WordCamp Los Angeles 2017

Whether you’re looking for a job (or promotion), a freelancer or a business owner, you need branding. Having a strong brand that focuses on your strengths will have a powerful impact on you or your business. Learn how to develop your brand through self-evaluation, research, choosing the right design elements (color, logo), and messaging via blogging, social media, and video.

Technical SEO is important, but Local SEO requires more than regional keywords to succeed. Jen Miller shares how the right mix of blog posts, social media interaction, podcasts, videos and actual community involvement is necessary to the health and traffic of your website. Learn how partnering with local influencers increases your presence on and offline in this session.

Making automation and compression easier with one file and a bunch of terminal installs

It is 2017 and time to make the robots do all the things we can make them do. Machines can do just about anything as long as you give them the properly formed instructions. Fortunately for us WordPress allows us to give these instructions in an easy to learn and very robust manner called The WP-CLI. It is the fastest way to install, active and update any theme, plugin or just about anything else in your WordPress site.
In this presentation I will demonstrate a simple install script that will have a fully functioning, customized WP website in about the same time than it normally takes download the WordPress.zip file. We will also look for how third party tools and hosts are leveraging the WP-CLI to make your life as a developer even easier.

Whether you’re a full time blogger, blogging hobbyist, or corporate media manager, your website needs content. WordPress is a great CMS and a great Blogging platform. In this talk I’ll look at a variety of strategies, techniques, and plugins to streamline, optimize, and supercharge your WordPress writing experience.

When making websites over the years, I often centered content vertically and created responsive columns. In order to achieve the aforementioned effect, I would use css hacks. Every hack came with a unique set of customized code for every major browser. Flexbox and grid were established to replace the bloated use of ‘float’ and layout hacks. Now, with Google partial to fast mobile friendly pages, Flexbox serves content quickly and robustly, using less code. WordPress themes are rapidly integrating Flexbox methods to create a similar result. I am an advocate of Flexbox. My presentation will answer the following questions: 1) Where did Flexbox come from, and where is it used now? 2) When should one use Flexbox? 3) How does one use flexbox? 4) What is the future of Flexbox? 5) Why is Flexbox relevant for WordPress designers and developers?

Just as an occasional Tweet is not a social media campaign, having a blog doesn’t mean that you’re doing content marketing. While blogging is a key component, a weekly blog post probably isn’t enough by itself to give your business the boost you want. Let’s talk about strategy, branding, and developing a killer content marketing plan with your WordPress blog at the core of it all.

Do you have a cause that you are passionate about? Are you thinking about starting a nonprofit or helping a cause in need? WordPress makes for an excellent platform for every nonprofit – regardless of size or budget.

In this session we will review how WordPress can be used to further empower your cause with little barrier to entry. With WordPress, you don’t need to have a big budget or be super techie. Using ready-made tools and effective goal setting and planning, creating a website your cause can be proud of can be a reality. Discover how an effective nonprofit website can engage its audience and bring in mission critical funds. Learn about the planning, tools, and know-how needed to get the job done and take the first step to sharing your mission with the world, using WordPress.

If your website is slow, your visitors won’t stick around…and worse, Google will actually penalize a slow site in the search results. In this session, we’ll cover the basics of site speed optimization, including how web pages work (so you’ll know what to optimize), and a variety of plugins, resources, and strategies for speeding things up on your and your clients’ sites. You’ll walk away with a punchlist of concrete steps that you can implement right away!

WordPress now includes a full featured REST API with default routes for content and the ability for plugins to add additional routes. This provide new ways to read and write data on your WordPress sites that is perfect for use with JavaScript-driven interfaces, apps and more. But do you know what exactly what is available and how to use each route?

Every WordPress site is unique, so every site’s REST API will be different. In this talk you will learn how to use route discovery to learn the answers to each of these questions, for every site.

Having a solid backup strategy can save your life in times of an extreme website crisis. No one wants to lose any of the hard work they have put into their site and why should you ever have to if you are backing things up.

Most, not all bloggers hit the dreaded wall called Bloggers Block. You blog, but you either fall into one of the following:

1. You’ve reached a plateau with your site, and just cannot seem to write any more.
2. You really are not sure what you can cover on your site. (For those with businesses, you might be scared of spamming.)
3. You are afraid you might be copying other sites in your niche, that may be covering the same topics.
4. Juggling family or personal issues.

