WordCamp Omaha 2014

From free extensions to paid, premium, ones, if you offer a product, chances are you will be asked to support using them. We’ll go over tips and advice to best handle these moments as well as some tools to help streamline the process, leaving your customers and users as happy as can be.

“I want social icons here, a color change there, or a image shifted to the left!”

The vast number of WordPress themes available for free and purchase is one of the powerful benefits to choosing to work with it. However, what if the administrative features of your chosen theme do not have the ability to allow you to tweak the one aspect of it you are dying to modify?

Through this informative session, Joshua McNary, a marketing technologist with years of WordPress content and development experience, will share his quick tips for hacking your theme to make it do what you want it to do. Through use of widgets, shortcodes, and some custom CSS editing, you can make changes to your WordPress theme to make it your own.

In my talk, I will discuss developing custom WordPress themes using Artisteer. I will talk about the features each of these programs offer, and how to decide which one is best for you.
Secondly, I will attendees through the entire process of developing a theme with Artisteer.

For the last year and a half I’ve been working on WP E-Signature an expandable WordPress plugin that transforms one page of any WordPress website into a secure, legally binding and easy to use document signing application (but without the monthly fees).

We consulted with hundreds of WordPress site owners (and Pippin Williamson of Easy Digital Downloads) six months too late. Originally I set out to make a “one size fits all” document signing plugin but found out (six months later) people wanted to customize E-Signature. Some needed to automate Terms of Service agreements others wanted Dropbox Sync and auto-responder email campaigns. With six months of development behind us (and thousands of dollars spent on development) I decided to literally start from scratch (based on WordPress community feedback) and put the power of signing documents back in the hands of WordPress site owners. Had we moved forward with this approach from day one we could have saved ALOT of headaches! Hoping to share the love with the community. 🙂

Christoph has built and enhanced a number of successful brands through digital strategies. From his own local news startup, to community groups and his own brand he is passionate about helping community members get engaged by sharing their stories.

Ultimately, this authenticity will help business.

This session will walk through the steps that it takes to live authentically and publicly to build your business.

Developing your WordPress site locally will save you tons of time and prevent that “oops” moment when something breaks on a live site. In this session, we will show you how to utilize tools and incorporate them within your workflow in order to save time and prevent mistakes. We will explain the components needed to create local development sites, show you how to do it by utilizing time-saving techniques and then demonstrate the steps required to deploy your site once complete.

Building a beautiful and functional website is one thing, making sure it gets found online by existing and potential customers is another. It’s estimated 40% of all online search has local intent and there’s a number of steps you can take to optimize your WordPress build for local searches, where most companies find most of their customers.

In the world of print, designers have control over every point and pica, but with all the variables inherent to the web, that same desire for control leads to headaches, frustration, and bad practices. You will learn specific guidelines to let go of that control and design more effectively for the web, as well as how to collaborate with developers to ensure a successful project without all the usual struggles.

People put a lot of effort into putting a website together, but often stumble at the finish line when it comes to making their final design decisions. Learn how seemingly minor design choices have a huge impact on how people interact with and understand the content of your site. We’ll go through specific examples of simple design tweaks that make a big difference.

Learn about various WordPress content types, from meta data to custom post types, and how to effectively store custom data and create relationships with taxonomies. A thorough understanding of content types and relationships allows for pushing WordPress from a blogging system to an app platform.

This talk will focus on preventive maintenance and development when several sites are under your care. I’ll cover a range of topics, from project management apps and code snippets – to version control and descriptive function/method names.

How often do you say “I wish I knew this eight weeks ago!” or constantly worry about scope creep? It happens to all clients, designers, and developers. This talk will examine some common mistakes and pitfalls throughout a project’s lifetime made by everyone involved. Starting with discovery and scope, and discussing everything in between to project delivery, I will discuss what not to do and (hopefully) ways to avoid common mistakes.