WordCamp Los Angeles 2014

Moderated by: Jeff Turner

Speakers: Jeff Zinn, Greg Douglas, Andrew Behla

Does this ever happen? The site is done and you are still waiting for the client to provide the content. They provide you with a bunch of bullet points and say, “Can you fix this?” Here are tips and helpful examples of what to do and what not to do to make website content more effective and meaningful. Homepages that don’t suck and about pages that don’t put people to sleep.

Join designer Jessica Barnard from The Pixelista and developer Robert Palmer from Honest Code for a panel discussion on how designers and developers can work together more efficiently and effectively. Move beyond being a one-stop shop without falling into common communication pitfalls between the left and right brains of a project. Learn how collaboration can help push your skills beyond what you thought was possible. This is an audience participation panel, so be sure to submit your questions before August 31!

For all it’s practicality and usability, the Common Web can be a boring place for designers. This talk explores the simple design elements that create compelling brand experiences and turn the Common Web into the unique and exciting.

Moderated by: Wes Chyrchel

Speakers: Nathan Tyler, Taylor Aldridge, Blossom Wright

Designers and developers are different breeds. Yet they must work together to produce successful web projects. We will discuss how to work alongside one another effectively and manage our differences. This is basically marriage counseling for web teams.

Following the WordPress mantra of decisions over options, this case study takes you behind the scenes of a lightweight, lean, flexible site with one primary goal: to get visitors to download a smartphone app. Get insights on the core design decisions made throughout the site build process to keep the focus on conversion. Learn about the challenges faced to not only deliver a stellar designed site out of the gate, but to accommodate the long-term marketing plan of expanding in-app purchase options. Plus, hear about several of design features & how they were successfully translated to screens of all sizes.

You guys, it’s about to get sensitive up in this joint. I’ll explain why empathy and emotion are crap-tons more important to overall user experience design than parallax, front-end frameworks, and even the hamburger icon. I’ll also explain why design is too important to leave to the designers. You won’t want to miss this.

Join designer Jessica Barnard from The Pixelista and developer Robert Palmer from Honest Code for a panel discussion on how designers and developers can work together more efficiently and effectively. Move beyond being a one-stop shop without falling into common communication pitfalls between the left and right brains of a project. Learn how collaboration can help push your skills beyond what you thought was possible. This is an audience participation panel, so be sure to submit your questions before August 31!

Thom Meredith will walk you through the fundamentals of his classes being taught to Graphic Designers and Interaction Designers. The process of birthing new unicorns.

Moderated by: Steve Zehngut

Speakers: Karim Marruchi, Robert Griffin, Bob Watson

Moderated by: Steve Zehngut

Speakers: Karim Marruchi, Robert Griffin, Bob Watson

Moderated by: Steve Zehngut

Speakers: Karim Marruchi, Robert Griffin, Bob Watson

Moderated by: Wes Chyrchel

Speakers: Nathan Tyler, Taylor Aldridge, Blossom Wright

Moderated by: Chris Lema

Speakers: Kevin Michael Gray, Jennifer Bourn, Lisa Tsou

Moderated by: Chris Lema

Speakers: Kevin Michael Gray, Jennifer Bourn, Lisa Tsou

This talk will include a peek behind the curtain of one of my own websites from early conversations and design questionnaire to the project board that includes the UX/UI, fonts, color scheme and design inspiration (http://premiuminteractive.com/roundabout/) to the finished WordPress website (http://www.roundabout.com). There will be tools and tips for how to think creatively when designing for WordPress… Also I will ask the co-developer for this site (Nathan Tyler) to join me on stage for the Q & A portion of the talk to assist in answering questions about development of this website.

Moderated by: Jeff Turner

Speakers: Jeff Zinn, Greg Douglas, Andrew Behla

Moderated by: Wes Chyrchel

Speakers: Nathan Tyler, Taylor Aldridge, Blossom Wright

Moderated by: Jeff Turner

Speakers: Jeff Zinn, Greg Douglas, Andrew Behla

Moderated by: Wes Chyrchel

Speakers: Nathan Tyler, Taylor Aldridge, Blossom Wright

Moderated by: Steve Zehngut

Speakers: Karim Marruchi, Robert Griffin, Bob Watson

Moderated by: Jeff Turner

Speakers: Jeff Zinn, Greg Douglas, Andrew Behla

This is your bonus for sticking around all day!

Our speakers will help you migrate that spiffy new WordPress site over to a new hosting account courtesy of our sponsor, SiteGround. Share your hard work with the world!

Are you new to the world of building things on the Web and with WordPress? Are you like a magical baby Giraffe just trying to get your “WordPress Legs” out from under you? If that sounds sorta kinda like you, then have we got a workshop for YOU! Our WordPress Superhero, Gregg Franklin, of ServerPress, will cover the basics discussing what WordPress is, what it can do. He’ll also cover setting up your own WordPress install on your own computer using an amazing tool called DesktopServer! Please download and install the free version of DesktopServer Limited(http://serverpress.com/downloads/#free) before attending the workshop. And then he’ll finish off the Workshop by showing you a few of WP’s key features. Bonus: If you stick around for the whole day, our speakers will help you migrate that spiffy new WordPress site over to a new hosting account courtesy of our Sponsor, SiteGround.

