WordCamp Miami 2017

As WordPress enters its teenage years, our community is no longer just thinking about startup mode. Entrepreneurs are trying to figure out longevity, and how to build a long lasting business. Karim brings the perspective of 23 years of building and leading digital teams from 30 to 300. Immersed in the WordPress ecosystem the last 5 years, Karim has seen some trends that worked against the traditional silicon valley idea’s of success. Are we a special snowflake, does Open Source make a difference in Start-up longevity?

In leading this discussion, Karim will build on the topics of the morning talks by Scott Mann and Sherry Walling. We have invited Rebecca Gill and Jon Brown, who both have many years in business before joining our community, to create a panel that collectively brings hundreds of years of business experience to the WordPress ecosystem and our community.

Kyle is a product manager Flywheel, working with engineers, designers, and customers to figure out how to build the next big thing. After several years working for Apple, he’s spent the last three years helping grow Flywheel from 4 to 84 employees.

Suggested Questions And Topics: If you want to talk with Kyle about managed hosting, product design and development, team collaboration to push technical products forward, or anything else on your mind, he would love to chat with you.

Learn more about “Ask The Expert” sessions here.

Advanced Custom Fields is a powerful plugin that enables the addition of custom fields to your pages, posts and more. Yet, it’s so wonderfully simple that anyone with a basic understanding of WordPress themes can learn to integrate its functionality into their own WordPress builds. Come learn what it can do and how to get started using it.

Learn the hidden tips, tricks and best practices about how to make more money and avoid mistakes with your eCommerce stores, directly from the people who made them.

Although focus is on WordPress platform users this talk if for anyone who uses an eCommerce platform, even if its not WordPress (Shopify, SquareSpace, etc.) and that can generally benefit from the experiences and lessons from the panelists.

One person, one idea, one keyboard — and making it happen.

Reignite your excitement for tech by hearing about that special place where passions, creativity, personal initiative and tech converge. This exponential power to effect change has altered the landscape of opportunity for every single person with the most most basic tech tools. This talk is for everyone, at every skill level, with all interests.

Miles Lifton is a passionate, creative, proactive young man who is barreling in to the tech world head first. Hearing him speak is a fascinating study in what fearless ingenuity looks like. This talk is not to be missed!

Learn the hidden tips, tricks and best practices about how to make more money and avoid mistakes with your eCommerce stores, directly from the people who made them.

Although focus is on WordPress platform users this talk if for anyone who uses an eCommerce platform, even if its not WordPress (Shopify, SquareSpace, etc.) and that can generally benefit from the experiences and lessons from the panelists.

Andrew Wikel is a WooCommerce ninja at Automattic. He is committed to open source values and loves working with WordPress. He fell in love with WordPress in 2008, and has been working with it in some capacity since then.

Suggested Questions And Topics: Ask your ecommerce questions – everything from general good practices to specific questions, especially if they involve WooCommerce.

Learn more about “Ask The Expert” sessions here.

We have all been at events where the panelists talk forever and then take a few questions that really just direct off stage where the value is not shared. At WordCamp Miami, we want you to be able to bring real question and put the panelists on the spot to get real answers. Over the course of Scott’s, Sherry’s, and Karim’s Session’s we will be collecting via Slack and Twitter, some real world case studies from our audience and will offer in-depth answers from our panelists.

You own a WordPress business. You’re someone in charge of driving the growth of a business in a competitive space. Your role may afford you many opportunities and benefits… maybe you’re living your dream. However, if you’re honest with yourself, you may also notice heavy psychological burdens like burnout, isolation, and the looming threats of stagnation and failure.

Over time, the weight of these burdens can take a major toll on your physical health, emotional well-being, relationships, and professional edge.

The good news is that a few simple strategies can help you enhance your longevity and life satisfaction. I will walk you through steps to help you better manage anxiety, find work-life integration, and become adept at reading and understanding your own personal well-being.

As WordPress enters its teenage years, our community is no longer just thinking about startup mode. Entrepreneurs are trying to figure out longevity, and how to build a long lasting business. Karim brings the perspective of 23 years of building and leading digital teams from 30 to 300. Immersed in the WordPress ecosystem the last 5 years, Karim has seen some trends that worked against the traditional silicon valley idea’s of success. Are we a special snowflake, does Open Source make a difference in Start-up longevity?

In leading this discussion, Karim will build on the topics of the morning talks by Scott Mann and Sherry Walling. We have invited Rebecca Gill and Jon Brown, who both have many years in business before joining our community, to create a panel that collectively brings hundreds of years of business experience to the WordPress ecosystem and our community.

