WordCamp Dallas/Fort Worth 2018

An introduction to the all new WordPress editor coming in WordPress 5.0. Gutenberg will transform the content creation process and give users more control over layouts. This presentation will be geared toward WordPress users that create or edit content for their websites and want to know what’s coming and how it will affect them.

This session will address the all-too-common, and costly issue of project scope creep, how it negatively impacts your business and what to do about it. As WordPress freelancers, consultants and digital creatives we all have experienced how an ineffective customer onboarding process, poorly defined scope of work or poor project management practices can lead to project scope creep. We will discuss processes to manage client expectations, identify project warning signs, prevent common profit-eating pitfalls and share some tools to keep Project Scope Creep from creeping up on you.

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 post types and taxonomies, extend the media library, add REST API endpoints, custom routes, virtual pages, and display all of it with formatted pages in only a matter of minutes.

Whether you’re building a Software-as-a-Service, or you just need a Minimum Viable Product to demonstrate to your client, PODS enables you to test an idea out quickly and efficiently.

Attend this session to see how PODS works in a start to finish site build.

Do you think WooCommerce is just for selling physical products? It’s not! In this session, we’ll learn how to think outside the shipping box. Did you know that you can sell time, resources, membership to a club, subscriptions to software and more?

Gutenberg is coming soon to a WordPress site near you. Are you ready? The new visual editor opens up a whole new world of possibilities to enhance the editorial experience for content creators, and developers like you have an opportunity to create the next generation of tools for WordPress. In this session, we will cover the basics of setting up your development environment, importing core components, and creating your very first custom Gutenberg block.

Plugins and themes are the backbone of WordPress, but many people, including developers and general users, get confused about what each is supposed to do. Most of the time, this isn’t an issue, but when it does become an issue, it can cause confusion, “loss” of data and a headache for users. This talk will go over what a theme should be, what a plugin should be, why they are that way, what users should look for in a plugin or theme and finally we’ll quickly discuss child themes and custom functionality plugins.

If a friend or client came and showed you their website and said “What would you do differently?” how would you begin? Would you open up photoshop or sketch? Would you start installing a new loca. WordPress instance? Why not just toggle dev tools open and begin manipulating their site live?

In music, a jam session is one or more musicians playing together to discover sounds, exchange ideas and just enjoy the craft. It’s purely creative and not focused on production. While graphic design has some similarities, this process hasn’t really made it into our day-to-day web design workflow. Using the browser’s dev tools, you can manipulate anything you want on any webpage and even save those changes to your local filesystem. Unfortunately your average webpage is a complex “shared space” of overlapping styles and scripts and working in it can be unwieldy and cumbersome. My goal with this session is to explore some ways to make the kinds of things you might want to do on-the-fly faster and easier to express so that we can ultimately get to a point where we’re comfortable jamming out with our team or a client watching and participating.

Topics include:

– How do I bring ideas and work I’ve done in previous projects into a jam session?
– How can I reduce the complexity of adding, removing and restyling elements so I’m not slowing down the conversation?
– How do we take a snapshot of our work and come back to it later?
– How do I leave the session with a list of actions I can move forward with?

While this session isn’t devoted to any particular CSS or JS technologies, demos will very likely include examples of:

– CSS Grid layout & display:contents
– Tagged template literals in javascript
– CSS shapes (clip-path, shape-outside) and filters
– CSS custom properties

Our canvas is not a design program or a specific framework, it’s the browser. That’s where we work and that’s what we need to know deeply and I’m convinced that learning how to “jam” in the browser will make us all better, more confident web designers.

AMP is a latest trend when it comes to speed . Big media houses have used it . Automattic and XWP has a dedicated team working on the AMP For WP. AMP is the future for speedy websites. But, how do you start ? There are numerous questions by few people who know AMP till a certain extent. Issue being the awareness. Same was with us. We started our journey 6 months ago and had in mind that we want o build something with AMP. This talk highlights our journey about knowing nothing when it came to AMP to developing a drag drop builder for AMP Stories

Influencers get paid to do what they love while making an impact and inspiring people to take action. But where do you start? Elayna has been a digital influencer for 13 years and has been recognized with multiple awards for her blog, ThePositiveMOM.com, and will teach you how you can start energizing, maximizing, and monetizing your influence today.

3 Main Takeaways:

The Top 3 Qualities Every Successful Online Influencer Must Have to Crush It Online

1 Strategy You Can Implement Right Away to Become a Top Influencer in Your Field

The Ultimate Checklist For A Successful Blog Post That Both Google Your Readers Love and Brands Will Pay You For

… and much more!

It’s hard working with a developer because sometimes it feels like you are both speaking a different language. I’ll go over the key questions to ask when working with a developer and what you need to know to make sure the project is a success.

I’ll cover how to install and navigate WordPress, some best practices and website security, recommending a few basic measures and plugins to protect a WP installation.

This will be a workshop on tools web designers can use to seamlessly automate client intake (from proposal to contract to invoice) as well as systematize client management throughout the project for a high end customer experience.

Using the WordPress platform and volunteers from local communities, we host weekend events to build 48 websites for 48 nonprofits in 48 hours.

Over the past several years we’ve hosted 10 of these events, helping over 450 nonprofits in different cities throughout the US.

This year we are going international starting in London Fall 2018.

This session will explore how the WordPress community gives back using their professional skills and how we use WordPress as the core platform to pull this off.

I’ll discuss strategies, plugins, themes, and other tools that we use.

I’d like to discuss the importance of going through a QA list on your website. We’ll touch points such as making sure external links open in a new tab, making sure you’re set up with SEO, and last minute things to check before making your site live.