This is your bonus for sticking around all day!

Our speakers will help you migrate that spiffy new WordPress site over to a new hosting account courtesy of our sponsor, SiteGround. Share your hard work with the world!

Introducing beginners to everything they need to know about themes, theme frameworks and child themes.

This is your bonus for sticking around all day!

Our speakers will help you migrate that spiffy new WordPress site over to a new hosting account courtesy of our sponsor, SiteGround. Share your hard work with the world!

You’ll learn how to find, evaluate, install and configure WordPress plugins and we’ll also discuss some specific plugin recommendations.

This is your bonus for sticking around all day!

Our speakers will help you migrate that spiffy new WordPress site over to a new hosting account courtesy of our sponsor, SiteGround. Share your hard work with the world!

No matter what WordPress level you are at, and especially if you are  a small business owner or professional that makes sites for others, maintaining consistent security practices, securing a regular and reliable backup schedule, and updating your open source software should be a top priority and will help the operability, safety and longevity of your hard-earned WordPress time and money. This session will show you what you need to do to harden your WordPress security, and what methods are available for making backups of your site.

This is your bonus for sticking around all day!

Our speakers will help you migrate that spiffy new WordPress site over to a new hosting account courtesy of our sponsor, SiteGround. Share your hard work with the world!

So you’ve heard that WordPress is an amazing platform with endless possibilities and you’ve decided to use it for your new project, but you have no idea where to start from? The very first step for a successful project is a reliable host and a good domain name. In this talk I will guide you through the most important things to look for when choosing a company, what are the different hosting options and when to use each, and how to choose and register a valuable domain name.

This is a talk on using Roots, a modern WordPress starter theme. Roots is more than just a starter theme – it’s a workflow! I would like to demonstrate how I get up and running with Roots and parlay technologies like Grunt and Github without getting too deep into code that can be intimidating for designers and starting developers. It’s a great way to create custom themes with less bloat and easy deployment.

All right, look, people. No one’s perfect. Not you, and certainly not me. We all make mistakes — what separates the professionals from the rest is our ability to recover gracefully from those mistakes.

In this talk, we’ll look at version control using Git. We’ll use a nice GUI so we need deal minimally (if at all), with command line stuff. We’ll find out how becoming comfortable with version control will empower us to make all the dumb mistakes we want, which can enable better design, better code, better writing. How? Because we can make mistakes knowing that there is a giant, nerdy safety net making sure we aren’t going to suffer for all our risky behavior.

You know that SEO is important. But Google is constantly changing, and SEO is getting more nuanced than ever before. This talk will cover the state of search engine optimization in 2014 as well as WordPress-specific tools, tips, and tricks to maximize your site’s visibility in non-paid search results.

This program on Creating Editorial Calendars will make blogging/podcasting a hassle free experience. It is designed for both potential and experienced writers/podcasters to realize and organize, how much information they have at their disposal to create a truly awesome creative experience

Every creator of content faces the same dilemma – what to write about – it can cripple a budding successful career. But with an editorial road map, and a flashlight, success is all but guaranteed.

There will be a live demonstration of how to organize loads of information into bitesized interesting units to produce blog posts and podcasts on a regular basis.

Participants will gain an insight into their own topic areas depth and breadth and have a renewed vision for their success.

Awesome WordPress plugins that can help small business owners take their websites from basic to bada$$, including content development, e-commerce, and customer relations.

Growing pains and support issues can hinder product growth. Code Organization and Implementation Techniques can maximize scalability in your code; eliminating reliability issues and reducing server resource needs. Whether you are designing a theme or developing a plugin for a high traffic site, practical tips and examples will be shared so you can implement them immediately. Yes, there will be code.

Non-Profits have ever increasing demands for their budgets, usually putting their website at the bottom of the list or gobbling up the majority of the money. WordPress allows non-profit organizations to get the most out of their budgets, as well as encouraging their members to contribute to the content. No longer are organizations tied to a web company to maintain it. No one cares more about your organization than you! This talk will show how to run your website on a limited budget, as well as how to create and manage content that your visitors want to see.

There are seven defined philosophies for WordPress core development, a pillar for WordPress’ success so far. Every decision, every commit, is made with these philosophies in mind, working towards making WordPress as easy to use as possible.

What are these philosophies, and how do they affect WordPress core development? And more importantly, how could they help you to create better software? And make your products more appealing? These questions and more will be answered in this session.

Exploring how to create a web application using WordPress and WP-API as a framework. I will walk through the benefits of client-side applications, or single page applications. I will walk through the basis for creating a client-side application with WordPress and AngularJS.

WordPress is a powerful, flexible platform capable of running the largest sites on the web. Flexibility can come at the cost of performance, and in WordPress we see this with complex queries over large data sets. Can we alleviate this by shifting the weight of WP_Query off of MySQL? (Spoiler alert: Yes).