We have all been at events where the panelists talk forever and then take a few questions that really just direct off stage where the value is not shared. At WordCamp Miami, we want you to be able to bring real question and put the panelists on the spot to get real answers. Over the course of Scott’s, Sherry’s, and Karim’s Session’s we will be collecting via Slack and Twitter, some real world case studies from our audience and will offer in-depth answers from our panelists.

As WordPress enters its teenage years, our community is no longer just thinking about startup mode. Entrepreneurs are trying to figure out longevity, and how to build a long lasting business. Karim brings the perspective of 23 years of building and leading digital teams from 30 to 300. Immersed in the WordPress ecosystem the last 5 years, Karim has seen some trends that worked against the traditional silicon valley idea’s of success. Are we a special snowflake, does Open Source make a difference in Start-up longevity?

In leading this discussion, Karim will build on the topics of the morning talks by Scott Mann and Sherry Walling. We have invited Rebecca Gill and Jon Brown, who both have many years in business before joining our community, to create a panel that collectively brings hundreds of years of business experience to the WordPress ecosystem and our community.

Specing out a website project is not easy and each one is very different. Sometimes when a client says “yellow” they really mean “gold”. It’s your job to know what they want sometimes. We can make recommendations about how to do something better for a client. As long as communication is open, we can come to a resolution that will work brilliantly! Sometimes it just takes longer.

While this “sales and marketing” panel is intended for small business and agencies, lessons learned can also apply to the freelancer or the developer looking to make a business from plugins. What are the right AND wrong ways? What lessons can our panelists share from personal experience? Simply “raise your rates” isn’t enough detail here so panelists should be prepared so share a few of their tips. 🙂

This is meant to be a blunt and straight-forward talk on the challenges of entering the WordPress space. This space is not all unicorns and rainbows – at least not anymore. Business and ideas fail in this space just like any other. Panelists should come with pros and cons of being in the WordPress space, and what they would do if WordPress’s dominance in the CMS/etc. space decreases. This is not mean to be a negative subject but a realistic one, and panelists represent different viewpoints (freelancer, small, large businesses, plugin/theme shops).

You can offer the most amazing product or service in the world, but if you can’t find hungry consumers, what’s the point?

That’s where a dash of effective marketing can change everything. Marketing isn’t the big, intimidating process you might think.

In this session, we’re serving up marketing morsels that anyone can enjoy. You’ll leave with the recipe for adding marketing to your mix.

Updated topics will be added here soon.

Learn more about “Ask The Expert” sessions here.

A chance to ask any questions to the Learn JavaScript Deeply speakers.

GraphQL is a data query language developed by Facebbok that provides a powerful alternative to traditional REST.

In this session I will provide a walkthrough of the GQL architecture and community, including:

– The differences and benefits of GraphQL vs REST
– Demonstrate GQL queries (your first 15 minutes with GQL)
– See how to query `through` your data
– Discuss schema design and architecture
– GQL client alternatives

This session will be technical in nature, but focused on fundamentals. I want you to leave the session with a
good understanding key concepts.

A chance to ask any questions to the Learn JavaScript Deeply speakers.

This panel helps to convey what it takes to build an agency from scratch or a few freelancers. How does one get an agency started? What are the things you need before or as you start? What are the biggest keys to success and the toughest lessons to remember?

This is meant to be a blunt and straight-forward talk on the challenges of entering the WordPress space. This space is not all unicorns and rainbows – at least not anymore. Business and ideas fail in this space just like any other. Panelists should come with pros and cons of being in the WordPress space, and what they would do if WordPress’s dominance in the CMS/etc. space decreases. This is not mean to be a negative subject but a realistic one, and panelists represent different viewpoints (freelancer, small, large businesses, plugin/theme shops).

A chance to ask any questions to the Learn JavaScript Deeply speakers.

Just about any moderately complex WordPress plugin requires some sort of administrative interface. In many cases, your code for this UI could benefit from the flexibility and power provided by the React JavaScript library, but integrating React with the WordPress admin brings its own set of challenges. From developer tools, to data persistence, to extensibility, we’ll explore some of these challenges and the solutions we’ve developed at Modern Tribe as we’ve used React to build elegant administrative user experiences in WordPress.

Making React applications play nicely with the WordPress admin involves a number of tricks and workarounds. I’ll cover topics such as integration with the TinyMCE editor, communication with WP’s existing JS libraries, setting up developer tools such as hot module reloading, and persisting data in the WP database.

