WordCamp Dallas/Fort Worth 2015

You’ve got the client. You’ve got their design brief. Now what? How do you analyze the information, assess their goals, establish the objectives, AND translate all of that into an effective (and beautiful!) website? I’ll answer those questions and more as I take you through the process of custom WordPress site design; all the way from initial discovery to development-ready mockups.

The hammer came down from Google on April 21 of this year: if you want traffic, your site better work on a phone.

Of course, we’ve been designing responsive sites for years now. Right?

So what changed in April? What do we need to do if we want to stay clear of the hammer?

How in the world are we going to make those phone-friendly sites look new and different?

Let’s take a look – and have a little talk.

This panel will feature many of our speakers and experts and will focus on topics of interest to freelancers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who runs or owns a WordPress-based business, or wants to!

Hear our panelists speak about, and answer questions on what it takes to run a successful WordPress-based business, whether you’re a developer, a content marketer, social media consultant, or professional blogger. Bring your questions and discussion points, as this promises to be a fun, informative, and interactive panel.

Finding success as a professional freelancer can be a difficult and challenging journey! You have to know the right stuff and have the proper skills in order to survive in the freelancing economy.

James Dalman will share seven key strategies so that you’ll be better equipped to survive – and thrive – in your own freelancing career or business. All the lessons are based on his 27 years experience as a professional freelancer and are applicable no matter where you are at in your journey.

Eating crickets during this session is optional.

This panel will feature many of our speakers and experts and will focus on topics of interest to freelancers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who runs or owns a WordPress-based business, or wants to!

Hear our panelists speak about, and answer questions on what it takes to run a successful WordPress-based business, whether you’re a developer, a content marketer, social media consultant, or professional blogger. Bring your questions and discussion points, as this promises to be a fun, informative, and interactive panel.

What good is a website if it can’t be found?! WordPress is one of the very best softwares out there for optimizing your website for search engines so you show up when people are looking for your services.

In this presentation we will dive into what SEO is, how to find out what keywords to optimize for, what keywords to use, and a solid SEO strategy for moving up in the rankings. Topics include: Google’s Keyword Planner Tool, Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin, SEO Article Creation & SEO Video Creation.

Note: This proposal is for a talk targeted at Business Users – I will also be submitting an proposal on the same topic for Developers.

Web Site security is a mindset, and an ever increasing source of anxiety for business users who see “[Big company] Web Site Hacked” headlines every day. Using the classic CIA Security Triad we will explore how business users can have more confidence in the Confidentiality, Integrity and Access regarding their own WordPress sites. We will explore selecting plugins around your CIA strategy, business policy decisions that impact security and external resources such as CERT.

I have had several articles published regarding PHP and/or WordPress security. The talk will be drawn from the ideas in the following articles:

https://aretex.org/wordpress-application-security-part-1/
https://aretex.org/wordpress-application-security-part-2/
http://www.sitepoint.com/encrypt-large-messages-asymmetric-keys-phpseclib/
http://insights.dice.com/2013/11/26/wordpress-secure-application-framework/
http://insights.dice.com/2013/03/08/a-brute-force-defense-against-injection-attacks/

This panel will feature many of our speakers and experts and will focus on topics of interest to freelancers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who runs or owns a WordPress-based business, or wants to!

Hear our panelists speak about, and answer questions on what it takes to run a successful WordPress-based business, whether you’re a developer, a content marketer, social media consultant, or professional blogger. Bring your questions and discussion points, as this promises to be a fun, informative, and interactive panel.

I’ve built a lot of sites, and it seems that the final 20% can be the hardest to complete. I want to teach designers and developers about the 80/20 principle and how it applies to their project workflow. Then I will talk about tools and tricks that I use to finish a project strong, particularly when building a custom theme.

So you’ve started your first WordPress site, and you begin writing your first post. Eventually you get your content written, and then notice that it just doesn’t look good when it’s on the site. After trying to “jazz it up” yourself, you realize you’ve created a monster with no idea where you went wrong or how to fix it. This session focuses on the do’s and don’ts of using the WordPress editor, while providing tips to help improve your content creation process.

So you’ve developed a bit of code that you think might be useful. It’s one thing to throw it up on GitHub and tweet the link. It’s another to get it on WordPress.org for the masses.

Designing Plugins for Release will walk you through common pitfalls to avoid before adding the plugin to the .org repository, and lay out what you should expect should your plugin gain traction.

This session will feature a live accessibility review of as many websites as I can get to in the time provided. Each site will be checked against all the accessibility standards, each site will also be manually checked using a screen reader, and recommendations provided.

I was a mild-mannered developer until that fateful day: the day I submitted my first patch to WordPress. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, it was that moment that would begin to change the way I thought about development, community, and what it meant to be a contributor to an Open Source project.

My contributions to WordPress have taken the form of talks, patches, code reviews, and documentation, but they’ve nearly all started in the same place: solving a problem that I (or someone close to me) had at the time. Together we’ll learn some ways for you to find a way to become a contributor and, just maybe, help scratch someone else’s itch at the same time.

You’ve heard or read about many things you should do to improve the security of your WordPress-based website, but have you seen a demonstration of what happens when you don’t follow that advice? How do people exploit what’s loaded by a default install?

I’ll show you some tools and techniques so you can perform before and after tests for greater confidence and understanding when making changes to better secure your site.

This panel will feature many of our speakers and experts and will focus on topics of interest to freelancers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who runs or owns a WordPress-based business, or wants to!

Hear our panelists speak about, and answer questions on what it takes to run a successful WordPress-based business, whether you’re a developer, a content marketer, social media consultant, or professional blogger. Bring your questions and discussion points, as this promises to be a fun, informative, and interactive panel.

