Sessions

Presented by Adam Rasheed in Big Hair Bands.

You might have heard about accessibility, and you might have also brushed it off as a ‘nice-to-have’, thinking it’s only for websites with users that have severe disabilities. Well, that’s simply not true; there are huge benefits that will help a huge majority of your users. Making your website more accessible will improve the user experience for everyone, help those that need an extra hand navigating through your site, and will even boost your SEO!

Presented by Sean Conklin in Big Hair Bands.

Get up to speed on all things WooCommerce!

Considered adding the official open-source eCommerce system to your WordPress site? Learn about how to do it right, whether you are selling products, services, subscriptions, events, memberships, donations, or even doing your invoicing off your website. Understand the benefits of the official theme Storefront and officially sanctioned extensions, as well as popular community plugins and best practices for safe customization with Code Snippets and child theming, even where to use your favorite page builder tools and where you probably shouldn’t plan to use them.

Presented by Nate Conley in Big Hair Bands.

There are many different ways and methods for including CSS and JavaScript in your WordPress themes and plugins. There are also many different related topics around this subject.

Properly enqueuing assets can improve your site’s performance and reusability. In this talk, we will cover best practices and topics including (but not limited to): conditional tags, localizing data, WordPress helper functions, and the $post object. This talk will feature live-coding examples, ideal for hands-on learners.

Presented by Jessica Boctor in Big Hair Bands.

Fonts are an essential item in any branding plan and website development.

During this presentation, participants will help to create a completely custom and unique font utilizing the free online service at calligraphr.com. Then we will go through the necessary css and html files to install the font onto a WordPress site.

Presented by Sam Jadali in Big Hair Bands.

Weekly news reports of data breaches have unfortunately become the norm. Remaining one-step ahead of today’s ever evolving security is vital to not only protecting your own data but also your clients’ data. Performing audits are an important part of the process to ensure you’re protected.

In this session we go beyond security plugins and we’ll review proper security practices, auditing methods, as well as what to do in the event of a data breach.

Presented by Greg Taylor in Big Hair Bands.

You can produce the best content, but if it is created and broadcasted to the wrong audience, it can fail miserably.

The more you know your audience and speak to them with your content the better your chance to succeed.

Presented by Jarrett Gucci in John Hughes High.

Having a solid backup strategy can save your life in times of an extreme website crisis. No one wants to lose any of the hard work they have put into their site and why should you ever have to if you are backing things up.

This talk will set you up for success outlining a fool proof backup and restore process that can run on autopilot. Also covered will be a walk through basic security measures to limit the need for full site restore.

Presented by Chris Aldrich in John Hughes High.

Growing toxicity on Twitter, Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, algorithmic feeds, and a myriad of other problems have opened our eyes to the ever-growing costs of social media. Walled gardens have trapped us with the promise of “”free”” while addicting us to their products at the cost of our happiness, sense of self, sanity, and privacy. Can we take back our fractured online identities, data, and privacy to regain what we’ve lost?

I’ll talk about how I’ve used IndieWeb related technologies in conjunction with WordPress as a replacement for my social presence while still allowing easy interaction with friends, family, and colleagues online. I’ll show how everyone can easily use simple web standards to make WordPress a user-controlled, first-class social platform that works across domains and even other CMSs.

Let’s democratize social media using WordPress and the open web, the last social network you’ll ever need to join.

Presented by Oscar Hernandez, Steve Ramos in John Hughes High.

WordPress is an excellent option for getting a great idea to market in a short amount of time.

Some might call it “cutting corners,” but when a project calls for a quick turnaround to get traction and test viability, the right combination of plug-ins and custom code can be just what is needed.

Our real estate tech startup has decided to utilize WordPress to launch a pilot program with select clients in order to get vital customer feedback and make a quick entry into our market. Here’s how we’re doing it.

Presented by Lisa Garner, Steve Zehnget, Marc Benzakein in John Hughes High.

Panel discussion with Marc Benzakein of SeverPress, Lisa Garner of Magnified Web & Steve Zehngut of Zeek Interactive

Presented by Samantha Johnston in John Hughes High.