No matter what kind of website you have, people need to be able to find it, like it and then trust it before you can take any advantage of its existence. To achieve these three things you need to be on a constant watch out. Is your website live and accessible? Is it fast enough or visitors lose patience waiting for your page to open? In this talk, I will show you how to measure, optimize and prepare to scale resources to guarantee the availability and performance of your WordPress website.

This talk would focus on how to use online services, like SalesForce, Evernote, Google and others and combine them with apps like Scannable, Expensify, ect.; automating tasks via IFTTT or Zapier so you can automatically create digital assets, input expense and contact data and track events and tasks to make a small business a productivity take off.

It would also include some WordPress Plugins that help specifically with keeping the small business social media involvement current and active.

This talk is not a review of how these services, apps and plug-ins work and are set up, it is an example of how you can use them to automate processes and tasks that you do in your business every day, to free up more time to work on the core mission of your business.

Solving the productivity puzzle takes real world examples from my day-to-day operations and lays out a roadmap on how to automate your business processes.

In this presentation specially designed for freelance web designers and developers, you’ll learn how and why to educate your clients on using and updating their WordPress site after launch. You’ll walk away knowing how a focus in education throughout the whole process can benefit both you and your client, as well as how to actually go about training the client on a one-on-one basis.

CSS-Tricks has been on WordPress since day one. July 4, 2007. There is no shortage of other CMS’s out there. They come in and out of fashion almost as commonly as JavaScript frameworks. Even WordPress itself seems to go in and out of fashion. I’m sure glad I picked WordPress early on and have stuck with it, because it has served me well and always feels like the right choice.

This talk is for anyone who is out there trying to find and win new business. Applying these steps and principles to your business can help you grow if you’re ready to get out there and make the change. Every company’s biggest challenge is finding and closing sales.

This joint talk will dive into and provide guidance on this common struggle for big companies, small companies and freelancers alike. emagine’s Business Development & Sales team is on the front lines of finding the companies they want to work with, attracting the right contacts, nurturing prospects and closing the deal. They know first-hand it’s not an easy task, but they also know it’s not impossible.

Strategies and tactics are constantly changing, but making it about your prospect (and not completely about you and your business) can go a long way in a world of standardized sales emails and boilerplate proposals.

This talk is for anyone who is out there trying to find and win new business. Applying these steps and principles to your business can help you grow if you’re ready to get out there and make the change. Every company’s biggest challenge is finding and closing sales.

This joint talk will dive into and provide guidance on this common struggle for big companies, small companies and freelancers alike. emagine’s Business Development & Sales team is on the front lines of finding the companies they want to work with, attracting the right contacts, nurturing prospects and closing the deal. They know first-hand it’s not an easy task, but they also know it’s not impossible.

Strategies and tactics are constantly changing, but making it about your prospect (and not completely about you and your business) can go a long way in a world of standardized sales emails and boilerplate proposals.

Plugins are what lets WordPress power so much of the web – all kinds of customizability in only a few clicks! Let’s talk about the WordPress Plugin ecosystem, learn how to identify good plugins from bad ones, and compare paid versus free plugins. I’ll also share my top list of awesome plugins to push WordPress way past a simple blog.

Are you a freelancer? Or thinking of taking the plunge? I want to share with you the processes I now use to win clients and the process of taking a client from a lead to project delivery.

▪Incoming Leads
▪Qualifying Leads
▪Client Meetings
▪Writing Proposals/Contracts
▪Educating clients and anti follow-up
▪Onboarding
▪Delivery
▪Referral Machine
▪Recurring Revenue

I’ll also cover some great tools and systems along the way.

WordPress and Drupal are two leading content management platforms on the web. They have similarities in community and architectures, but they also have remarkable differences in the same.

In this session I’ll go through community, contribution, architecture, and open source differences and lessons including:

• Community similarities and differences
• Plugin / Module conceptual and architectural differences
• Differences in the communities’ approach to open source and contribution
• Lessons that can be learned and adapted from all of the above.

This will not be an overly technical session, but will be suitable for anyone looking to learn from “off the WordPress island”.

Over 150 people came together one October to build 48 custom WordPress websites for 48 non-profits in 48 hours. Learn how we built the custom fundraising system that empowered these organizations to accept online donations and mobilize their communities to start their own fundraising campaigns just like charity: water — in less than two hours with zero custom code. And take away some tips for how you, too, can quickly and efficiently build custom business applications at a fraction of the cost using WordPress.

Over 150 people came together one October to build 48 custom WordPress websites for 48 non-profits in 48 hours. Learn how we built the custom fundraising system that empowered these organizations to accept online donations and mobilize their communities to start their own fundraising campaigns just like charity: water — in less than two hours with zero custom code. And take away some tips for how you, too, can quickly and efficiently build custom business applications at a fraction of the cost using WordPress.

