Sessions

With all of the technologies changing in the development industry constantly, how do you know what to follow, how to implement and how fast to implement? Here’s a helpful guide to get you on the right road.

Ever had a project to side-ways? Find out how to prevent it from happening ever again, and making sure site your project is a success by addressing issues like: getting content on time, collaborating effectively with other consultants (designers, copywriters, photographers), preventing scope creep, website mainatenance, and much more.

We all know a content calendar keeps you on track as a blogger, but how do you know what REALLY matters to your audience? Jen Miller explains how support queues, readers’ questions, and on-page tracking allow bloggers to remain agile, pivoting as needed, to enhance the reader’s experience and increase website traffic. You’ll be given a 7 step formula that allows you to easily create cornerstone content and resonate with your audience. Step into 2018 prepared. Increase visibility in the new year by incorporating an agile calendaring method.

While you might conjure up images of Indiana Jones carrying a whip (and screaming “This Belongs in a Museum!”) anthropology is more than just digging up lost artifacts from past civilizations and being chased by boulders.

This primer on anthropology will force you to rethink your processes, allowing you to design better prototypes by studying your clients and adopting cultural relativism. Through topics such as enthnographies, holism, participant observation — and yes, even trowels — you can impact your clients and projects by knowing when (and how) to dig deeper.

We all know that sometimes the game can be stacked against us. But sometimes we have to play whether we want to or not. Taxes, 9/11, regulations, these are games we have to play.

But what about the game of business? How can you win when the odds are stacked against you?

Let former Army Ranger and startup veteran Pete Parker tell you about he time they were in a war game in Germany, behind enemy lines, with only the stuff they could carry on their back, surrounded by 40,000 enemy soldiers, while forced to hide in the woods, and outnumbered 100 to 1.

In 4 days they found and captured the enemy headquarters, and the two Commanding Generals.

How did they win a game so stacked against them?

And how you can do the same in your business – because in business you are outnumbered a heck of a lot more than 100 to 1.

You can work harder (until you collapse), or you can Change the Game.

We all hear about game changers – but what are they really, and how DO we change a game?

Technology alone isn’t enough. People have wants and needs – understanding these needs drive every successful game changer.

The Game Changer itself may be technological, but Game Changers always come down to a better way serving peoples needs.

Come learn how to change the game of business – and life.

The popular ElasticPress plugin enables anyone to leverage the power of Elasticsearch to supercharge the search experience on their WordPress site. But did you know that ElasticPress can do much more? For example, ElasticPress can surface related posts for your content, speed up the largest WooCommerce installations, and give you industry-leading features like fuzzy matching and autocomplete.

In this talk, we’ll cover the basics of ElasticPress and Elasticsearch, and then dive into some of the cool, lesser-known integrations the plugin offers. We’ll also touch on some free local and cloud-based development options for running an Elasticsearch instance so you can get a feeling for what ElasticPress can do for your site!

The topic is about powerful tool WP-CLI than can help WordPress developers or power users a lot.

If you manage multiple WordPress websites or multiple environments of a WordPress website, you probably have experienced situations where you need to go through exact same steps on multiple websites. Clicking through wp-admin screens to change settings becomes time consuming. WP-CLI can be used to automate those tasks with ease.

During my presentation I’ll introduce the audience with the command line and WP-CLI, then I’ll go through some of the tasks that can be easily done using this tool. I’ll demonstrate some tasks running them on a sample WordPress website running in local development environment. Demonstrations will include tasks like pulling back the database to lower environments (qa/staging) and rewriting it, managing users, plugins, etc.

Do you know that if you have a picture of a duck having it face left or right can increase your conversions by 40%?

Think this sounds silly? It is but backed by research. Spend some time to learn about what a/b testing is, what things to test, testing methodology and the best tools to use for your site.

Everyone will get a handout of the very same checklist I use when A/B testing our client’s sites. One of our clients, an insurance company, increased leads by making just a small 2px change.

When you launch a website, you are guessing. Sure the guesses are educated based on experience and data, but you can maximize your ROI with good A/B testing.

Promote your brand in a compelling and consistent way! Learn how to craft the content on your blog, choose the right social media channels, and correctly automate your content. Acquire the skills to find your niche audience that will read and share your message.

It’s easy to lose track of what tech relates to WordPress. This talk is for front-end developers especially but will help anyone connected to WordPress. I’ll cover Flexbox, src sets, SVG, CSS animations, AMP and more. The format introduces attendees to a variety of new technologies so that everyone will find something helpful. This is not an in-depth talk; it’s a summary of new technologies that relate to WordPress.

A few years ago I jumped my organization onto Multisite, at first it was fantastic. WordPress, themes and plugins could be updated in a single dashboard. By clicking a few buttons and checking off a to-do list I had another site ready to go. This was fantastic!

Before long I was managing dozens of sub-sites and that to-do list was getting longer. Some elements couldn’t be shared and had to be duplicated manually. Wait, this is supposed to be dynamic and automated. Why am I doing more work than before?

