🇺🇸 WordCamp Greenville 2020

Distractions are everywhere. Options seem limitless. Choices abound. As the experts, people are looking to you for answers to their digital needs. WordPress gives you an unfair advantage to meet their needs in a way no other software can. You have the potential to stand out from the crowd and make WordPress, along with yourself, stand out from the crowd.
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We have all struggled with the absence of modern development tools and principles provided by WordPress core. Hours of your time are wasted in tedious coding and the manipulation of bloated plugins.

Contending platforms, like Laravel and Statamic, are elegant to work with, saving you hours of hair-pulling coding frustration. Their modern features include MVC, composer, PHP 7, routes, templating engines, migrations, and more.

So, can WordPress be justified by a pro-developer?

Yes. As a pro-developer, you can have the modern features you desire in WordPress.

In this talk, you will learn about frameworks crafted to modernize WordPress so you can encounter a pro-level of WordPress with MVC, routes, custom fields, migrations, and more.

Do you see caching as “that vague and confusing thing that developers do to speed up your site”? Maybe you’ve even gotten brave and tried installing and configuring a caching plugin. The reality is, you aren’t really sure how caching works and it always seems to make things more complicated than they need to be.

If this is you, don’t miss this session! Using simple analogies and unique visuals, you will come away understanding how caching works, what types of caching exist and why you might use them, and will be able to avoid common pitfalls that DIY caching novices fall into.

Using Beaver Builder and a few other favorite plugins, I am sharing my system for speedy deployment of basic websites- with easy customizations!

DNS is one of the most critical steps in getting visitors to your website, but it’s something that is often overlooked and taken for granted. (Can you name who your DNS provider is? Hint: it might not be the same as your domain registrar!) Improperly maintained DNS records can cause slow performance, security issues, email deliverability issues, and WordPress outages. I will share with you an overview of how DNS works and how to maintain your DNS to protect your domain name and WordPress site.

WordPress is great, however there’s no denying that static websites have their advantages. They’re more secure, faster, and won’t break when a faulty plugin gets updated. In this talk I’ll walk you through turning your beautiful WordPress site into a static site that can be hosted on Netlify (for free). You won’t be limited to any specific theme or framework either! Use Elementor, Divi, Astra, whatever you want. We’ll also cover how to handle form submissions and other possible drawbacks to this method (and when NOT to use this).

Why isn’t my blog getting more traffic? – this question haunts every blogger. Why can’t my website rank higher? Let’s look at some SEO basics that will highly impact the way Google sees your website or blog. There are simple changes you can make today to help you increase exposure and drive rank. In this workshop we’ll look at a few tools to give you better insight for keywords and optimization.

As one of the most affordable and accessible platforms for people interested in Technology, WordCamps are a real-life showcase of the growing diversity in the field. However, there is still more work to be done. Increasingly, there are not only more women in tech, but more and more women over 40, as well as, young girls interested in pursuing a career in a STEAM field. Additionally, there are many in underserved communities that are unable to participate because of a lack of access.

As a woman of color, over 50, involved in tech, and STEAM teacher at KidsCamps and having worked with non-profits struggling to bring technology into low-income neighborhoods. I have seen and experienced the challenges first hand. In this interactive talk, I will discuss the different types of people looking for a way to participate in the world of technology and what may be some of the challenges.

I will share some ideas of how we as a WordPress community can be more inclusive, not just at WordCamp, but in places of business. I will also invite participant in hands-on activities as well as discuss and share their ideas that all of us can implement in our local communities and WordPress meet-ups so that everyone can have a seat at the table.

Takeaways:
Participants will

• Have a better understanding of who the emerging minorities are.
• Have a better understanding of the different terms used when discussing diversity
• Have a chance to participate in hands-on activities as well as discuss and offer ideas for their own solutions

In this session, Clifton is going to show the Unlimited Elements for Elementor plugin that will revolutionize the way to think about building websites and widgets/modules for your clients and yourself. Clifton will walk you through how to build 1 to 2 widgets/modules and how to incorporate the use of Advanced Custom Fields with UE.

I will be showing how easy integrating Gutenberg into your workflow can be. I’ll start by showing how you can use Gutenberg like you might have used ACF and specifically the Flexible Content field in the past to streamline theme development and ultimately make your themes more versatile and reusable.

We all want the free traffic that SEO can bring to our sites. However, SEO advice always seems to be changing. What’s the best things you can do to get more traffic (and, better, business) from your SEO efforts in 2020? More specifically, what do WordPress users need to pay attention to in order to get the most love out of Google? David will share what he’s doing with his clients- so you can apply this advice to your website, as well.