Whether you’re brand new to WordPress or a season developer, web security is everyone’s responsibility. Utilizing black box scanning tools, find out what types of information your WordPress site is leaking, how attackers can use this information to compromise your site and steps you can take to mitigate this risk.

From Subscriber to Administrator, WordPress comes with a variety of roles and capabilities to both grant and restrict access to various functionality within a site. But what if you need to step outside the defaults?

This advanced developer talk with plenty of code samples will show you how to create new roles within WordPress, how to create new capabilities and grant roles access, as well as fine-tuning capabilities using filters.

This talk is for absolute beginners who would like to start their journey into the World of WordPress. I will speak on how I went from zero experience in creating WordPress websites to confidently creating and customizing new websites in a short amount of time and how you can learn to do the same.

WordPress can seem daunting to the non-initiated. That is why during the talk you will learn valuable tips that would make your first (or ongoing) WordPress experience more pleasant. You will learn how to go from Zero to Zen in WordPress.

We have all been at events where the panelists talk forever and then take a few questions that really just direct off stage where the value is not shared. At WordCamp Miami, we want you to be able to bring real question and put the panelists on the spot to get real answers. Over the course of Scott’s, Sherry’s, and Karim’s Session’s we will be collecting via Slack and Twitter, some real world case studies from our audience and will offer in-depth answers from our panelists.

As WordPress enters its teenage years, our community is no longer just thinking about startup mode. Entrepreneurs are trying to figure out longevity, and how to build a long lasting business. Karim brings the perspective of 23 years of building and leading digital teams from 30 to 300. Immersed in the WordPress ecosystem the last 5 years, Karim has seen some trends that worked against the traditional silicon valley idea’s of success. Are we a special snowflake, does Open Source make a difference in Start-up longevity?

In leading this discussion, Karim will build on the topics of the morning talks by Scott Mann and Sherry Walling. We have invited Rebecca Gill and Jon Brown, who both have many years in business before joining our community, to create a panel that collectively brings hundreds of years of business experience to the WordPress ecosystem and our community.

This presentation will discuss both the how and why of SEO, as well as how it relates to business owners, bloggers, and WordPress developers.

SEO plugins are awesome tools within WordPress, but they are only a small part of a structured SEO process. To be successful in SEO, you have to go beyond basic content creation and WordPress plugins.

This discussion will review: key questions to ask, the importance of user intent and keyword selection, the benefits of site mapping, then wrap up with a review of on-page tactics and how they relate to popular SEO plugins.

This panel helps to convey what it takes to build an agency from scratch or a few freelancers. How does one get an agency started? What are the things you need before or as you start? What are the biggest keys to success and the toughest lessons to remember?

If the thought of marketing and selling to new clients terrifies you and makes you just want to lock yourself in a closet.. this talk is for you. As techies, we are about 75% introverts, some more than others. You will learn 6 keys to closing without “Badgering”, and clever ways to “beef up” your bottom line.

If the thought of marketing and selling to new clients terrifies you and makes you just want to lock yourself in a closet.. this talk is for you. As techies, we are about 75% introverts, some more than others. You will learn 6 keys to closing without “Badgering”, and clever ways to “beef up” your bottom line.

If you are a theme / plugin business owner trying to promote your product – presumably, you’ve had your share of ups and downs. With over 12 WordPress Themes and Plugins stores, Shilpa & team have tasted success as well as a reasonable amount of failure with their marketing efforts.
This session will focus on what worked for them and what didn’t – mistakes, that others would do well to avoid.

Email Marketing is tricky at best but what works very well for most organizations. But sending far too many emails , too few emails, poor messaging can shrink your email list faster than you are building it. This talk will share tips to help you come up with the right strategy for your business.

A skewed understanding of who your customer is can be disastrous – and building a product for someone you don’t really know, even more so. Besides nudging you to do some serious introspection, the other areas this session will cover are – articulating your product offering clearly, getting your sales pitch right, optimizing on your conversion rate.

It doesn’t matter if you are a seasoned marketer or simply thinking of launching your own product, this interactive session, peppered with real-life examples, will give you enough food for thought.

While you can use BuddyPress to create a feature packed community site in mere minutes, it is often overwhelming for both administrators and users alike. I’ll share some tools and techniques that you can use to build your BuddyPress community while maintaining your sanity.

The Total Wellness Challenge is an online lifestyle, fitness and nutrition “game” created by Design TLC and One Big Idea using BuddyPress, MemberPress and creative problem solving.

