WordCamp Hampton Roads 2015

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has gotten both more complex and easier at the same time. In this talk, Digital Strategy Works founder, Tony Zeoli, will discuss the complex part, including mobile responsive themes, SSL certificates, Schema.org markups, and page-speed optimization, which is comprised of minification, caching, image compression, and content delivery network (CDN). And, he’ll go over the easy part – crafting exceptional content in your sites pages and posts that can boost your site’s pagerank.

Today, keyword stuffing is dead and backlinks are are on the decline. Publishing authoritative, long form content for semantic search is the next wave in SEO, but the basics are still important Crafting great titles and descriptions that appear in search results drives interest to action. Long tail phrases can, at times, be more successful than battling with big companies who spend top dollar buying keywords.The use of canonical URLs ensures your site isn’t flagged for duplicate content penalties. And, generating and verifying a sitemap in all the major search engines In this talk, Tony will walk through how to optimize your site with a popular SEO plugin, as well as introduce other plugins and third-party resources you will need to ensure that your site is fully optimized for search. He will also show you why social meta is now increasingly important to search and go over a few examples of winning search engine optimized content marketing strategies that get results.

Learn how Newark Public Schools (NJ’s largest school district – 40,000 students; 70 schools) cut their annual web site technology budget in half by migrating to WordPress from a closed-source, proprietary, expensive, vendor-controlled SaaS CMS. Hear stories from the trenches about budget battles, angry/clueless technology vendors and frustrated administrators from one guy with a vision to disrupt the market and bring better web site technology to our public schools.

Do you call yourself a web designer, developer or simply a pixel pusher? Think you can’t be replaced? You’re dead wrong. With the advent of DIY design tools and drag and drop themes, it’s easier than ever for businesses to get online. What are you doing now to make yourself indispensable to your clients? What else are you bringing to the table? Tired of hustling from one project to the next? Stop looking at yourself as a pixel pusher. Focus instead on how your work brings increased value to your clients. It’s not just design. It’s not just making it work. It’s making digital strategy matter to you and your clients. In this presentation, we’ll review techniques for building (and maintaining) long-term client relationships, different compensation strategies and how to reframe your offerings to build sustainable, profitable businesses.

Practical application for how photographers, and designers creating photography websites, can optimize WordPress in terms of user experience, lead generation and sales.

The WordPress Multisite — what I call Monster Sites — is an often misunderstood creature. Beyond the knowledge of how to install and configure it, there is little understanding of what purpose WordPress Multisite serves. Often, the only way you can discover any benefit to WordPress Multisite, is when you decide to use it on a project, only to find out just why “monster” is such an appropriate label! Without proper planning or preparation for its use, some multisite installations are disasters waiting to happen. But what if you could prevent a multisite from becoming that monster? What if you could begin your project with a guide to which monster site can work best for you? In this talk, I presenting you my approach to WordPress Multisite by illustrating potential strategies and patterns that I’ve found work well with keeping the monsters at bay. Without the interference of heavy, technical details, you will hopefully come away with a new understanding of the strategic value of certain Monster Site configurations, enough lessons learned to know how to prevent your Monster Site from eating your projects, and how applying even some of these WordPress Multisite strategies can tame your next Monster Site once and for all!

Starting a blog, we all hope to widen our reach so that someone other than just our mom reads it! In this presentation, learn how to create a blogging schedule that you can stick with, write relative posts that will appeal to a wider audience, and come away with enough blogging material to get you going for a year!

Custom Post types allow users to create posts that are automatically categorized for unique display and archiving. Custom Fields (improved by the Advanced Custom Fields plug-in) provide a simple user interface for adding specific content to a post, as well as an accessible mechanism for styling that information on the front end. By combining the two, you can develop custom features, including event directories, specializes menus, product catalogs and more.

Steve will discuss why Open Graph is important and how social networks such as Facebook and Twitter use this information when your site visitors share, Like, Tweet or Pin your content on their social networks. Steve will review how to control this information and what you can do when things don’t show up properly.

WordPress is the most popular web design platform today. The downside to this popularity is it makes WordPress a common target for hackers. Some hackers want to steal information, advertise their own agenda, or simply do it because they can. In my presentation, I will teach how to protect your website from hackers, bit at the site level and the server level, using the best tools available. While there is no such thing as an unhackable website, the skills you learn in this presentation will make your site as hard to crack as possible.

WordPress is much more than a website building. I see it as a digital multitool that can be configured into just about any use-case with a little effort. My talk will demonstrate how you can use WordPress as mobile game engine for a multiplayer mobile apps along with code examples and a demo.

Sometimes when you’re using WordPress, things just seem to go wrong. It’s not always your fault, so no need to panic. There’s ALWAYS a solution. What you know in this situation are 2 things – you’re not able to use WordPress and you need to get it back in working order. This presentation is to make you more aware of what to do when things seem to go wrong with WordPress. We’ll go over reasons why this could happen and some really common scenarios to look for. This is for the Beginner, Power User, and anyone not familiar with troubleshooting when things go wrong with WordPress.

Prior to writing documentation for Rocketgenius, Jeff Matson previously worked in the web hosting industry. In this talk, Jeff will show you how to choose the hosting provider that best suits your need and your budget.

So you’ve jumped on the Sass bandwagon, and are tackling the intricacies of responsive web design. This session will show you the Sass tools that will help you shave hours off your responsive theme-building life. We’ll cover native Sass functions, useful and robust Sass libraries, and how to use these tools with the latest CSS features such as flexbox. This talk was first given at CSS Dev Conf 2014, but will be updated with the latest information.

When we meet people in the context of one thing, it’s easy to forget that there’s more than meets the eye, and that everybody has a story. Using and then contributing to WordPress changed my prospects completely. I’m a lead developer today, but there was a time I was a music major at VCU, and before that, a not-so-great teen running around Virginia Beach. Let’s take a moment to remember that everybody is somebody (if you went to OLHS, “I AM SOMEBODY”) and talk about how contributing to WordPress in some way could be a part of your journey.

This talk is all about the WordPress REST API, a glimpse on how to use it, where you can use it, and more. I’ll go over some cool demonstrations, show how it works, how to contribute and everything you need to know about one of the coolest features coming in a future version of WordPress.

Often times a website gets built, the keys handed over with well wishes and a pat on the back but do you know what to do once you take control of your website? Websites need more than posts being made. They need updating, maintenance, and security. Let’s talk about all the things your site needs to stay active and healthy.