Sessions

WordPress is cool and all, but can it do this? Or that?  We’ll talk about some ways we can use WordPress in ways you may have not thought of and show how we could do it. Let’s talk about what is multisite and why you would want to use it. Backups, why you need them and how to do them. We’ll talk creating child themes and custom themes and why you would want one over the other. We’ll also talk basic plugin building. We’ll also talk local dev environments a little deeper and include some developer workflow tools, Gulp, Git and how to deploy to production.

Interested in using your WordPress skills for the greater good? Learn more about Cleveland GiveCamp, an annual hackathon-style weekend where we work on tech projects for local non-profits. We work with about 20 non-profits per year and have about 200+ volunteers working all day (and night) to save time, money, and to give back to our community.

This year’s event is July 20th – 22nd and registration is now open at http://clevelandgivecamp.org. At this talk we’ll discuss different ways to use your talents for building a better world through volunteering your skills, mentoring others, and sponsoring events and orgs you’d like to see more of in the world.

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Selling doesn’t come easily to most people. Whether you’re a marketer, agency, designer, or developer you need to have a steady stream of work to stay in business. Learn how you can go from your first client to booking your schedule months in advance.

Strategies discussed will be getting involved (WordPress community, local networking, volunteering) finding your niche, positioning yourself as an expert (blogging, videos, social media, speaking events), strategic collaborations.

The WordPress publishing experience is going to change significantly with Gutenberg, a new block-style editor set to replace the TinyMCE editor with the next major release of WordPress. Available as a plugin now, Gutenberg will allow extensive layout options to posts and pages that just might reduce the need for using page builders or other layout plugins, preserving layout when changing themes! This presentation will include a demonstration of Gutenberg that showcases its features and talents, covering how it interacts with the WordPress ecosystem, integrates with themes, and what options you’ll have when it arrives as the default WordPress page editor.

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Now that you know what WordPress is and the basics of how it works, let’s dig into some light customizations. Need to tweak some CSS (don’t worry we’ll briefly cover what that is) we’ll talk how it can be done. Need more menus? We’ll show you can create a menu and then make it appear somewhere. Maybe you’ve heard for custom fields or custom post types we’ll discuss these as well.

Cover various marketing channels that can help users grow their WordPress based websites. Channels include SEO, Social Media, Paid Traffic, and more! Included will be strategies, tips, tactics along with tools and other practical advice any WordPress website owner can implement immediately!

Discover The who, what , where, why, and how of WordPress. Even if you have a general idea of what WordPress is come join us as we go over the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, the WP Dashboard, how to find plugins and themes you can trust and we may even be able to squeeze in why even if you’re not a developer you should run a local install of WordPress.

It is great that WordPress allows us to easily create websites and blogs, but most website owners want to make money with their websites by selling more products, getting more potential clients, and promoting their businesses more effectively.

The problem is that most websites are not designed to engage their visitors or make money for their owners and miss great opportunities to convert visitors into customers or paid members.

This session shows simple design changes to our WordPress themes and blogs to help convert visitors and engage them to become customers, subscribers, and repeat visitors. It can be applied to any WordPress theme and covers over 20 actions that website visitors do when they visit your site. I explain how to design our themes to make visitors take action from any demographic, geographic or social media.

We also discuss tapping the power of the Google Analytics bounce rate to measure how our visitors are taking action as well as how to improve our theme’s designs to lower the bounce rate.

Utilizing a WordPress Network (WPMU) and a Page Builder Plugin (Beaver Builder) you can set up a turnkey/concierge website platform for users. This talk will go over setting up WPMU and some basic plugins to get things started on building the platform.

You already know that your audience is looking for an expert to help grow their businesses. Find how to help your audience succeed and build your expertise at the same time.

Don’t fake it ’till you make it. Learn it ’till you earn it. This session will give you practical ways to grow your own business and your reputation.

In late 2016, I left my comfortable agency position as a Lead Web Engineer to join a small media startup as its first Director of Technology.