I will answer a few key questions I have had to field quite a bit over the past year. Then I will break the dashboard into 5 key sections and cover them somewhat broadly to allow for time. 1. Settings. 2. Content Creation. 3. Categories and Tags. 4. Themes. 5. Plugins.

The goal of this talk is to be able to get someone with no experience with WordPress a little more comfortable in dashboard.

It’s not sexy. It’s not flashy. But it’s one of the most important things you can do to improve professionally. Documentation. Don’t like that word? Fine. Call it what ever you like, but all throughout the creative, development, and business process, writing things down is critical.

Jetpack brings features from WordPress.com that either need cloud infrastructure or aren’t ripe for core to your site. But did you know it has over 400 action and filter hooks allowing you to trick it out to you and your client’s delights?

In this session, we’ll look at some of the features of Jetpack, examples of how they can be extended, and how to request added flexibility if you’ve found something we haven’t added hooks to yet!

This panel will feature many of our speakers and experts and will focus on topics of interest to freelancers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who runs or owns a WordPress-based business, or wants to!

Hear our panelists speak about, and answer questions on what it takes to run a successful WordPress-based business, whether you’re a developer, a content marketer, social media consultant, or professional blogger. Bring your questions and discussion points, as this promises to be a fun, informative, and interactive panel.

In the end of October 2013 we had a client come to us to build an eCommerce website for the 2013 Christmas season. We got it up with WordPress and WooCommerce and put in place a marketing and sales system made over $200K in the first 2 months. We kept it going and in 2014 made just shy of a million dollars in revenue online.

This presentation will go over lessons learned during this crazy year and give you some guidelines for building up your own eCommerce website. Topics include: eBay, Amazon, Merchant Accounts, Security, Shipping, and Fulfillment.

Recent growth in places like China, Vietnam, India and Russia brought astounding economic and technological successes that also yielded some of the largest networks of censorship in history. The Great Firewall of China, DPI and SORM in Russia, and SmartFilter in Iran and Saudi Arabia are just a few of the tools used to block the free expression of millions of people.

For this talk, we will discuss how WordPress can empower users while still understanding the pitfalls and considerations required to reach those affected by censorship.

Other topics will cover how WordPress sites and plugins get blocked, issues designing and maintaining sites, and how the OpenNet Initiative affects WordPress. John will also give insight into his own experiences working with censorship and the Web from his time working in China.

With this knowledge in hand, you’ll be able to leave the talk knowing what you can do to understand and combat censorship for your new or existing WordPress sites in a global web.

This panel will feature many of our speakers and experts and will focus on topics of interest to freelancers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who runs or owns a WordPress-based business, or wants to!

Hear our panelists speak about, and answer questions on what it takes to run a successful WordPress-based business, whether you’re a developer, a content marketer, social media consultant, or professional blogger. Bring your questions and discussion points, as this promises to be a fun, informative, and interactive panel.

Let’s face it, blogging is a profitable practice and if you’re not doing it, you’re missing out. But how do you know you’re doing it right? In her presentation, Elayna Fernandez, award-winning Marketing Master Trainer, will teach you exactly how you can become a credible, visible, and profitable blogger so you can increase your influence, impact, and income.

In this session, you will learn:

3 Common Reasons Why Blogging Isn’t Working For You (And How To Fix It)
7 Little Changes That Will Make A Big Difference With Your Blog Success
7 Horrible Mistakes You Could Be Making With Your Blog
The Ultimate Checklist For A Successful Blog Post That Both Google and Your Readers Love
13 Tools Every Blogger Should Be Using To Get The Results They Want
and much more!

Many folks have an innate fear of the command line — they’re afraid to mess something up, do something wrong, break a site, or worse. The thing ism while the command line certainly is *powerful*, it’s also a great time-saving tool that every professional developer should have in their back pocket. Attendees will be given a brief intro to some common CLI commands and then a more thorough run-through of the king of all WordPress CLI tools: WP-CLI. Those desiring the respect of their peers, the praise of their customers, and a deeper understanding of that part of the second Matrix movie where Trinity blows up the power station should turn out for this talk.

This talk will explain the concept of internationalization and localization in plugins and themes and introduce theme and plugin developers to the necessary tools for the job. In addition to discussing the importance of internationalization, this talk will cover WordPress internationalization functions and best practices.

The new WP REST API has a lot of functionality included. This talk will cover extending the API with your own custom routes, custom response data, authentication, sending non-JSON results, etc.

As bloggers, entrepreneurs, and content creators, we have many creative ideas and opinions. Sometimes, though, we think that if we are open and are truly ourselves through our content, we will be judged or ignored, and thought as unprofessional. In reality, your target audience wants to read what you have to say, they want to see the real you. And through connecting with your audience you can be more successful, turn more prospects into clients, and get your desired results.

Through this session, you will learn:

– The 3 Ways to Being Authentic On and Off-line
– How to tell your WHY Story to Connect to the Audience
– How to Deal with Critics Easily and Effectively
– 3 Powerful Attitudes that Help you Relate to the Audience
– Practical Ways to Deeply Connect with your Target Audience
– and many more insights on how to connect with your audience on a personal level!

There is incredible power in knowing the story you’re in, and how to manage it. The brand you develop will impact your pricing, your positioning, and your prospective market. Come hear Chris Lema’s take on branding – specifically in the WordPress ecosystem – and how you can leverage the power of story in your marketing, sales, product announcements, and blog.

With its power and ease of use, WordPress is ideal for custom church websites. In this beginners session we’ll discuss how good design basics, effective messaging, and workflow/updates exponentially expand functionality so that WordPress church sites become powerful ministry tools.