This talk will describe the history of the development of this online game, beginning with Google Sheets on a simple WordPress website, to a more elaborate custom plugin that incorporates BuddyPress into the MemberPress on a new WordPress Multisite platform.

Tara Claeys of Design TLC will talk about the approach and process taken to create this website, the challenges faced, solutions created, and lessons learned. The presentation will not delve into code details but will talk about the strategic decisions behind software choices, the configuration and relationship between the different plugins used.

If you are interested in how BuddyPress can be used in extended, creative ways, or if you are interested in fitness, nutrition and lifestyle improvements you will enjoy this talk!

Design is not about making things pretty. Design is about solving problems for your audience. As designers, it’s easy to fall to the temptation of designing something that we “like”, instead of what the user needs. How can we recognize our bias and determine how we need to reframe our design strategy for each audience in order for a successful creative project?

This panel helps to convey what it takes to build an agency from scratch or a few freelancers. How does one get an agency started? What are the things you need before or as you start? What are the biggest keys to success and the toughest lessons to remember?

While this “sales and marketing” panel is intended for small business and agencies, lessons learned can also apply to the freelancer or the developer looking to make a business from plugins. What are the right AND wrong ways? What lessons can our panelists share from personal experience? Simply “raise your rates” isn’t enough detail here so panelists should be prepared so share a few of their tips. 🙂

How I used the Internet (and WordPress) to build a seven-figure a year business with no money in the bank. My journey has taken me from freelancing and client services to digital products, online courses and building communities. WordPress has been my constant tool of choice and has allowed me to build a great business and live a rich life.

Every small business owner needs to be a master of their craft, but they also have to master all aspects of their business, including project management, marketing, sales, finances, customer service, time management, and more. In this talk, you will learn about desktop/web apps, mobile apps, and other hacks that will make you run your business professionally and efficiently, while not breaking the bank.

Whether you’re a developer, a designer, or just a user, you’re a potential user for Page Builders. This lightening talk will be a explanation for those who are looking for ways to when and where you have the benefits of use it.

Finding the best way to organize your code is one of the hardest parts of coding custom plugins and themes. Determining the best way to architect your code can prevent nightmare situations from surfacing in the feature. No more taking forever to add new features! No more breaking unrelated pieces of code that haven’t been touched! No more nightmares when refactoring code for compatibility with a recent WordPress update! In this talk, we’ll cover the concepts that make for a clean architecture through various examples of implementation techniques.

Using “Content Marketing” to grow your business in 2017 is virtually a necessity.

The most effective content marketers use a strategic approach to ensure that the time, energy and money they invest in developing content has a measurable return on investment (ROI).

Furthermore, for content to be effective, we often find that we need to distribute it in multiple ways: the web, social media channels, and email, just to name a few.

In this session, we’ll talk about how to translate your content marketing strategy into real results for your business, including:

* How to continuously improve your content based upon insights from your analytics & other sources
* How to ensure your content gets the visibility it needs (major starting hint: use WordPress!!)
* How to promote and “atomize” your content to get the maximum return on investment!

This will be jam-packed with useful tips and insights, and it’s a near certainty that we’ll need to continue Q&A at the Happiness Bar!

If you’re a self-starting entrepreneur with a potential product – whether it is a physical good, your expertise as a service, or the content you want to create for a blog – and you’re trying to figure out how to sell it but have no clue where to start, this talk is for you. In the shortest amount of time imaginable, we will cover how to sell anything – your crafts, products, services, content, digital downloads, and even request donations – using WordPress.

This talk will take you through the major “tools of the trade” of ecommerce in the context of WordPress as 1) a portal for collecting payments or leads and 2) maximizing your marketing investment using third-party tools that work well with WordPress. In less than an hour, you will gain a high level understanding of the toolkit that is enabling people around the world to sell anything using WordPress.

While this “sales and marketing” panel is intended for small business and agencies, lessons learned can also apply to the freelancer or the developer looking to make a business from plugins. What are the right AND wrong ways? What lessons can our panelists share from personal experience? Simply “raise your rates” isn’t enough detail here so panelists should be prepared so share a few of their tips. 🙂

This is meant to be a blunt and straight-forward talk on the challenges of entering the WordPress space. This space is not all unicorns and rainbows – at least not anymore. Business and ideas fail in this space just like any other. Panelists should come with pros and cons of being in the WordPress space, and what they would do if WordPress’s dominance in the CMS/etc. space decreases. This is not mean to be a negative subject but a realistic one, and panelists represent different viewpoints (freelancer, small, large businesses, plugin/theme shops).

You can offer the most amazing product or service in the world, but if you can’t find hungry consumers, what’s the point?