One of the major draws to the startup was its complete lack of technical debt: I’d be in charge of deciding everything we used, from hosting platforms, platforms, and office tools. The opportunity was perhaps the greenest of fields I had ever laid eyes upon.

While the company ended up not being the right fit for me, the lessons learned from researching, evaluating, and deploying the solutions have informed recommendations and decisions in my career post-startup.

Attendees will gain insight into the technology needs and available solutions for a small, web-based publisher, and the criteria that led to each decision.

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Testing software in an automated fashion is one of the best ways to guarantee quality, reduce bugs, and prevent regressions in our code, and is a prerequisite to operating in a Continuous Integration environment. Unfortunately, the most difficult parts of testing come right at the beginning: scaffolding a test suite and writing our very first tests. For those who are new to automated testing, these hurdles can prove overwhelming.

This talk covers the fundamentals of testing, in a beginner-friendly way. We’ll discuss how testing makes software better, the various levels of the Automation Pyramid, how to scaffold some basic unit and integration tests, and discuss the characteristics of great tests.

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Give your site some LOVE! Search optimization and customer experience are increasingly overlapping and one cannot be had without the other. Content is the interaction layer where a business and customer finally come together. SEO is critical to ensuring that the customer finds that content, and that it’s easy to consume, engaging, and brings them further down the funnel.

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There’s essentially 3 phases to any site build: planning, designing, and maintaining. For many designers, these can last days, weeks, or even months. We’ll go over how to nail down your process, and the tools you can use to build a workflow that takes hours and not weeks.

Open Sourcing Mental Illness is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) corporation dedicated to raising awareness, educating, and providing resources to support mental wellness in the tech and open source communities.

OSMI began in 2013 as a speaking campaign by Ed Finkler. Ed started speaking at tech conferences about his personal experiences as a web developer and open source advocate with a mental health disorder. The response was overwhelming, and Ed has continued to speak, gather data, and organize efforts to change experiences of those with mental health disorders in the tech workplace. This includes speaking at conferences and companies, conducting research, and creating documentation to assist companies in making supportive environments for those impacted by mental health disorders. He is assisted in these efforts by selfless board members and volunteers who bring their time and expertise to bear on this important issue.

Beaver Builder is something that I have had in my development workflow for a couple years now. It cuts down on development time significantly and it is easy for business users to maintain the site. This talk will go over setting up a site with Beaver Builder and building custom modules as needed to extend or limit functionality.

In this fundamentals course, we will be going over how to set up and configure WooCommerce.

Topics covered will be:

• Why WooCommerce?
• How to Install
• A walk through the settings
• Set up your store and add products
• And how to run your store.

Join Josh Gellock of Expander Digital for a talk on local SEO. This is an introductory talk, focused on tactics business owners, webmasters, and developers can take to rank for local searches. You’ll learn strategies to reach local searchers, including claiming online listings for your business, building local business-specific structured data, and where to place copy with information about your business that’ll win you favor with search engines.

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WordPress powers almost a third of the internet, making it not only powerful, but as an open source project, WordPress is a tremendous gift to all of us. So what do you do with an amazing gift like this?

1. Make a living from it.
2. Have fun with it.
3. Give back.
4. Pay it forward.
5. All of the above!

I make a living with WordPress, but I’m also what you might call a “serial volunteer.”

In the years that I’ve created a career with WordPress, I have also set aside time to help others through:

• Mentoring
• Organizing Meetups
• Organizing Hackathons
• WordCamp organizing and speaking
• Creating WordPress classes and clinics
• Setting up WordPress coworking days
• Creating free and discounted non-profit websites
• and more!

There’s a side effect to giving and giving back with WordPress: I’ve found that the more I give… the more I’ve gained: friendships, clients, jobs, and the warm feeling that only comes from sharing good things.

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As someone who builds WordPress websites for clients, you’ve probably learned that offering (or requiring) monthly maintenance contracts is smart business. It’s likely you’re including core software, plugin and theme updates as part of your maintenance plan, which ensures a steady income stream you can rely on and helps with your financial forecasting. But are you including website security as part of your project proposal and scope?

