WordCamp Omaha 2016

WordPress websites offer the opportunity to make continual data-driven improvements that will improve your rankings and increase your traffic. So how do you know what SEO steps will bring the best return on your investment of time and effort?

This session will look at the essentials at different levels of risk and help you decide what you need to do, what you should skip, and what you should hire done.

A “how-to” on using free resources to design, develop, and launch a killer website that will work for your business. In this talk, we will touch on everything from the goal of your site, to the character it portrays, all while making use of quality free resources such as themes, plugins, fonts and analytics.

Want your words to have an impact? Users gotta find them first! This talk will provide an introduction to the study of information architecture and how you can apply it to your WordPress sites.

You’ve created your WordPress website, now what? Whether you’re a blogger, freelancer, or product business owner the key to a successful website is to keep your visitors (or customers) engaged by reading and sharing your content or coming back to purchases additional products or services.

Email marketing is the answer. But how does that apply to your blog or website and how do you get started with an email marketing plan that actually works?

In this session attendees will learn why email marketing is vital to the success of any website and how you can get started immediately. You’ll learn various ways of integrating an email marketing plan into your WordPress site and how you can start simply and grow your campaigns into a more robust system of automated emails based on different “triggers”.

Speaker: Adam W. Warner

You have to be an expert in your field. If you aren’t, you will fail. But by expert I don’t mean an expert in WordPress. Instead I mean an expert in your client’s field. There are a billion WordPress people. What will separate you from the rest is finding a niche market and going after it with everything you have. The narrower the market, the better.

This is counter-intuitive to startups in the service industry. By the end of this session, participants will know how to start finding their niche, questions they need to be able to answer in order to better serve their market, how to create multiple revenue streams within this market and how to have the the courage to say no to that which doesn’t serve their business.

There are many factors that go into making WordPress fast. Caching, minifying, optimizing, CDN’s, web servers, you name it! We’ll take an in-depth look at all the technologies involved in WordPress performance, and make it a little less daunting to go under the hood and start tuning. Yes, yes! You can haz more performanz, too!

WordPress is a great framework. What can we learn from other frameworks? What’s the most expensive things that can happen on, frankly, any website? In this talk, we’ll take a comparative look at different philosophies, tools, and methods to make WordPress sites blazing fast. After attending, you should be able to understand where bottlenecks can pop up in your sites. If you have questions, I’m open to answer them over coffee via Twitter!

Speaker: William M. Riley

As web designers and developers, we often focus on the technical aspects of our jobs. Unfortunately, many of us struggle with other important parts of a project – business strategies and communication with our clients. These often overlooked pieces of the puzzle, but they are directly correlated with outcomes and how the client feels we did our job.

WordPress security isn’t as difficult as most people think; the leading causes of hacked sites and malware tend to be some combination of misinformation and inaction. This talk aims to show folks how easy it actually is to keep your WordPress site secure, and offers simple steps to prevent issues like hacks and malware from ever occurring with implementations that any WordPress user can handle, from developer to user.

Speaker: Josh Collinsworth

How to present and maintain a secure E-Commerce site. We will go over some details on PCI compliance as well as privacy policy and general web security.

Speaker: Andrew Wikel

When people talk about contributing to an Open Source Software project, the natural assumption is that you have to be contributing code. The WordPress project has a number of ways to contribute code, yes, but there are always ways to give back that focus on teaching, documenting, in-person Meetups and more. Join Josepha to learn ways to get involved with the project that have nothing to do with code and find out where those awesome volunteers are located!

Too often, UX is only considered on the front-end of a WordPress site design. Although that is very important, too many WP Designers/Developers stop there. We are going to go over tricks and methods to make updating and administrating WordPress sites much more user-friendly for the admin/site-owner/client. Using Custom Post Types, the WPDB API and some creative coding, we can make WordPress sites easier for ANY business and/or experience level of user to update and add content specific to their business. After all, content is king, so let’s encourages admins to add more!