Choosing a Theme for Your WordPress Site
In this session users will find out how to choose and install a theme; learn about menus and widgets; and make changes in a site’s appearance using the Customizer.
Choosing Plugins for Your WordPress Site
In this session, users will learn about choosing and installing plugins. They will be introduced to the basics of pro plugins and support as well as free plugins.
Converting Brand New Website Visitors into Paying Customers
Getting more traffic to your website is always a good feeling. But what are you supposed to do once you’re getting enough traffic but aren’t yet winning new customers? I’ll go over some best practices of what to do (and what not to do) in order to slowly turn new visitors into paying customers.
This talk will help freelancers, agency owners and anybody selling products or services on WordPress gain their own financial independence.
Creating Posts and Pages in WordPress
In this session users will learn to create pages and posts; upload and add media; and create comments.
Design Tools and Processes
In our early experience with WordPress, as the open source community took hold, we quickly realized the tools and information available to us were a game changer. Where I work, we are designers first. We have a great appreciation for those in the community, developers, users and of course designers, that make WordPress what it is.
WordPress is a platform loaded with design possibilities and surrounded with constantly growing resources that we use when we design. Just some examples are: page builders, online wire framing, and mock-up tools. I’ll discuss some tools that help us to make design decisions regarding typography, color and image editing on the fly, and look at ways to stage and present ideas. WordPress has afforded designers the ability to focus on working with art, color and visual concepts while making full use of functionality in the environment of the browser.
Designing a Conversation: An Intro to UX Writing and Conversational Microcopy
We’re all humans, right? The primary way we exchange information with each other is by having a conversation and that’s what users expect from websites and apps. They want to know the how and why when they’re asked to give up valuable personal information. Everything from lead forms to loading screens are a part of the conversation and should be answering those questions. And just like a conversation, the flow of information is expected to go both ways.
In this talk, we’ll discuss the art of designing the words people see when they interact with software and how to craft a genuine conversation with your users.
Email Is Insecure, but You Don’t Have to Be
While email is inexpensive and has a high ROI, it is also the most insecure marketing channel. Learn the best practices to send email securely that will help you protect your customer’s data, your data, your reputation, and ensure more of your emails get read by the right people at the right time.
In this session, you’ll learn what customer data is safe to send via email, how to tell email clients (like gmail) that you are who you say you are, the basics of segmentation and automation, and be able to apply those things immediately in your email marketing efforts.
Falling in Love with Your Development Workflow
Whether you are just getting started with WordPress development or you are an advanced developer, there are always things that we can do to upgrade our workflows. Creating a process for your development workflow can help you save time, better estimate projects and in turn be more profitable.
We will talk about example workflows and things to consider to help you “fall in love with your development workflow.”
Fast Track Your Design Process
As a fellow WordPress designer, I know how much time it takes to work with a client and get a website created. It can feel like an eternity with the initial consult, getting the pieces together, creating the rough draft to their requirements, presenting the rough draft, going back and forth with updates, and so on.
While there’s no cure to make all of this automated, there is a way to shave countless hours and throw remedial tasks out the window. In this talk, I’ll go over my approach to streamline the WordPress design process allowing you to be more efficient, build sites quicker, and even handle more clients.
Gutenberg for Site Developers
Gutenberg is great for bloggers who want better publishing tools, but what about developers who need to craft customized CMS experiences for their clients? If you use a lot of custom fields and are horrified at the idea of giving clients any design control, this session is for you. We’ll talk about:
- when to use Gutenberg, and when not to;
- what should be a block, and what should stay a custom field;
- how to limit a client’s color and text options;
- the magic of block templates and block locking;
- and how your theme development will change.
Now is the chance to create new site building best practices and drive the evolution of block editing. Let’s get excited for what’s possible!
