WordCamp Denver 2019

This is my inspirational story of going from stay-at-home-mom (SAHM), to entrepreneur, to intentional community builder, and how I caught the eye of a well-known page builder to coordinate and build their community. WordPress played an integral role in this journey, and it caught me by surprise.

Let me share with you this motivating story of how an open source software and the community that surrounded it help this woman with no identity (that wasn’t contingent on another human ((wife/mom)) find hers.

It’s hard enough to build a gorgeous, working website, but how do you build one that actually creates results and grows your business?

You know the one—that website of your dreams that sells your products, actively brings you new clients, and is out there on the interwebs, constantly hustling to tell the story of your business and your promise to your customers.

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to get exactly that.

From this workshop, you’ll learn:

• How to brand your business to inspire your customers to create a relationship with you.
• The key to writing content that compels your site visitors to stick around and actually do what you want them to do.
• The journey your average visitor takes through your site and the critical places you lose them along the way.
• How to avoid the biggest design mistakes that repel and confuse your audience.
• The single, most important ingredient to any great website that sells.

The WordPress Block Editor (Gutenberg) has been the official WP editor for almost a year, but it seems most users still use the Classic Editor. It is time to make the move to the Block Editor… or is it?

This session will discuss the pros & cons of the Block Editor. It will cover converting Classic pages to Block Editor pages.

Some of the better plugins that add new blocks will be reviewed, as well as how the Block Editor compares to page builders.

Keyword research is one of the most important foundational elements of SEO. SEO Content Strategist Matt Lacuesta shares his detailed approach to keyword research, which includes an emphasis on data and human intuition working in tandem with each other.

In this keyword research-focused session, you’ll learn:

• The basics regarding how keyword research impacts efforts with onsite SEO, backlink building, and technical SEO (website structure).
• Multiple different approaches to finding keywords, even if you’re struggling to find the right terminology to start your search.
• The importance of relevance and intent and how to create a content calendar that addresses searchers at various stages in the buyer’s journey.
• How to validate keyword ideas based on search volume and keyword difficulty.
• How to rank for more than one primary keyword by incorporating semantic keywords.
• How to effectively use keywords in content to properly signal Google.
• Various tools for doing keyword research, tracking rankings, and spying on the competition (including free and paid options).
•  …and so much more!

For many people, WordPress is a bit of a mystery starting with this very confusing question, “Do you have a WordPress.com or WordPress.org site?” What does that even mean? And why does it have to be asked?

In this session, we will talk about “What Is WordPress?” from an ontological perspective. Is it a content management system (CMS)? Is it a website? Is it a company? Is it a secret society of people who wear t-shirts with the letter W emblazoned on them and carry around weird stuff animals that look like Pikachu but aren’t?

After we get through that, we will talk about how WordPress (the CMS) works. We will start from the beginning, right from the moment you install WordPress. What happens after you click the WordPress installer at your web host (if you have self-hosted WordPress)? We will look at the WordPress database, the WordPress application files, and all the stuff you might upload to your WordPress website and where it actually winds up.

Through this session, we will reveal the secrets of developers. What are they actually doing tinkering with your theme files or building plugins? We will take a look at your theme files and how they work along with the WordPress application and various plugins to display the content of your site.

This is a talk for beginners, so don’t be intimidated to attend. This is where you can uncover the mysteries of your site and be a more aware WordPress user.

With new threats constantly emerging, how can website owners protect themselves and their business? In this session we will cover this crucial topic for SEOs and share several demos of these threats, plus how they can be prevented. Find out what Google is seeing in hacking trends, Google’s view on what HTTPS does (and doesn’t do), and how to best address a hacked site.

Attendees will learn how to protect against SQL injection attacks, sanitize user generated input, and come away with other practical tips that can immediately be implemented to secure their sites.

The WP-CLI gives developers powerful tools to rapidly manage WordPress sites, automate repetitive tasks and diagnose problems from the command line. But if you aren’t building custom commands, you’re leaving tons of time-saving potential on the table!

In this session we’ll explore best practices for creating custom command line interfaces, combining and reusing commands, plus other tips & tricks.

Experience with WP-CLI will be helpful, but not required to attend.

If you’ve ever wanted to build your own plugin for WordPress, this is the session for you. We’re going to start from scratch and work our way up.

First, we’ll take a look at the basic requirements of a plugin. Next we’ll take our example plugin idea and break it into the various components and steps that we’ll need. We’ll code up the plugin together and install it on our sites, debugging any problems that arise. Finally, we’ll look at ways that we could further extend our plugin.

This tutorial assumes some HTML and CSS knowledge, but you don’t already need to be familiar with writing PHP or JavaScript.

The steps that we’ll work through include: – Setting up a folder and PHP file for our plugin – The plugin file header and what it does – Creating a README file – Adding a menu item and sub-menu item in the dashboard for our plugin settings – Creating a plugin settings page, settings sections, and individual settings with the Settings API – Using WordPress hooks to enqueue scripts and styles, and display output for the user – Moving our plugin settings into the WordPress Customizer – Preparing our plugin for translation and future updates

The world of web design is changing, and if you’re not keeping up, you’re not going to make it as a freelance web designer. With drag-and-drop builders the barrier to entry is getting lower and lower.