The presentation will explain when and how to create & grow your team to scale your business.

Questions to ask yourself before posting the job opportunity, questions to ask applicants, contracts to have in place, how to pay them, how to manage projects and how to keep them loving their work, loving you and most of all loyal and raving contractors/employees.

I’m not an HR pro, accounting pro or legal pro, I’m a fellow WP pro and have built an amazing team of contractors who love me, our work together and due to their raving about me, I have been asked by others how I’ve built my team and how they can do it too. I’d love to share my process and help others grow their team and scale their business as I have.

Presented by David Nuon, Leo Postovoit in John Hughes High.

We have less than 1% of the written documents from Rome. We have less than 0.5% of the documents from Ancient Greece. Only three codices of the Mayan civilization remain. The internet’s power is its ability to give us an incredible, boundless storage.
But have we actually built into our software design patterns a notion of longterm thinking? We want to think about our life’s work, and we want to preserve content, access to it and inspire others to think for the long term. Time is comprised of snapshots, and we’re seeking understanding for the whole.

In the same spirit of projects like the Internet Archive seeking to bring access to information to preserve history, we believe it’s also a responsibility to understand where we’ve come from, how we’ve built it and where we might be headed. This also matters for the tools in which we create.

On the quest to share content creation’s history, we also decided to make something. Something that was extremely accessible for both people and machines. Here’s our weird, wild journey of our attempt to create the “”Most Compatible Thing ,”” built for legacy support by design. Yes, there will be GIFs.

Powered by the magic of WordPress and Gutenberg, we used lots of pixelcraft and a custom web server to create paired experiences for each media. From modern headless future-facing web technologies to the GOPHER protocol, from Twitter bots to TTYs, from phone calls to a snail mail service, we’ve got a story to share that we hope will last and be preserved. All you gotta do is look for it.

Presented by Marc Benzakein in John Hughes High.

Starting a software company and building it from the ground up is an appealing option for many. It can be rewarding, but it also comes wrought with many challenges. In this presentation, I will talk about the how we built ServerPress from a concept to the challenges, pitfalls, and successes we’ve experienced along the way.

I’ll cover the ways in which your roadmap evolves as you go from a company of zero customers to a company of over 60,000. Most importantly, I’ll give you a chance to learn from our mistakes when building your own software company.

Presented by Mary Barnett in Big Hair Bands.

I will share the top 3 ways you can help your clients stay Top of Mind with their customers, so they can increase their Revenue!

Presented by Amy Hall in Big Hair Bands.

MailChimp is the most popular email service provider and WordPress is the most popular website software. It’s only logical to use them together.

Learn how to use MailChimp and WordPress for lead generation on your website.

1. Why you need a lead generation item
2. How to easily integrate MailChimp and WP
3. How to send your lead gen item from MailChimp

Presented by William Bay in Big Hair Bands.

SEO is often shrouded in a veil of mystic arts, magical spells, and misconceived notions from years passed.
In this hour, my promise is to lift this veil, and simplify the notions of gaining traffic from search engines.

Presented by Bill Dalessi in Big Hair Bands.

We try to teach people SEO and WordPress as to start you need a Website (WordPress). But if no one ever sees your website, all your hard work and money were wasted. After they have a website we start by teaching SEO and how to get the search engines to work for you and with you.

Anyone can pay for advertising (Pay Per Click) but that gets very expensive very fast. Small or medium size business need to learn how to get (FREE) organic traffic from Google, etc.

Presented by Taylor Waldon in Big Hair Bands.

When launching any kind of website, there are simple strategies to implement that will help start out your SEO right and make your site look more established at the same time.

This talk will cover four pieces of post content that should be published before you launch and why they are important. Your posts can be added to your website in the form of a blog, newsroom, resource center, or anything that will allow users to feel like you are adding value to their experience.

We’ll focus specifically on how the components in each of these posts work for good SEO and how to use them as a blueprint for continued good practices.