Tired of writing blog posts that never seem to rank? Frustrated that all your blogging efforts seem wasted? Sick of writing awesome posts that vanish into the bowels of your website (and never get any traffic)?

Then this is the presentation for you.

Learn how to write an awesome blog post that will not only be more likely to rank (on Google and other search engines), but that will also be more likely to convert the readers who actually DO visit your blog regularly.

Wondering what it takes to get your website listed in Google for local searches? This talk walks you through best local SEO practices and also answers the following questions:
– Should you pay for Yoast premium or the Yoast Local SEO plugin? Is it worth it?
– Do I need to learn schema markup?
– What are some common mistakes that could get you kicked out of local searches on Google?
After this talk, you’ll be able to confidently increase your website’s visibility on Google local searches using a WordPress powered website.

In 2015, I began investigating the positions WordPress had to offer. I knew I didn’t want to code and designing would take more schooling, but I wanted see if I could find a place in the ecosystem my husband worked in. This talk will highlight what I found.

Born This Way

Long before Lady Gaga Gayle Williams was singing the refrain of “born this way” in answer to interminable questions and stares. “I was born without my eye,” she would say with a smile even as a five-year-old. That smiling mask was a stalwart cover for an understandable sense of uncertainty and a stubborn resolve to be just like everyone else.

Now as a gray-haired digital marketing expert, she’s learned she certainly doesn’t want to fit in. Standing out from the crowd is where it’s at.

In this laugh-filled take on life from a different perspective, Gayle talks about surviving a childhood of hospital stays and doctors’ offices and the surprising gifts uncovered along the way.

Kori Ashton will share how she grew her freelancing business from her couch into a million dollar WordPress dev firm in just five short years. She’ll help you better understand contracts, pricing / profit, and how to establish clearer client expectations.

Learn how to deploy your WordPress site by pushing up code to your Git repository.

We’ll go over configuring CircleCI and GitLab CI to test your codebase and then deploy it to production.

Continuous integration allows teams to work more efficiently when doing development work on projects. No more wasting time or worrying about making mistakes when you need to get your changes pushed up!

We don’t code and design things just to be cool or pretty. The goal is conversions. Whether you’re creating a site that generates leads or an online store that generates revenue, the goal is the same. We’ll talk about strategies, tips and ways to drive conversions.

This past spring, the UNT Health Science Center webteam took on the massive challenge of adjusting our site to conform to WCAG 2.0 standards. Through this process, we have learned quite a lot about how best to approach the idiosyncrasies of producing clean code and correcting (where possible) some not-so-clean code. If you are concerned about how your site looks to someone with disabilities or want to give your site a boost in how Googlebot perceives and indexes your site (thereby even improving search performance), then come join us. Discover the most common pitfalls as well as the BEST tools you’ll need in your bag to address your own sites.

If your WordPress site was analogous to the human body, the core code would be the brain and your plugins would be the rest of the central nervous system that makes the site do what you tell it to do. However, in the Information Age, where the data of the database is the lifeblood of your site and business, the WordPress database would be the heart of your site. This talk will highlight the HEART database maintenance workflow / paradigm (developed by David) that will provide you with a framework for maintaining a healthy, secure, and optimized database for your WordPress site.

Quick and Dirty… How to get out of your WP DIY hole. We know WP is made for non-technical users, but what if you’ve tapped beyond your personal skill and the depths of YouTube…What do you need to prepare to work with an external developer or team while maintaining your vision and site ownership.

Get your customers off of the “app store mentality” and get ongoing subscription revenue for your plugins by turning them into a SaaS (Software as a Service) by providing services via APIs on your own servers.

Did you know the WordPress REST API provides a simple way to get started developing your own API based services, hosted by your existing WordPress site!? In this talk you’ll see practical examples of how WPMU DEV has leveraged the REST API for it’s own services. Then we’ll build our first “hello world” API service together to jumpstart your own SaaS ambitions!

Together, we will talk through the process of understanding your audience and talk about how that compares to your intended target audience (avatar or personas). Then, through an interactive experience, we will break up and walk through the discovery process of “understanding” that person. In this experience, we will define the characteristics of this person and what their online usage and informational digestion process. Then, use a few inference questions to ask ourselves how we can best set up our platforms for successful interaction with them.

Using a tested tool, I’ll talk to the group about looking both on their blog/website and in their social platform insights to discover the audience they already have and compare that with the audience they think they have or want to target generally or for a specific project. Then, we will break the room up in groups and use the persona tool for an assigned persona and discover what it would look like to use this for our own platforms. Attendees will walk away with the persona tool they can use for their accounts and digital platforms as well as an experience using it and the inference process you can explore from the information gathered.

Main take away – until you know your audience you can’t interact with them. And if that audience is not your intended audience, how do you move toward attracting the customers you want?

Did you know you only have 10 seconds to capture the attention of potential customers? When a potential customer lands on your website you only have seconds to convince them to take action on your offer. This means you have a small opportunity to instill confidence, establish trust, and communicate your credibility. In order to be effective, your message must be clear, concise, and customer-focused.

In this interactive session, participants will learn how to combine company data with the company story to create marketing content that inspires potential customers to take action.

Learn how to use the project management framework to manage your WordPress projects from initiation to close out with ease.

So you’re interested in becoming a developer or learning a new technology? Maybe you’ve tried online tutorials or explored coding classes, but aren’t sure where to begin? In the fast-paced world of web development, learning to teach yourself new technologies is an essential skill.

In this session we’ll explore strategies and resources for diving into WordPress development, how to overcome roadblocks and how to get help from the community.