That’s where a dash of effective marketing can change everything. Marketing isn’t the big, intimidating process you might think.

In this session, we’re serving up marketing morsels that anyone can enjoy. You’ll leave with the recipe for adding marketing to your mix.

If you are interested in building a social network mobile app with BuddyPress this session is for you. We will be showing how to build a native mobile application that can be submitted to the app stores using BuddyPress and AppPresser, a framework for building mobile apps with WordPress. At the end of this session you should be able to get started building BuddyPress powered mobile apps.

A chance to ask any questions to the Learn JavaScript Deeply speakers.

In this talk we will cover topics such as React setup with webpack & babel, component hierarchy and how to use a store (redux) to communicate with the back end. Examples will include creating a todo app from scratch and you will walk away with an understanding on how redux makes writing React components simpler and easier.

WordPress 4.7 dropped late last year with a host of great new features, particularly content endpoints for the WP REST API built into core.

This talk will discuss what types of agency projects are a good fit for the REST API—and which aren’t. We’ll also dive into some practical use cases and real-world examples to see the power of the WordPress REST API first-hand.

With all the buzz around the REST API maybe it’s been awhile since you took a look at WordPress core’s JavaScript-driven single page application (SPA), the customizer. In this talk we will explore how to use the customizer to improve the user experience, explore how the customizer has evolved, and look at the future of the customizer.

Want to give the WordPress admin area some professional polish? Want to make it super easy for your clients to locate and work with their most critical data? How about making it super easy for your client to contact you? This talk will provide theme developers with ideas to do just that along with the PHP code snippets to make it a reality. Take the WordPress admin experience to the next level!

The purpose of this talk is to compare & contrast the two most popular open source directories and see what we can learn from each other. Topics covered:

– Navigation
– Search engine
– Standalone vs embedded directory
– Update handling and serving
– Level of directory team supervision
– Status of commercial plugins
– Way of developing the directory and possible ways of contributing

Do you dread deploying new WordPress code for clients? *raises hand* It’s weird to feel that way. Deploying WordPress code isn’t rocket science after all (or maybe it is and no one told me!).

It tends to come down to opening our favorite FTP client and pressing the upload button. Easy-peasy, right? Of course, not! (Things are never that easy…) You’re also refreshing the web page in the browser while praying that you don’t get a white screen of death.

It doesn’t have to be that way. You can deploy your WordPress code with confidence! It just comes down to creating the proper workflows and the right automation.

This is what you’ll learn in this talk. We’ll go over what makes a successful deployment workflow. You’ll also get an overview of the tools that you can use to automate deployments. It’s everything that you need to get started on your quest for safer WordPress deployments!

In this session we will discuss the current state of UX and go over examples of UX done right. We will talk about what works, what the future holds, the process of creating websites people love to use, and ways to improve user experience.

It’s up to the design/development team to take lead and create amazing UX. In this workshop we will discuss taking that lead. The better the user experience, the more people will want to use and stay on your website. How many times have you loved using a website so much, you recommended it to a friend? Let’s build more of those websites and experiences.

Is social media impacting your happiness and productivity? People usually spend 3-4 hours every day on their smartphones. Fear of missing out, plagues a huge number of social media users. This session will give you the tools and balance you need to effectively use social media for your business and personal life. Learn how to live a happier life by understanding the research behind “Social Media and Happiness”.

A chance to ask any questions to the Learn JavaScript Deeply speakers.

In this talk, WordPress educator Zac Gordon goes over many of the popular JavaScript libraries and frameworks (jQuery, Backbone, Ember, Angular and React) and discusses various use cases for each one. Of course, the talk also includes emphasis on some vanilla JS knowledge a WordPress dev should have.

A chance to ask any questions to the Learn JavaScript Deeply speakers.

Ever try to integrate 3rd party code and it didn’t work because callbacks? Callbacks are probably the most treacherous concept in all of JavaScript. Join us in exploring the theory behind callbacks and asynchronous code while we try to integrate with YouTube’s IFrame Player API.

In this track you’ll learn the anatomy of a landing page. The design layout, what copy to write, images, call-to-action-, best forms to use and much more. In addition, you’ll find out how to optimize and market your landing page.

Learn the hidden tips, tricks and best practices about how to make more money and avoid mistakes with your eCommerce stores, directly from the people who made them.

Although focus is on WordPress platform users this talk if for anyone who uses an eCommerce platform, even if its not WordPress (Shopify, SquareSpace, etc.) and that can generally benefit from the experiences and lessons from the panelists.

An insightful interview with several youths ages 6-14. The focus? How they publish on the web in 2017.