In this talk I discuss my rough start with Multisite. How problems could have been minimized and the additional steps I take today to maintain this growing network.

We all like to look at pictures, it’s what makes websites draw in the reader.

In this session, Christina Hills will show you some easy tips to make working with images much easier for you.

Best practices for the featured image and how to get it to show up correctly when you share on Social Media.

How to organize, compress, and store your images in your media library, for faster load times.

Plus where to find high quality, low cost (and free) images to make your website stunning.

You will walk away with practical tips and skills you can use right away whether you are a business owner, free lancer, or just starting out learning WordPress.

We might all have staging sites but it’s clear we don’t all use them. Why not? Are we negligent or lazy? Or do we simply not understand the true value of a test and deploy workflow? We’ll cover the whys and hows staging. I’m talking to you, a WordPress site owner of any skill level. No development skill required!

So many times we put the website building “cart” before the business strategy “horse”.
Here you are, you spent a lot of time putting together a fantastic proposal for your new client, and yeah, you won the battle! Now the question is, are you going to win the war?
Unfortunately, the answer is likely “no” – and it is not your fault. The result is often predictable.
What if we could transform the way we couple the design of websites with meaningful business strategy? What if there was a way for you to quickly extract out of your client the objectives, strategy and tactics that will get to them to their financial goals?
By attending this talk, you will learn an easy method to gain clarity on the best strategy right at the beginning of the project. This will save you and client a lot of time and frustration because you are now able to decide on the right strategy and tactics that win the war for your client.

How to attract and close good deals while avoiding the crappy ones…

In this presentation, we will test “new” web technologies to see what are the real world impact on a site.

we will be evaluating performance difference between PHP 5.6, 7.0, and 7.1.

We will also cover performance of classic http, http/2 and QUIC Protocol.

Learn how to create complimentary partnerships to dramatically increase the number of incoming referral leads you receive each month. From print shops to PR firms, to SEO agencies there are many opportunities to create win / win positive partnerships opportunities that will help you grow your client base faster. Make referrals one of your most consistent and positive cash flow opportunities in your website design or website development agency.

Here’s the really short version: “Whether they have a case or not, people don’t sue people they like. They have a case or not, people do sue people they dislike.”

For decades, Conway has watched this play out in his legal practice. He watched people get in many unnecessary, expensive legal battles. Ultimately, that lead him to coach businesses and professionals in the art of “how to not get sued.”

As we entered the Age of Referral and the sudden proliferation of review sites, those same skills become infinitely more important. Some review sites never take down bad reviews, even if a court has judged the content to be false and defamatory.

Of course, basically legal processes must be followed. The real protection is the way you connect with your clients and staff. The Ohana Way may be the most powerful set of tools to do this you will ever learn.

Have a quick, 4-minute talk? Come to this session and present! Speakers will have 4 minutes to present an idea, and 4 minutes for Q&A. Sign up on Saturday if you want to speak.

Bring your questions to our panel and we will do our best to answer them!

What is rubber ducking? It’s a method of debugging code. The name is a reference to a story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer in which a programmer would carry around a rubber duck and debug their code by forcing themselves to explain it, line-by-line, to the duck. (A rubber duck will be provided to all attendee’s)

Ever thought about creating a Blogging Schedule to really take your blog to the next level? If you have you maybe asked yourself “How many post per week or month should I write?”. This is a tricky question and I want to help answer it with a method I developed called the 20/30 Rule. We will come back to that in a moment. First I would like you to imagine having an engaged audience that loves to read every new article you publish.

It has been proven that the best way to become an expert in your field is to write. So, what is holding you back? I bet the first thing is time and a close second for some is what to write about. For the purpose of this talk, you are going to be helped with the time portion of your blogging fear.

The Weird Side of WordPress: Off-the-wall uses for WordPress from live events and games to juice ranching.

This presentation makes the case for using page builders to accelerate development, rapid prototyping and advanced wireframing.

We can now build better websites, deliver better value in half the time and make more money.

Page builders now give us the opportunity to style WooCommerce pages, blog posts, 404 pages and more.

We will review a partial list of the alternatives in the marketplace, recommendations, and resources for your exploration in this emerging capability. We will compare Divi, Beaver Builder, and Elementor and share a list of other possible choices.

The secrets behind creating one piece of valuable content and leveraging it across multiple broadcast channels.

Create something great and give to your audience where, when and in their preferred format.

Schedule. Create. Leverage.

I believe the day of a business marketing and sales plan without the integration of both Social Media and SEO are in the past. Search engines now see Social Media and Search Engine Optimization as tied together and we need to as well.

Examples include:
– Website visits from social site tend to have lower bounce rates and produce more “”sticky”” visitors
– Social channels can be optimized for keywords that complement website keywords and phases.
– Website pages and blogs tied together as cornerstone content and shared on social channels produce more rapid SEO gains.

A well crafted, well-targeted online marketing plan that strategically combines social marketing and SEO marketing can accelerate traffic to websites and engagement with buyers. It not really sorcery, but it does produce magic.