How to Improve Your Google Analytics Skills
Getting actionable insights out of Google Analytics requires data to be accurate, comprehensive, and segmented in a way that can answer questions. Take your Google Analytics knowledge to the next level in this intermediate session that covers beyond-basic tactics including:event and conversion tracking, custom reports, custom segments, custom dashboards, secondary dimensions, filters, referral spam, self-referral issues, and cross-domain tracking.
How to Write Winning Website Copy
How many times have you had to wrestle with clients to pull out the website copy you need to complete their website? If you are not a writer at heart you may feel hesitant to add website copy writing to your project proposal. Fear no more. Even Thomas Jefferson struggled to write the Declaration of Independence and get it past the committee’s approval, but look what good copy can accomplish!
You don’t have to be a Founding Father or a Madison Avenue whiz kid to write copy that connects the facts of the business to the needs of the customer. What you do need is an awareness of the key building blocks of effective copy: persuasive writing, the customer persona, and buying journey. In this session we will take examples of basic copy and whip them into winning website copy. Not only will you get a booster shot for your own writing skills, you will walk away with powerful tools to create a more successful website.
Suggested questions:
Does my writing have to be perfect?
Are there certain buzz words or vocabulary that work better than others?
How do we learn more about the buyer persona and journey?
Introduction to Post Meta
One of the things that makes WordPress so powerful is its extensibility. While in some cases a post may consist of no more than a Title and Content, in other cases there may be a great deal of additional information associated with it. Posts can be enhanced with things like colors, external URLs, subtitles, and logos, all of which can be stored as WordPress post meta values. We’ll look at how to add these values and how to modify our theme to display them.
Let’s Talk About Using Colors
Color plays a very important role in designing websites. Trying to find a good color scheme can be little scary if we are not sure where to start.
In this talk, we will discuss how color psychology and theory could help us in choosing the right colors for what our site or brand represents, and the do’s and dont’s while choosing colors. We’ll also look at some helpful color creation resources.
Leveraging WordPress to Build Communities
Inbound strategies require thinking through the right plugins, information architecture and template for your audience. The talk with walk through the importance of customer-centric focus with both design and content in building a digital community.
Maintaining Your Site
Once you have your WordPress site set up, there are many things you will want to set up as well as some things that you will want to regularly check. Your maintenance strategy should include everything from keeping regular backups to being notified if your site is down or hacked.
In this talk, we will be discussing:
- Staging Sites
- Backups
- Updates
- Monitoring
- Security
- and more.
Making Friends with the Inspector: How Non-Developers Can Harmlessly Dig into Code for the First Time
When I started learning and playing with CSS, I didn’t know how to use the browser inspector (I use Chrome). The first time someone showed me how to use the Inspector, I was hooked on “playing” with code and learning how css properties relate to each other.
In this talk, we’ll focus on debugging tools in the Inspector for non-developers. We’ll play with the Inspector to edit some CSS on “live” websites without actually editing the code. We’ll discuss ways to make the most of using the inspector to save time in development by visualizing changes on the front end before editing the code in the style sheet. This talk will also be helpful for designers who want to give developers specific edits, such as font size, padding and margins.
Managing Your WordPress Projects
You may have started your business because you valued the freedom and independence, but do you find your time is not your own? Clients who don’t meet their deadlines; software, themes and plugins that change the way they work (or break) on their schedule not yours; and generally fighting the fire of the day mean you won’t be as successful as you want.
In this talk learn some tips to make your WordPress design and development projects, and your business in general, run more smoothly so you can pursue what matters to you. The platforms, tools and processes you use and how you structure a project can make a difference. Regain your independence!
Strategies Beyond SEO & Google to Build Your Brand & Market Your Social Media Awesomeness
Crossing digital platforms sometimes is not easy, so there must be knowledge of who you’re trying to attract and what content bait you’re using to grab attention. This talk will show how your content will hold your reader’s attention and encourage them to return back to your site. Digital impressions and perceptions are important because they do define our presence in the world.