What tools do they use? What are their friends using, and why? Do they publish with WordPress?

Why are these questions important to the larger WordPress community? Because it’s vital for current WordPress users, developers, and product maker to know what the next generation is using. When it comes to technology, you don’t adapt – you die. And getting an insight to how youth is publishing on the web is one way to figure that out.

The following are our guests for the Kid’s Panel on Sunday. We’re excited to have them with us and ready to talk with the next generation of Tech and Publishing!

Jayda Washington-Boothe (Age: 9)

Jayda is a 3rd-grade honor-roll student at Manatee Bay Elementary. She has been coding since Kindergarten using ScratchPad, Code, Office365’s SWAY to build structures for Minecraft. She has recently started using WordPress and is a proud member of Black Girls Code- Miami Chapter.

When she is not involved in STEM activities, you will find Jayda running Track and Field, active with The Faith Center Ministries Youth Department, Hip-Hop and Jazz Dance Classes, and The Broward County Mayor’s Chess Challenge.

Her future dream is to run Track and Field in the Olympics, become an engineer, and own and build her own mansion and homeless shelter.

Victoria Dameus (Age: 15)

Victoria was introduced to coding by her computer teacher at 13 years old, she describes herself as competitive smart and funny. She fell in love with coding at Lauderhill 6-12 and started volunteering with Oracle. She has participated in multiple code competitions before and her favorite one was where she had a chance to team up with her best friends and they won the competition!

With the help of CodeCademy Victoria learned how to code websites using HTML, Html5, CSS, Bootstrap, Python, and JavaScript.

Victoria is originally from Haiti and is now in the 10th Grade. When she grows up she hopes to be a web designer/programmer, and a software developer.

Alicia Eugene (Age: 16)

Alicia started coding as a Freshman at Lauderhill 6-12. She is now a Sophomore and likes creating websites with HTM, CSS, Bootstrap and JavaScript.

Alicia began her coding experience through a school event and found she really enjoyed it. When she starting coding competitions against her classmates she realized she was really good at it too. Not long after Alicianbegan volunteering at Oracle and continues to help on the weekends as assistant Coach at least once a month.

Alicia hopes to start learning the Java language soon and looks forward to studying Computer Science in College. She is excited about continuing to learn more code and earn money with her skills.

Titus Brinley (Age: 8)

Titus owns Theta Creative, a business he started to help pay for his karate training. Last year Titus used WordPress to expand the reach of the goods he sells to a larger market. He has sold a wide variety of items ranging from cookies to pincushions, greeting cards, and stuffed Wapuus!

Titus is the creator of the Original Plush Wapuu and posts to the Twitter account @PlushWapuu. He also loves karate and penguins.

Business Twitter: @thetacreative

With plugin, theme and core updates coming out on a continual basis, keeping your websites updated and secure can be a daunting task. Steven’s presentation will focus on tools and processes to ease the burden of managing multiple WordPress websites and keeping everything secure, backed up and safe.

The success of small- and medium-sized technology consulting businesses is heavily dependent on how the front-line consultants are perceived by potential clients. This personal/professional branding relies on communicating several key factors such as Expertise, Ethics, Effectiveness, and Efficiency. In this presentation, my goal is to move your personal brand, as well as your organizational brand, to where it needs to be to not only attract the right clientele or employers, venture capitalists, etc., but also to allow you to command the type and amount of compensation that will allow you to meet your various goals. We’ll discuss the What, the Why, and the all-important How to make sure that the right people understand your expertise in the right way.

A chance to ask any questions to the Learn JavaScript Deeply speakers.

Learn how to make use of post endpoints of the WordPress REST API using the VueJS framework. This talk will provide an introduction to VueJS, a relatively simple, yet extremely powerful JavaScript framework. We will use WordPress data, via the WordPress REST API, to create practical examples of how to use VueJS to edit and show a post, create posts lists and switch between them using the Vue router.

Learn the hidden tips, tricks and best practices about how to make more money and avoid mistakes with your eCommerce stores, directly from the people who made them.

Although focus is on WordPress platform users this talk if for anyone who uses an eCommerce platform, even if its not WordPress (Shopify, SquareSpace, etc.) and that can generally benefit from the experiences and lessons from the panelists.

Being a freelancer or working for an agency is hard. It seems like you’re always under pricing your projects and you have to put in extra hours just to finish the project. Or you’re over pricing your projects and your clients are upset at what they got. I’ll show you how to scope projects (in particular e-commerce projects) so that you and your clients are happy with the results and you both want to work together after the project.