Today, your parents, and even your grandparents can make a website.

In a day.

So how can you compete? How can you make any money when anyone can make a website?

In my talk I break down how selling websites is the WRONG thing to be doing, and how today, the tech skills simply aren’t enough. Instead, the focus must shift to providing value through strategic design that answers your clients’ problems by creating more leads, reducing workloads, and increasing profits. When the focus is shifted, you set yourself above the page builders and premade templates, and become a solution that your clients are willing to pay top dollar for.

Whether you’re promoting your product, talking about your interests, or sharing your thoughts, podcasting opens to door to sharing your message with the world. In this session we’ll look at the tools and services you need to record, produce, and publish your podcast, along with how to add your show to your WordPress website.

The podcasting market continues to grow with 51% of the U.S. population listening to shows as of spring 2019. That’s up from 44% in spring 2018. 90 million people in the U.S listened to a podcast in the last month, and 62 million people listen to shows weekly. The craving for content keeps growing, which means there’s a good chance a lot people want to hear what you have to say. If podcasting wasn’t such a powerful platform, we wouldn’t have shows like Unobscured, The Habitat, S-Town, and My Favorite Murder.

We explain what the WCAG 2.1 guidelines are and why they are so important to us as WordPress developers and agencies.

Then we offer our easy and actionable steps that you can do to your website as soon as you get home to help you become compliant.

We of course go through and explain each step we offer so you will understand clearly.

Finally, we offer some resources and links to completely free plugins that you can use to test your websites Section 508 compliance and help your compliance instantly.

What if you’d rather jump into a cage of hungry lions wearing a meat suit than wade into a room full of strangers?

We’re taught networking is important, but few of us are taught to do it well. For many people, networking causes real social anxiety, discomfort, and even distress.

In Lunching with Lions, Katherine shares the strategies she used to go from being terrified of networking to founding one of Denver’s leading women’s networking groups and becoming an influencer in the women’s entrepreneurship community.

You’ll learn how to:

• Use the trifecta of awareness, purpose, and intent to build a successful networking practice.
• Identify the right groups and connections.
• Leverage your investments of time and money to get the best results.

Best of all, you’ll get strategies and tools to build your networking muscle and help you overcome your fears.

You don’t have to be in every group, attend every meeting, shake every hand, or collect every card. KP shows you how to choose the right groups and connections to help reach your personal and professional goals in a way that feels good and gets the results you want.

Here’s what some recent audience members have said about “Lunching with Lions: How to Survive and Thrive at Networking”:

*** “just wanted to let you know I have been thinking about your presentation all day and told so many people about it! The cool kids part stuck with me and has made me really think about what I’m doing.”
Kendall Prine

*** Thank You for an excellent presentation at Polka Dot last night. I loved your energy and your information – very valuable. I can’t believe I’d never thought of some of your finer points about networking and about the cost of networking! You are the type of woman I want in my tribe! Thank you!”
Tonya Mecum

*** You were AMAZING Katherine McGraw Patterson! That is actually the first thing I did this morning was really evaluate my networking and the impact I want to make. You’re amazing sister!”
Stephanie Schoolmeester

*** A timely message at today’s meeting helped me to organize my time and energy at this expo. Thank you, Katherine McGraw Patterson, for your reminder to identify and focus on the people and situations which are most likely to be potential clients or otherwise build my business. 🌟
I stopped at tables which appeared to match and had lively, interesting conversations without rushing. I made lots of great connections! ”
Anne Moriarty

This presentation is based on Katherine’s recently-published book, “Lunching with Lions: Strategies for the Networking-Averse” which was endorsed by Ivan Misener, founder of BNI (the world’s largest professional networking organization) and New York Times best-selling author, who said “Lunching with Lions will help you overcome networking fears with insight and awareness. Katherine shares her own journey of overcoming her aversion to networking to subsequently leading one of Denver’s fastest-growing professional networks for women business owners. She encourages business owners to approach networking like everything else in their organization – by setting concrete goals, creating actionable strategies, and tracking their results. People will be using this book as a tool to expand their networks for a long time. “

When I talk to agency owners and they are not thinking about recurring revenue I am shocked. There are so many different ways to scale revenue and scale your agency towards higher growth potential. In this talk I am going to focus on how to view your agency growth and how you can take it to the next level.

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, but most are just guesses, and not based on real data. STOP GUESSING. If you have a performance issue, or just want a faster site, you need to KNOW exactly what is slowing things down, and how to fix it. This talk will show you how.

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’re just stuck starting out. Here are the 10 most common mistakes and errors you have to know how to DIY and how to ask for help once you’ve tapped out of your personal skills and the depths of YouTube.