Topics will include:

• Defining your target audience and developing a voice.
• Selecting the right keywords.
• Integrating keywords without sounding forced.
• Using an SEO plugin to optimize your content.
• What to do with the content once the site is launched

Attend this talk and you will leave with ideas and resources for types of blog posts that can easily be created and a checklist of items to complete in order to set up content marketing before launching a website.

Presented by Geno Quiroz in Big Hair Bands.

My business, online authority and SEO experience have grown significantly over the past few years in large part due to the blog communities I have managed. In the process of blogging and managing/editing a few multi-author blogs, I have put together some guidelines and tips for growing your online presence.

When most people hear the word blogger, they think of stay at home parents who write articles as a hobby. But blogging plays a crucial role in bringing value to your website and your brand. Here are a few of the benefits of blogging and tips to make the most out of each blog post.

Presented by Alicia St Rose in John Hughes High.

We’ve all been there. Maybe it was a live group setting or a Zoom call. Someone in the group drops a term, everyone else nods knowingly, your anxiety rises as you realize you’ve NEVER heard of this thing, that you SHOULD have heard of before! Everyone keeps nodding as the speaker rambles on about this term. You nod, too. You feel like a fraud, an imposter. You will hit Google at the next available moment, you vow. You do. You still can’t figure this out. Yikes!, you think, I suck.

Imposters Syndrome is real. A REAL DRAG. And it doesn’t have to be that way. You see, you probably weren’t the only one pretending. And the group wasn’t fortunate enough to have a Super Hero pipe up and say “I don’t know that term. Can you explain?”

In this Session, I’ll deconstruct Imposters Syndrome. I will give you a new mindset to try out, The Dunno Doctrine, so that you can be the Super Hero and this madness can stop!

Presented by Gertrude Nonterah, PhD in John Hughes High.

This talk is going to be divided into two parts.

The first part will go over how I stumbled into the world of blogging in 2012 and how starting a blog would later replace my full-time job when I was laid off from my role as a research scientist in May of 2018.

The second part of the talk will go over 10 little tricks beginner users can tweak within WordPress to make their user experience more enjoyable while also enhancing the experience for readers of their blog/users of their website. I see many beginner WordPress users trip up on these things and I am on a mission to end it once and for all.

Presented by Amber Hewitt in John Hughes High.

There are thousands of themes out there and finding the right one for your website can be difficult. Is a free theme any good? Is it worth buying a premium theme? Will it work?

We’ll talk about what to look for and what to avoid in your search for a good quality theme. The right one will display your content beautifully, be responsive, load quickly, and have the features you need for your site.

Presented by Matt Kopala in John Hughes High.

Speed matters. People are impatient. If your website or a client’s website doesn’t load quickly – within a just a couple of seconds – many visitors will abandon it completely. A slow site means lost time & revenue. But figuring out how to speed up a slow site can be HARD.

Everyone’s got a suggestion and an idea for how to fix your performance issues. Disable this plugin, try this, try that … usually just guesses, and not based on real data.

STOP GUESSING. If you have a performance issue, or just want to make your site faster, you need to KNOW exactly what is going on with your actual, live site in production.

We’ll start by with an overview of WordPress page performance, and then focus on server response times, and what affects them. We’ll take a look at tools that will tell you exactly what plugins are slowing down your site.

Presented by Bridget Willard in John Hughes High.

In the WordPress Community, we talk about community frequently. We know how to build community with WordPress, but what about with our own clients?

Retaining clients and parting ways with clients requires grace. This type of relationship maintenance is an important thing to learn for introverts and applies to new businesses to veterans. It’s an art and a science — soft skills for the win!

In this talk, I’ll discuss how I went from an employee to a business owner — with half of the clients I need in the first four months — because of soft skills. We’ll talk about relationship building tips for organic and sustainable growth — online and off.

Presented by Loxley Browne in John Hughes High.

With over 1.8 BILLION websites on the web, how do you make yours stand apart from the others? Solid tips from an experienced Public Relations and Publicity Pro will help you develop your brand online with organic growth.