When one freelancer prices themselves incorrectly, it makes your fellow service providers look dishonest and it sets up unrealistic expectations for customers.

In short, poor pricing strategies hurt everyone! Remove yourself from the clearance rack and come learn how to develop a competitive and profitable pricing strategy. (Bring your calculators!)

Behind the scenes look at the exact process and workflows we use to create hundreds of articles a month that generate over 200 million pageviews annually and power our multi-million dollar business.

You will learn:

• How to come up with blog post ideas that your audience wants to read.
• How to use systems and processes to better organize your workflow.
• How to optimize your content for maximum conversions.

Learn the tricks designers use to make websites attractive and effective. We’ll teach you the Most Important Question designers ask their clients, and how you can use it to your advantage when doing it yourself. Then, learn practical ways to apply it yourself to create attractive sites (using good design principles and simple rules for success) and effective sites (through basic exercises that help you develop and showcase your primary call to action).

Darkness is an old friend, and Orlando WordPress developer Adam Soucie has come to talk with you about it. He has battled depression, bipolar disorder, and come to terms with being on the transgender spectrum for over 15 years. He lived to tell the tale, so in this talk, Adam will share his story of how he hit rock bottom, got help from professionals, medication, and the WordPress community, and is now thriving running a WordPress business. Bring an open mind and maybe a couple tissues. This one’s going to get emotional.

We’ll start off BuddyCamp with an introduction to BuddyPress for new users. We will walk through the steps of installing BuddyPress, some considerations to make when integrating BuddyPress into existing sites, and some caveats for usage.

Next, we will walk through the main features of BuddyPress, and discuss how members, groups, messages, and forums can be used. A few examples of BuddyPress based sites will be introduced, and recommendations on useful themes and plugins will be given.

The REST API can be used for so much more than front-end theme work, which is what many early demos used it for. Having used the API for lots of back-end work lately, Shawn will show you some of the things that he’s implemented at Actionable.co in hopes that you’ll start using the REST API in your next project.

We have all been at events where the panelists talk forever and then take a few questions that really just direct off stage where the value is not shared. At WordCamp Miami, we want you to be able to bring real question and put the panelists on the spot to get real answers. Over the course of Scott’s, Sherry’s, and Karim’s Session’s we will be collecting via Slack and Twitter, some real world case studies from our audience and will offer in-depth answers from our panelists.

This panel helps to convey what it takes to build an agency from scratch or a few freelancers. How does one get an agency started? What are the things you need before or as you start? What are the biggest keys to success and the toughest lessons to remember?

While this “sales and marketing” panel is intended for small business and agencies, lessons learned can also apply to the freelancer or the developer looking to make a business from plugins. What are the right AND wrong ways? What lessons can our panelists share from personal experience? Simply “raise your rates” isn’t enough detail here so panelists should be prepared so share a few of their tips. 🙂

As WordPress enters its teenage years, our community is no longer just thinking about startup mode. Entrepreneurs are trying to figure out longevity, and how to build a long lasting business. Karim brings the perspective of 23 years of building and leading digital teams from 30 to 300. Immersed in the WordPress ecosystem the last 5 years, Karim has seen some trends that worked against the traditional silicon valley idea’s of success. Are we a special snowflake, does Open Source make a difference in Start-up longevity?

In leading this discussion, Karim will build on the topics of the morning talks by Scott Mann and Sherry Walling. We have invited Rebecca Gill and Jon Brown, who both have many years in business before joining our community, to create a panel that collectively brings hundreds of years of business experience to the WordPress ecosystem and our community.

Your clients aren’t clients. They aren’t partners. They aren’t customers. They’re your GUESTS. And you’ve invited them into your magical world of WordPress where impossible things happen and there’s an entirely new language to learn. Let’s talk about practical real-world examples of how making them feel welcome and giving them a better experience can have an unbelievably positive impact on your business and our community.

Do you know what is available in PHP 7.1? Do you know how it changes how we build websites? If you are still a procedural and don’t plan on changing, skip this session. Otherwise, join us for a 20 minute whirlwind tour of the new tools in your toolbox.

This session is all about kids and code. We will discuss why you should teach your kids to code. We will cover how to teach your kids to code. We will even talk about how to keep your young bloggers safe online. We will cover resources and what you as a parent, or teacher need to know to make sure your child is ready for the future in code.

There are a lot of tools from Fail2ban to firewalls that go beyond the code and WordPress itself to protect your website. This talk will focus on implementing solutions to secure your web server and related components in order to make sure that there are no holes anywhere else that could compromise even the most updated sites and vigilant site owners. This talk is appropriate for developers and site owners that have full control of the server their WordPress site runs on.