SEO and Google are not the be all and end all solutions to building followers. Engagement and activism are still key…
Testing Business Critical Features with Behat
Every site seems to have that one feature that, if it breaks, would be a catastrophe. Lost profits and angry clients are something we all want to avoid.
In this session, we will explore the fundamentals of Behat and look at some example tests covering critical features of WordPress sites.
Testing Your Critical JavaScript
We’ll deep dive into testing in JavaScript. Looking at when to write a test, which type of testing approach to take, and how to be sure other developers feel comfortable adding and editing your tests in the future. We’ll start with an overview of what should be tested and then cover some of the different kinds of testing – unit, integration, and snapshot. We’ll cover when to think about mocking your functions and how to think about critical pathing future testing iterations
The Art of Troubleshooting
Whether managing or developing a website, you or your customers are going to encounter issues. Solving those problems quickly, efficiently and compassionately is critical to the success of your business and the happiness of your customers. I’ll discuss simple strategies that you can apply to any scenario to help you troubleshoot more effectively, and even go over a few examples of how those tactics can be applied to some problems that might come up when working with WordPress.
The Importance of Typography: Design, Usability, Cost and Loading Times
The most important points of modern typography boil down to Design, Usability/Accessibility, Cost, and Loading Times. The choice between finding a harmonious balance of serifs, sans, or both shouldn’t be difficult with the vast amount of options. They can be purchased, subscribed, or free. There is something to fit every budget and design decision. Usability is a combination of selected font and size. The size is most important when it comes to the responsive nature of a site. Understanding the probably reading distances of each device helps in judging these choices. This is a big problem. People don’t understand the actual cost of good type, and may feel cheated or overwhelmed.
Good type makes a difference and is worth the investment. If this is not in your budget there are many other options to consider, not forgetting that type can become apart of a good brand and for full brand consistency might look good on a site. A good website loads in a reasonable amount of time, less than 3 seconds. When choosing web fonts, the choices you make can cause some significant load time issues. Sometimes these issue might be okay, sometimes not. Here are some things to keep in mind when making a decision, will it stop the page from loading completely, do you mind having unstyled text for a moment, adding unecessary outside calls (if using a google fonts or Typekit like service.
Understanding Merchants: Building Plugins for the E-Commerce User
Using Data & Research For Website Planning
In the spirit of independence, I’ll briefly discuss Philadelphia’s advanced city planning, and show the value of planning ahead and how it relates to WordPress. I will then discuss how WordPress users of all skill levels can use data from Google Analytics and other sources to plan their site design and content strategy for optimal SEO success.
This includes: building an SEO-friendly site hierarchy with URL structures, using existing Google Analytics data to plan content strategy, and how to use data to navigate a site redesign or migration.
WordPress For Non-Profits: Website Best Practices, Collecting Donations, Increasing Exposure Online
WordPress web design takes a different approach when creating websites for nonprofit organizations rather than a brick and mortar or eCommerce business. It is more than just driving traffic to a site but getting the visitor to buy into the story that the nonprofit is telling. Picture the ASPCA commercials we all have seen on TV, then convert that into pictures and words. Stories that pull at the heartstrings open the wallets for donations. Providing secure portals to accept not only one-time donations but also subscription based, monthly reoccurring is key. By designing a website that creates emotion and engagement as well as a place to share the stories of the nonprofit. In turn donations and exposure will increase for the organization as well as their digital reputation.
In this presentation I will discuss plugins that I have found that work well for donation-based model websites. I will also share ways to create a user experience that increased donations and awareness. Proper theme selection, seo, plugins all enhance the way we not only tell the nonprofits story but also build brand awareness and in turn a sense of comfort with the donor that they are supporting a cause whose story resonates with them. Whether it be animal welfare, orphans, trafficking, no matter the cause a properly designed site can provide donor dollars and exposure that the organization would likely not have otherwise.
WordPress Installation and Settings
In this introductory session, users will learn about installing WordPress and the Settings menu.