WordCamp Fayetteville 2015

In this talk I will cover 6 main points.

• Self Branding – How to make yourself appear bigger and better than you are.
• You Must Become A Teacher – Teaching your clients why what you’re doing is important will build trust and will make it easier to charge them more. (This isn’t being “sketchy” by any means!)
•  Learn One Theme and Learn It Well – Learning how to do everything within a certain theme so that you free up time to learn more.
• Monthly Maintenance – How much you should charge and how much value you can provide on a monthly basis.
• Referrals – Personal experience on how my system generates more referrals than I can handle.
• “For my portfolio” Projects – Finding value in building a WordPress site for someone for free.

Design Thinking & Going Pro

“Being surrounded” explores the principles and influences of design, the creative content that we consume on a daily basis, and what it takes to “go pro” in our digital space. Whether helpful or distracting, we digest oceans of content with every click, tap, and swipe. Being surrounded is inevitable, but what we do “with” and “in spite of” our surroundings make up our worldview, content strategy, and web presence.

There are many page builder plugins out there and they usually come with their own pre-made modules and layouts. In this session, we’ll look at how we can create our own custom modules to match custom designs for you or your client using a plugin designed for developers.

Neal Colston of Paze Interactive will share the essentials about themes and plugins, the building blocks of your WordPress website. A theme is the set of templates that give your website its overall look. Neal will cover what to look for to choose a theme that fits your needs. A plugin is a customizing app for your website, such as a social media feed or a contact form. Neal will cover the most essential and easiest-to-use plugins.

In this session, we will talk about the effects of website speed on SEO and customer conversions. You’ll learn how to test, track and increase the speeds of your website.

“I have literally built a million dollar business on the strength of my email list. Ninety percent of my income comes from it. Even today, my email list is still my #1 business priority and asset.” (Michael Hyatt)

Take a tour of list building possibilities, tools and approaches. Then turn down the volume of those outside voices and tune into your own situation to decide what list building approach is best suited to take you to the next level in your business.

Google Analytics 101: From Installation to Insights

Do you know how many people visit your site? The first step to solid content strategy is looking at the behavior of visitors. Glean these invaluable insights from your website.

In this session, you will learn how to:

• Install Google Analytics into your WordPress site
• Understand what the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) mean
• Learn how to suss out insights that help you build a better website

Social Media and the Federal Trade Commission – what you should know and best practices for social media posts. Meredith Lowry of Wright, Lindsey & Jennings LLP has the scoop on legal issues that affect publishers.

Getting the most out of your phone, stock photos and editing photos!

Dave has tried out a large number of responsive plugins and is ready to present the details so you can choose the right one for your needs.

We’ll kick off WordCamp Fayetteville 2015 in the auditorium. Eric will go over where to find your sessions, introduce the Committee chairs and answer questions. We’ll also take a few minutes to hear from Martha Londagin who will share information about the Donald W. Reynolds Center for Enterprise Development.

Imagine an employee who doesn’t take vacations, doesn’t need a weekend off, doesn’t require overtime, and who works 24/7/365 for no pay whatsoever!

If you’re WordPress website isn’t sharing your story, enhancing your brand, and generating leads that have a higher chance of converting to sales, then you need to attend this talk.

Your WordPress website isn’t like the robots of the apocalypse waiting to enslave humanity. They are waiting to achieve sentience to create new algorithms and plugins for you and your business!

Come learn about psychology, design, plugins and strategy so you can help stop the robot apocalypse…but really, hot to get more business from your WordPress website.

NOTE: This is NOT about SEO Robots or how to get ‘robot’ spiders to search your site.

Shane Purnell of Platform Giant tells you all about podcasts, from why to how to what to do with your podcast once you’ve gotten it published.

Blogging for nonprofits is like finding that star volunteer that is great at everything and always available. Find out how to use blogs to increase awareness, engagement and maximized your time.

Sean Morrison shares how to optimize your website from the beginning. Topics include page speed, hosting solutions, content delivery networks (CDNs), and more!

Learn about the major recent updates in the Google Algorithm, and how they can affect your website. We’ll explore how and why the algorithm has changed, and how you can make sure that the changes benefit your website’s performance.

The session assumes that you have some basic understanding of SEO and search as well as WordPress, but will be appropriate for personal blogs as well as nonprofit or commercial websites.

The image at the top of the post is used courtesy of 454 Creative.

For “world domination” read, “collaborating with people all over the world (or down the hall) and totally dominating it.”

Businesspeople whose companies use WordPress websites often have no idea how much great stuff they can do with their websites. In this session, we will look at themes, plugins, and native WordPress capacity to improve collaboration on things like

• editing pages and posts
• project management
• customer relationship management
• team building

Automattic’s Josepha Haden shares what’s coming up with WordPress, plus how a little girl from Fayetteville, Arkansas got to work for WordPress.

Sean Borsodi of Sharp Hue talks about WordPress REST API and Security. The WP REST API plugin will soon be part of WordPress Core and along with it comes security risks. We will discuss the basics of what an API means to WordPress and how to securely access your data.

Changing your phone number on your website and don’t want to wait for a tech guy to do it? Need to redesign your website and you hear that WordPress is really easy? Michael White of Doc4 Design explains how to tell when you can do it yourself and when to hire someone.

Be braver than you think you are, but don’t do harm to your business by taking on battles you can’t win. Prioritize and figure out how best to use your resources, and WordPress will be a real asset to your business.

If you don’t already have lots of questions about WordPress, you will by the time you get to the end of the sessions in WP101! Bring all your questions, and experts will be on hand to answer them.

The session will cover the basics of using WordPress to create — for free — both blogs and conventional websites for personal and business projects. WordPress.com will be the basis of demonstrations to create a site then create individual pages and posts. WordPress.org details will be integrated into the presentation.

Writing for online audiences is different than writing for print in several ways including different patterns and SEO considerations. This session will give an overview of how online audiences read content, best practices for working through WordPress to get the best SEO and reader-friendly content, and best practices for writing engaging content.

Businesses and nonprofit organizations would all benefit from having a blog but often either don’t realize how important it is, or how to go about starting a blog. Jamie explains the value of a blog and how to get a business blog started. Topics will include the reasons to have a blog, choosing topics, writing the blog, and choosing who writes the blog.

With many websites seeing half their visits from mobile devices, responsive design is essential. See a live demonstration of techniques for successful responsive design for WordPress websites.

Angela Belford

Sky Shabatura gets us all up to speed on the Customizer. Love it or hate it, you’re going to have to get to know it. Let Sky show you how to make friends with the Customizer.