyssa teach practical ways that can keep kids and teens safe while giving them freedom to be tech savvy and do what they love online.

    Teens will learn:
    How to keep safe online yet still have fun
    How to protect themselves against cyber bullying
    How to be good online citizens

    October 20, 2019 at 11:00 am CDT

  • Mirror, Mirror, On the Wall – Ways On Debunking Impostor Syndrome

    Presented by Alex Juchniewicz

    Most of us look in the mirror every day and are used to seeing the same old reflection, ourselves. But what we don’t see is what’s going on internally, in our mind. At one point or another we’ve convinced ourselves of not being good enough, a fraud, and even doubtful or questioning the ability to be confident and successful. I’ll share my stories of battling with anxiety along with ways I have learned to manage it in my personal and professional life. We will take a look at common ways to you can identify signs of Impostor Syndrome and how to combat it to improve mental health.

    October 20, 2019 at 11:00 am CDT

  • Concept Car Marketing – Learning From the Car Industry

    Presented by Bridget Willard

    Have you seen the concept sketches for the new Volkswagen ID.Buzz? They’ve been marketing this concept car and evolving it since 2001. This isn’t new in the automobile industry. The concepts are always marketed years before they go into production.

    And, yet, in the WordPress product space, we tend to build something, see if it is viable, and then throw a few dollars at marketing. And we’re left wondering why there are so many abandoned products and plugins.

    Instead, my suggestion is to start a GitHub repo (or Trello Board) for your marketing so what while you are building your next SaaS Product or WordPress plugin, you will simultaneously be working on brand

    October 20, 2019 at 1:00 pm CDT

  • Simplifying Complex Page Designs

    Presented by Brent Jett

    This session aims to help you approach long or complicated page designs and highlights some different tools to implement them on WordPress. We’ll discuss ways to break a design down into its visual and logical pieces and try to anticipate how the page might change over the lifespan of the website. Lastly we’ll discuss tools like Page Builders and Custom Field plugins that may help you accomplish a tricky site design.

    October 20, 2019 at 1:00 pm CDT

  • Agency Of One

    Presented by Nathan Allotey

    More recently the freelance landscape has become crowded, but there’s still a chance to be successful if you know how to stand out from the rest. If you are going to survive as a freelancer in today’s climate, you have to combine your creative skill with a business skill.

    What’s the difference between a freelancer, agency and consultant? The answer to this question is the key to increasing your value as a freelancer.

    In this session, we will uncover the 4 parts of the creative process and discuss the best elements of freelancing to increase the pricing on your unique value proposition.

    October 20, 2019 at 2:00 pm CDT

  • Automating Your Development, Testing, & Deployment Workflows

    Presented by Justin Kopepasah

    Whether you are a novice or senior developer, automating your workflows speeds up your go-to-live timeline, while also ensuring fewer ‘unknowns’ slip through the cracks.

    Join me as I walk through various processes and workflows to create automations for your development, testing and deployment practices.

    October 20, 2019 at 2:00 pm CDT

  • How to Write Blog Posts That Captivates & Persuades Your Audience to Buy

    Presented by Shay Banks

    If you struggle with coming up with blog content or want to increase your conversions on your website, then this talk may be just what you need.

    In this talk, you’ll learn:

    ** Why blogging is still an effective traffic strategy
    ** How to never run out of blog topic ideas
    ** Important elements every blog post must have if you want to increase conversions

    October 20, 2019 at 2:00 pm CDT

  • Building SaaS Applications for WordPress

    Presented by Toyin AKinmusuru

    The WordPress ecosystem is very large, however, while the plugin ecosystem number in the thousands, there is still a relatively small set of software that provide services not best served as a plugin. We will discuss what kinds of software makes sense to be a SaaS application, and when it is advantageous to do so over standard plugins. We will also cover a small example of how to integrate site owners with your application, and common models for getting paid.

    October 20, 2019 at 3:00 pm CDT

  • How to Utilize Trending Moments to Create Killer Content

    Presented by Desiree Johnson

    In the world of fleeting news and viral sensations, creating killer content can help make or break your website. Learn how to capitalize on pop culture, holidays, and trending moments which can elevate your content and social media to the next level. Whether your creating web content or a social media posts, keep your site one step ahead with relevant material your audiences will love.

    October 20, 2019 at 3:00 pm CDT

  • WordPresspreneur

    Presented by Dominick Montgomery

    In this discussion, I plan to inspire entrepreneurs to use their talents within WordPress to make a healthy income and to price and sell these talents above standard industry rates.

    October 20, 2019 at 3:00 pm CDT

  • Delivering a Better eCommerce Solution to Your Clients

    Presented by Sandi Batik

    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.

    October 20, 2019 at 4:00 pm CDT

  • Driving Change with WordPress

    Presented by John Bloch

    Ever thought about building something with WordPress to drive positive change in your community and the world? At Whistle Stop Digital, that’s not a thought, it’s a day that ends in Y. Come learn about how we built a platform to help movements engage and organize the community in furthering progress!

    October 20, 2019 at 4:00 pm CDT