Moderated by: Chris Lema

Speakers: Kevin Michael Gray, Jennifer Bourn, Lisa Tsou

Come hear the stories of several lives that have been changed because of WordPress, and be challenged to engage the community, embrace the technology, and experience your own paradigm shift.

Website owners and operators have a number of unique issues that they must contend with; everything from licensing to privacy to user-generated content to e-commerce raise legal issues that the website owner must contend with. During this talk, Jonathan will address some of the more important issues and help you understand how to deal with them before serious problems arise.

“Security should be a part of everyday life. We should always be aware of what we’re doing and what it might do in return. But… If you’re not a developer, is there any special magic to make sure you only make smart decisions when it comes to your website?

Learning how to make smart decisions with regards to code you don’t understand starts with learning where to look and what you’re looking for. I’ll help demystify the process and talk about ways with and without plugins to keep your site safer.”

Is your large organization or company considering moving to WordPress for enterprise content management? In this session, Christopher Frazier will give you tools to intelligently sell WordPress to management, provide you with clear expectations for what the roll-out process looks like, and discuss how to build a community within your organization that effectively uses WordPress to reach your audience.

Did you know that WordPress is great for blogging!? I’ll be discussing some easy tips to boost your blog from good to great. Topics include enriching your posts with images and other media, sharing your posts via social media, and a few tips to supercharge your site.

Moderated by: Chris Lema

Speakers: Kevin Michael Gray, Jennifer Bourn, Lisa Tsou

Blogging is critical to the success of any online business, yet it’s often ignored, underutilized, or flailing. Learn the biggest mistakes new bloggers make, why they are sabotaging their own success, and how to avoid doing the same. From headlines, to optimization, to formatting, to promotion, we’ll cover how to get every one of your blog posts maximum visibility and get them in front of people who need what you offer, are ready to buy, but just don’t yet know you exist.

Going Global – Building WordPress Multilingual Websites covers creating multilingual website with WordPress – how to do it, what are your options and has a comparison review of what plugins you can use. We go over good and bad examples, Google’s directives for multilingual sites and a tutorial on creating multilingual WordPress sites. Attendees will leave knowing how to turn their WordPress sites into full multilingual sites.

“WordPress’ Customizer API (also known as the Theme Customization API) provides an easy and powerful way to implement previewable options in themes and plugins. WordPress 4.0 introduces several additions to this API, enabling developers to build exponentially larger solutions into the Customizer.

In this talk, I’ll discuss the additions to the API in 4.0 as well as exploring some advanced and under-documented Customizer tricks, and discussing the future of the Customizer in core. Topics covered will include:

• Customizer panels: a way to group sections.
• New built-in control types: textareas and generic input support.
• New control parameters: descriptions and input_attrs.
• Contextual controls: implementing front-end-context-specific options.
• Improvements to the customize_update_$type and customize_preview_$type actions, and how to use them.
• Customizer conditional function.
• What’s next for the Customizer in core.
• Thoughts on customizing Settings, Menus, and Themes (that is, in-page theme-switching and previewing).

I’ve posted a tutorial summarizing many of these topics on my blog: http://celloexpressions.com/blog/wordpress-4-0-customizer-api-improvements/. We’ll go into depth with these concepts, looking at specific use-cases and examples, and answering your questions on the Customizer, its APIs, and its future.”

If you are in charge of user experience, development, or strategy for a web site, Accessible UX will help you make your site accessible without sacrificing design or innovation. User testing also means testing with persons with disabilities. This session will show you some results of such user testing with WordPress and the possible solutions to issues discovered during the testing.

If you’re a skilled developer and you freelance, you’re leaving money on the table. Building a plugin allows you to untie your income from your time. I’ve been making a full time living selling WordPress plugins for over 5 years, and in this talk you’ll learn everything you need to know to do the same thing.

Numbers Used Once (NONCE) are important tools for developers. Many developers however don’t understand what they are or or how to properly use them. In this session we will take the red pill and dive headfirst into the rabbit hole. When we emerge, you’ll know the tools available to you, both built-in and add-ons.

Join me for this enchanted journey, learn something new, refresh your knowledge, and groan at the bad jokes and tortured metaphors.

We all love WordPress but know that things can go wrong from time to time. What if you knew exactly what to do whenever a WordPress issue arises? This can include anything from a theme or plugin issue all the way to those really bizarre things that can happen leaving you clueless how to troubleshoot them. No high level amount of technical experience needed with the tricks you learn. Being equipped to handle WordPress issues can really help you keep things running smoothly on your site and focus on the fun stuff rather than hair pulling and other madness.

“If you’ve got a WordPress site, you’re probably getting a pretty decent share of incoming spam comments. They can be incredibly annoying and, in some cases, extremely time consuming to deal with. While spam attacks can never truly be 100% stopped, they can be slowed down to a trickle.

This presentation will show you how to combat spam directly by getting hands on with several plugins as well as your core WordPress configuration.”

Your business’ website is finished, but you’re not done working with it. Whether you’re a product or service company, the foundation of your online marketing strategy should be developing and implementing a game plan for original content published on a regular basis. We’ll also go over the basics of how this game plan will help you win friends and influence people on social media.