WordCamp Orlando 2016

Important perspectives on growing your solopreneur efforts into an agency, while working at home. WordPress and the modern distributed work model offer us great flexibility of time, schedule, location and environment. But this new freedom comes at a price. We must learn new skill sets of productivity and resources to succeed. The lines of family and business are often blurry. This is especially true for WordPress Moms and Dads. Hear my personal story of business and family growth along with practical suggestions to navigate your own path of expansion.

WordPress is a powerful platform however one of the often overlooked powers of WordPress is how well it integrates with other products. We will look at some of the build in functions WordPress has that make this easy and efficient.

Managing WordPress products contains some unique challenges and I want to share my perspective for creating and managing a successful product. Whether your product has 50 customers or millions of customers, these practices will scale with your business.

While there may rarely be a best way to do something, there’s almost always better ways. Let’s look at some code and see what could be done to improve it: higher confidence, fewer bugs, and more rapid iteration.

Every site needs a great looking contact form. For many sites, the contact form is a key step in generating leads and making sales. This talk will cover what you need to know to make contact forms that look good on any device, convert well and start a conversation with your potential customers.

Ever feel overwhelmed by all your images? Do you find yourself re-uploading the same image over and over again because you can’t find it? Ever wish you had a couple preset sizes that just worked? How about an easy way to fix the half face auto-crop? Then this talk is for you, We will be review the plugins that our agency uses on our clients’ sites to make their jobs easier. Live demos too!

John will provide information and lessons he has learned as a WordPress user, using the various tools and resources available through the WordPress Community, tell his personal story of using WordPress to go from building one basic site to now building and maintaining multiple WordPress sites.

Learn how themes work, how to choose a theme, and customizing a theme to fit your needs.

No cowboy coding here! Learn how to set up a safe, offline work environment to test and refine your work.

Your site won’t be complete without thinking about accessibility (A11y) and security.  Learn best practices for site security and how to make your site accessible to the masses!

Learn how to create and add functionality to a child theme that fits your site’s needs.

Carol Gann will cover how to install WordPress hardened and to maintain security. Chip Keefer will cover WordPress server security and what is important to look for in a WordPress hosting environment.

In this presentation, Matt Hunt from Afteractive and David Yarde from Sevenality will share some of their past project and client experiences. What makes a WordPress project uniquely qualified to go out-of-scope? For most people, there’s going to be projects that inevitably go over budget. As a designer or developer you always want to say ‘yes, it can be done’. And before you know it, you’ve doubled your project workload before the scope of work is considered complete. If you’re the client, you may not be sure why something is out-of-scope.

We will give insights on qualifying a client early on. We’ll dive into strategies on how client eduction can help with managing scope expectations. You’ll walk away with a few strategies to keep yourself from getting burned. And if you’re going to be the client, you’ll learn how important these expectations are for a successful project and a great relationship with your designer or developer.

Have you wondered how your competitors websites have 20,000+ visitors a month? In this session, we will discover the best business practices for building keyword studies in your client’s industry. We will show how to properly research: your clients ‘suggested phrases’, their competitor phrases, and their industries high traffic keyword results. By charting the traffic and activity on websites and social mediums, you can build a solid design and marketing strategy utilizing the correct keywords.

Learn the basics of the dashboard and navigation, including menus, media, content, and more!

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 can have an unbelievably positive impact on your business and our community.

Accounting and Tax are not often welcomed words in the creative world of WordPress. Do you need accounting? Are you making money? What happens if you never receive a 1099? How do you choose the right software? Whether you are a freelancer, independent contractor or business owner, this talk is built with you in mind to educate you on the industry, sprinkled with helpful nuggets to keep Uncle Sam at bay.

Whether your selling items on your website or trying to catch leads, you have a conversion funnel. Understanding the path and drop off points in that path are the key to success to optimize your conversion funnel. We will talk about the easiest ways to track this funnel and how to make sense of all the data you have collected. We will even talk about methods to discover why your users are dropping off and the most affective ways to address it. This talk will also look at the different tools including Google Analytics, HotJar, Mixpanel and Kissmetrics and how each of them help you track your conversion funnel.

Learn how to set up a new WordPress install. Includes help with hosting environments and initial safety settings.

Being your own boss can be awesome. It can also be a TON of extra work since you not only have to do your job (you know the one you are good at? The one you love?) But also the jobs of about 15 other people! Even if you are doing freelance on the side hoping to go full time some day, or if you are already freelancing full time and are feeling overwhelmed with all those other jobs, then I have solutions! After 10 years in the IT/Creative freelance world, I have learned a few tools along the way. I want to share them with you. They will save you time, money and eliminate so much unnecessary stress!

WordPress isn’t just blogging software. Learn how to extend WordPress to other innovative uses and get the most out of your website!

We start with everyone’s favorite WordPress plugin, “Hello, Dolly”. With a dramatic wave of our hands, we speak the magical word: “Refactor!” Let’s see how far we can go.

Sure, “Hello, Dolly” doesn’t do anything practical for your site, but the plugin does provide a simple introduction to the power of the WordPress plugin API. Even this encapsulation of a generation’s hope and enthusiasm could benefit from a refresh, going beyond procedural code to demonstrate the intersection of the plugin API with modern development best practices. Learn about object-oriented design, dependency injection, automated tests, and more as we apply SOLID principles to WordPress’s most venerable plugin.

Nobody likes waiting for a slow site. You have less than 5 seconds to engage your customer before they leave. With users increasingly on the go and having mobile connections of varying speeds, page-delivery performance has become more critical.

In this presentation we’ll go over tips and techniques that will dramatically increase your page load times.

In detail we’ll cover: why speed is important, how you can measure it, how you can compare your page speed to your competitors, and ways to improve it.

We’ll also discuss HTTP/2 protocol and how it can benefit website performance.

There are thousands of plugins. Learn about some of the best and how to install and control them on your site.

You know how to build a WordPress theme, you’ve written your share of plugins, you know all the secrets to transform a WordPress site into the application you need it to be. But do you struggle to distinguish between navy and midnight blue? Do you flip a coin to choose between Open Sans or Lato? Perhaps it’s time to work with an expert in web design, a professional who can enhance both the beauty and the usability of your creations. In this session we’ll discuss the importance of designers to WordPress development, how to decide when you need one, and how to find one worth working with.

We are currently in a golden age of web development education. Between traditional college degree tracks, bootcamp-style programs, and online schools, there are tools for developers at any stage to learn new skills or build on their existing skill set. But all of the educational tools in the world can’t do the most important part: building something.