The security of your clients’ websites is often not a priority or is left till the end of a project (or sale?) as an optional add-on for the client to consider after going live. The value of a strong website security posture can be difficult to explain to clients, but when put in the context of their business and possible loss of revenue, it can become an integral part of your offering that separates you from the rest.

In this session, Adam will cover simple website security best practices that you can implement immediately for your own site and those of your clients. In addition, he’ll also offer advice and examples on how to best present the importance of website security during the proposal, scope, and maintenance package stages to your clients. Not only does this ensure your maintenance plans offer what every website needs, but also presents an additional revenue stream opportunity for your business.

Our business-trained minds still tend to think in terms of “experts” or “product owners,” which can be tricky with a community project like a website. It can be debilitating to have to rely on one single website administrator, especially in a group that changes membership rapidly. So why not set up your WordPress site to reflect that reality? Rather than having a singular Admin who is the sole point of contact for all site changes, how can you develop a strategy to shift the responsibility to an entire community? This talk will explain the pitfalls of information silos and present an alternate (and admittedly messy) approach of “Octopus” Admin rights. Using the community-based democratic F3 Cincinnati men’s workout group as a case study, Leif Fairfield will talk about how he trained a “multi-armed” group of computer illiterate men to share not only the responsibility but the enthusiasm of maintaining a well-functioning and intentionally designed WordPress.org site.

Projects can quickly derail, whether you’re a solo-designer or emerging agency. Without solid processes and communication outlines your clients can feel left in the dark, and you can feel harried and stressed.

In this workshop, Lee takes you through her 6 phase process that helps you bring in the perfect clients and keep them on point during the design and launch phases of the project. She shares all her secrets as a designer, marketer and project manager that she’s accumulated to make her process smooth as silk.

The Project On Task process includes:

Intake, finding the right clients and what to do with those who are on the fence.
+ Onboarding: setting up the project for total success.
+ Planning: the essential step of any project.
+ Design & Development: the meat, and potatoes of most projects.
+ Launch: getting it right the first time.
+ Post Launch: the key to having satisfied clients and great referrers.

This popular workshop provides actionable information that works for every business size at any phase. It’s ideal if you’re looking for insider tips or honing your process, so you expand your team whether you’re a designer, developer, marketer or blogger.

If you’ve been immersed in SEO over the past few years, you’ve likely already noticed the shift away from keyword optimization and toward topical optimization. The goal is no longer to create content around a single keyword but rather to create content that authoritatively covers a specific topic.
But even the best, most authoritative content isn’t going to mean a thing if it’s not what the searcher was looking for. You need to dig deeper into your keyword research and make sure that, while being authoritative, the content also matches the searcher intent. This session will show you, step-by-step, how to do that.

Specifically, you’ll learn

• How to evaluate your current website pages and determine their purposes.
• The process for identifying keyword intent
• The secrets to writing intent-driven content
• The final step that brings it all together and drives the conversion

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Pappy had a struggling WordPress web design and site management business going, but he was (barely) making ends meet. He was a solopreneur and loved it that way.

Then disaster struck. Pappy suffered a major heart attack. The recovery was complicated and had many setbacks. It was 8 weeks before Pappy was even allowed limited access to his office and computer, and 7 months later he was still having problems that kept him from working more than a few hours per day.

Because Pappy did not have an “Emergency Readiness Plan” his financial situation quickly deteriorated. Trying to keep his clients taken care of while attending to his own recovery quickly became impossible. Four clients that needed immediate help due to the nature of their businesses had to leave Pappy and go with a different web site manager.

This could have been avoided if Pappy had had his “Emergency Readiness Plan” in place and ready to roll. So let’s learn from Pappy himself as to what he did wrong, and what you should do to be ready for any kind of emergency that could derail a solopreneur or a small agency.

We’ll be discussing various ways to spread the word about your fantastic event including using organic social media, paid social (Facebook pixel), community calendars, ticketing, SEO & media.