There’s a solution for all of these!

I am going to go over some tips to help you overcome Blogger’s Block, and get you to think outside the box when coming up with loads of topics for you. Don’t let search results scare you- your blog voice and your knowledge can do wonders for you!

Move beyond the basics of theme tinkering and write a little PHP. We’ll look at how to set up an integrated development environment, write some custom code in the functions.php file of a theme, and how to do the same thing in a basic feature plugin.

The ongoing optimization of your WooCommerce store can lead to increased conversions, higher sales and more income. The purpose of this talk is to help you achieve these three goals and to optimize your store into an efficient selling machine. We will cover all aspects of improving your WooCommerce store – from choosing a theme, to optimizing your pages, to integrating plugins, to adding in features that will increase your conversions and sales. You will learn the most effective tools and techniques for optimizing your WooCommerce store and reap the rewards of your positive actions.

I believe the day of a business marketing and sales plan without the integration of both Social Media and SEO are in the past. Search engines now see Social Media and Search Engine Optimization as tied together.

Examples include:
– Website visits from social site tend to have lower bounce rates and produce more “”sticky”” visitors
– Social channels can be optimized for keywords that complement website keywords and phases.
– Website pages and blogs tied together as cornerstone content and shared on social channels produce more rapid SEO gains.

A well crafted, well targeted online marketing plan that strategically combines social marketing and SEO marketing can accelerate traffic to websites and engagement with buyers. It not really sorcery, but it does produce magic.

I, an eleven year old boy, explain how to use WordPress for portfolios, and why you would want to use WordPress for portfolios in the first place.

WordPress is a great platform to display a portfolio of work. It acts as a companion to a resume, a scholarship application, submissions to competitive schools and colleges and internship proposals. It can also be an asset in seeking grants. Or convincing a committee to select your proposal to speak at a conference (wink wink).

You’ve probably set up a CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) for your company before, but stopped using it after day one. It ends up feeling like more work with little value.

With marketing automation tools, you can set up a CRM that you’ll actually want to use. Automatically find out how your customers found you, what pages on your website they’ve visited, and how they’ve interacted with you in the past. All of this information can turn you into a stellar and empowered salesperson.

After spending five years as a developer and then the last ten years in operations and project management, I have often found myself in a position where I have to estimate what it will take to build a WordPress site without expertise as a front-end or PHP engineer. I will explain how scoping feature build time as a function of risk is how you can accomplish the three part goal of client acceptance, developer buy-in, and realistic delivery date attainability.

This talk will go into detail on how we’ve pushed WordPress to the extreme. We’ll cover how we automate, scale and secure WordPress setups for massive scale on top AWS using Elastic Beanstalk, EFS, CodePipeline, Memcached Aurora and Varnish. This will be a meaty presentation with lots of actionable advice.

Open source software is taking the world by storm and by now, most of us use at least one open source tool every day. However, joining that community of people who use and contribute to open source tools can seem daunting. It doesn’t have to be! In this talk, we’ll dive into what open source software really is, how tools like Github make collaborating on software easy, and walk through an example of how you can contribute to the tools you use every day, without writing a line of code!

Mostly overlooked and underestimated, technical SEO for WordPress can take on many shapes and forms. From URL paths and topic focusing to breadcrumbs and page speed, proper technical SEO implementation can mean the difference between exposing your content to targeted online consumers or hanging out on page 10 where no-one will find you.

This session will cover both basic and advanced technical SEO techniques, best practices and dive into the following:

• Siloing and organization techniques
• Canonicalization and pagination
• Topic focusing to prevent competition and dilution
• Breadcrumbs and schema markup
• Techniques for avoiding index bloat
• Crawl budget optimization
• WordPress taxonomy best practices
• Page speed optimization best practices

I’ll share my step-by-step process (honed since the days of just HTML) for WordPress website creation or redesign. We’ll touch on content audits, theme selection (or should you go custom?), launch checklists, and post-launch care. Also freelancer or client management.

Great for those who want to launch or relaunch their sites and those who work with clients.

How WordPress gave me a platform to discover an identity I didn’t know existed.

Matt has been both a client manager, customer manager, and now supervisor. He will discuss the type of verbal and written skills you need to enhance in your day-to-day communication to serve customers, clients, and/or co-workers effectively. The biggest insights are not so much the words you use, as the goals you want to achieve with these relationships.