Building your first website can be intimidating. There are a lot of things to consider and many decisions that need to be made. Unfortunately, most people don’t even know where to start.

The goal of this workshop is to:

• Educate you on the decisions you will need to make when building a site.
• Simplify decisions by providing you with frameworks for decision making.
• Help you gain clarity on your site’s content and structure.
• Provide a safe place where you can ask questions and get specific advice on your goals.
• Walk you through the process of inserting your content into WordPress.
• Show you how to select and install themes and plugins.
• Demonstrate how to build and launch a website (without code).

A crisis of confidence is at the root of many business struggles: not charging enough, allowing clients to take advantage of you, nagging fears, and a lack of satisfaction from your work. In this session, Nathan will discuss two streams that feed the crisis – Imposter Syndrome and Hero Syndrome. Then we’ll talk about some strategies to escape.

Key Takeaways:

1. Why confidence is important as a web professional
2. How Imposter Syndrome and Hero Syndrome get in the way
3. How to build your confidence

SEO can be a scary unknown, especially technical SEO. It doesn’t have to be though. Come learn some basic things to be aware of like page speed and mobile usability. Walk away knowing how to do a basic audit of your site and what tools that will help you do it.

The most successful website designers and developers are able to stand out among thousands of others in the same field. They are crystal clear and concise on how they explain what they do, for who and why. During this session, you’ll craft that magical one-liner statement which will become the foundation of your brand messaging. It will attract and captivate your perfect client, set you apart from others, help you connect with the right partners and…drive revenue!

ECommerce is a popular subject area with hundreds if not thousands of implementations. Plus, more and more stores are going online every day making the ECommerce market explode with opportunity. Of course you want your store to be successful, but there’s a lot of contradictory & outdated advice for what tool to use for what. And as a store owner, how do you make sense of the chaos and do what’s not only right for your business, but what will propel it forward? Listen to best practices from Patrick Rauland, a former WooCommerce Product Manager & how ECommerce business owner Shayda Torabi applied those best practices to scale her online store. She’ll tell us what she learned, what was worth implementing, and what wasn’t worth her time.

Where should I store this data? A custom post type? Taxonomy? Custom Table? WordPress has a few different built-in mechanisms that allow you to store custom data, each with their strengths and weaknesses. The question is, which one should I use?

Having a well-designed data structure is crucial to a project’s long-term success. It acts as the foundation of your project, and if not well thought out, could lead to massive technical debt, and costly migrations down the road.

In this talk, we will walk through a few specific examples of project requirements, and the thought process involved when deciding how to architect the data to fulfill the requirements.

ECommerce is a popular subject area with hundreds if not thousands of implementations. Plus, more and more stores are going online every day making the ECommerce market explode with opportunity. Of course you want your store to be successful, but there’s a lot of contradictory & outdated advice for what tool to use for what. And as a store owner, how do you make sense of the chaos and do what’s not only right for your business, but what will propel it forward? Listen to best practices from Patrick Rauland, a former WooCommerce Product Manager & how ECommerce business owner Shayda Torabi applied those best practices to scale her online store. She’ll tell us what she learned, what was worth implementing, and what wasn’t worth her time.

For those of us that rely greatly on Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) for customizing our themes, the release of Gutenberg was and still is scary at times.

Have no fear! acf_register_block() allows you to create your own Gutenberg blocks using just Advanced Custom Fields.

You will learn:

• ACF & it’s awesome capabilities
• How to create Gutenberg blocks with ACF
• A few other handy ACF tips & tricks

The WordPress HTTP API allows you to gather data from other parts of the web and present it however you wish. We’ll take a look at how it’s done, while taking into consideration performance issues.

We’ll look at both examples of what can be done as well as code samples to accomplish specific goals.

Attendees may be thinking of starting a plugin business. They may already have a business and want to break through to the next level. This talk is for them.

In this talk, I will present for 15 minutes about the path I took to get where I am, and then I will take questions from the audience. At the end of this session, attendees will come away knowing more about what it takes to run a plugin business and how to address some of the challenges all plugin businesses face.

Some of the topics I am prepared to discuss include:

• Going from idea to product:
  • Identifying and developing product ideas
  • How to determine if your idea is good enough to be a product
  • Getting started cheap
  • Gathering feedback and building interest
• Setting up a business:
  • Structure of the company
  • Paying taxes
  • Outsourcing and contracts
  • Domains, hosting & social media
• Selling a plugin
  • eCommerce software
  • Deciding on pricing
  • Deciding on support models
  • Payment processing options (pros and cons)
  • Cart abandonment
  • Churn
• Providing quality plugin support
  • Is it hard give good support as a developer?
  • What tools to use
  • What to expect, in terms of support load
  • Best practices, resources
• Marketing & branding your plugin
  • How to develop a brand
  • Finding your voice as a brand
  • Advertising & Pay Per Click
• Growing & running a team
  • Company culture (hint: it’s you!)
  • Project management
  • Communication
  • Scheduling
  • Tools