🇺🇸 WordCamp Austin 2020

SEO experts Joost de Valk, Michiel Heijmans, Willemien Hallebeek and Annelieke van den Berg perform live site reviews at WordCamp Austin and share some practical tips with you. Do you want us to review your website? Send an email to [email protected].

A reflection on the value of the WordPress community, and how we all can contribute to its on-going success.

Mompreneurs everywhere use WordPress for their business and blogs. There are a lot of things we are doing with WordPress to become profitable entrepreneurs include passive profit streams. This talk will encompass many of the opportunities WordPress gives us to have a profitable income stream, many of which are passive. From ads on a high traffic blog site, to courses, membership, e-Commerce, and other digital products. WordPress can do it all.

As websites and web applications get larger and more complex, one of the great challenges is how to rapidly prototype to get immediate client feedback and agreement from your customer, and identify any hidden technical issues before investing significant time and effort writing code. 

In this session you will learn how to create custom backend data structures for complex business requirements, and integrate them into a sample theme design fully populated with sample data to act as a working prototype for your customer. Whether you’re building a Software-as-a-Service, or you just need a Minimum Viable Product to demonstrate to your client, Rapid Website Prototyping enables you to test an idea out quickly and efficiently.

To prove the power of this technique, we will layout the requirements for a complex business website, then build it live in under 30 minutes.

Have you been scratching your head wondering how or if you’ll even use the WordPress block editor (Gutenberg)? In this session, David Vogelpohl of WP Engine and Genesis discusses the evolution of the block editor in WordPress Core, what that could mean for the future of WordPress, and how brands and agencies are using the block editor to win today.

David’s presentation details the historical context of the block editor, major changes coming to the block editor in 2020, and interactive live-demo examples showing how blocks and in particular custom blocks can help you propel you further faster in your in-house or agency projects.

If your block strategy, is no strategy, don’t miss this session!

Going from freelance to working in an agency can be overwhelming, but don’t let the fear of a collaborative workflow scare you.

What is Git?? Better question, what is version control? And what the heck is a local environment?

We’ll cover the basics of
– Local environments, multidevs, and branches
– Version control
– Overview of a git client

Watch Karen’s talk on WordPress TV here.

An update in WP 5.6 is going to remove support for very old jQuery. I am a Senior Front End Developer for an agency that builds and supports over 40 WP sites a year. Our custom theme, Gesso, does not use older jQuery, but we do use a range of plugins based on the technical requirements of our clients. The jQuery version leap is quite large, and we are trying to account for all the plugins and different versions of these plugins that we use that may have flown under the radar utilizing now deprecated code.

We are currently using the jQuery Test Update plugin and jQuery Migrate on new builds, but we needed a more programmatic way to analyze sites that are currently deployed. First we want to get a comprehensive view of all the plugins we use and their versions. Then we are investigating the plugin code to determine if it uses old jQuery. If it does, we are either, updating that plugin’s version (see Custom Post UI), or taking it out completely if we can’t find a version that complies with the new requirement. Many of our clients are non-profit and government sites that are updated monthly. This WP update requires more rigor than usual, so we need a tool to help.

Enter PyGithub. PyGithub is a Python library that accesses the GitHub API. It allows you to run robust searches throughout all of your repos, when you need to do something more complicated than the GitHub search function will allow. I will demonstrate how to connect to the GitHub API and then drill down to the composer.json and pull out the plugin names and versions. Then I will show how to search within the code for offending jQuery.

I hope to have everyone using this simple tool to do all kinds of analysis on their WP repos, and provide people some confidence in updating sites to the latest version of WP without fear of breaking things. I will also cover some of the typical issues that we ran into regarding plugins, and older theme code.

Whether you are a beginner or not, most WordCampers know what an image ALT tag is or have seen closed captions on our television shows or YouTube videos. But the majority of you reading this STILL skip these critical first steps in making your client or personal WordPress sites accessible and perform markedly better.

In this interactive WordCamp online presentation, we’ll also cover the basics:

– What the first 4:44 seconds of the Lion King can teach us about accessibility
-How to find WordPress themes and plugins to get you started on being accessible right “out of the box”
– How to avoid generating creating “craptions” and tools to improve YouTube’s auto-captioning
– How, as a beginner, how you handle images and videos in a more mobile-first world can improve your site performance in SEO ranking
– How accessibility is often seen as an inconvenience but actually enhances your website performance if done correctly

In 2013 I launched a blog for female creative entrepreneurs that became an overnight success in its own niche in Italy. Six years later, the blog is still going strong: it grew from a handful of contributors to a newsroom of over eighty authors. Last December I was able to hand it off to a new team thanks to the smooth editorial processes we put in place. In this talk, I’ll share the challenges we encountered over the years creating an effective workflow for the growing number of authors and my experience in keeping the quality consistent while maintaining a schedule relevant to the audience’s expectations. I’ll recommend best practices including how to manage user permissions, how to assign editing and curation, deciding who has the final editorial say and delegating the task of actually getting the content online. I will share practical solutions, based on what worked for us, that many different types of teams can use to coordinate their efforts and keep things in check.

Have you ever launched a website only to return to find some annoying SEO has come after you and destroyed it? Has some obnoxious marketer bugged you for lots of little changes- outside the client’s scope and budget?

I’m sorry.

That might have been my fault. Let’s work together to help our clients. I’ll share my secrets on setting up a WordPress site for SEO success. While this won’t guarantee SEO results, but it will set up your clients for optimal Google love.

We all know that the tech space – including the WordPress space – could stand to be more diverse. But whose responsibility is that, and what are the best ways to accomplish it without tokenizing people? How can you improve upon diversity in your immediate and extended spaces? In this session, we’ll identify the kinds of thought processes, language, and systems that you can adopt today to help enrich your space with more diverse kinds of people.

Do you want shoppers, or do you want buyers? An ecommerce store is only as valuable as the number of visitors it converts to buyers. But Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is a successful online store. Building a sustainable, cash positive storefront takes time – and a thoughtful strategy. We’ll go over some simple tips you can use to increase engagement, lower customer acquisition costs and, ultimately, improve store sales.