Creating a WordPress Website that Works from the Start
Installing WordPress, plugins, and a theme is just a start, but in maintaining and growing your website, you’ve got to make plans. Sure, your initial idea of creating a WordPress site for whatever reason is great, but if you’re trying to get people to either subscribe to your newsletter, share your posts, fill out your lead forms, leave a comment on your posts, click an ad, or buy your stuff, you’ve got more to do.
If you’re not getting some type of return on investment, which is to get people to do something on your website, then your website is broken. Come sit in and let me help you fix your problem by giving you ideas that you can use.
Matt Christensen
Analytics Beyond Page Views
We now live in a data driven world. It is important to know what your site traffic is trying to tell you. Gone are the days of hit counters. To get the most out of your advertising dollars, you need to ‘track all the things’.
In this talk, I will walk through multiple platforms (Google and Adobe) to demonstrate what can be told about the traffic going in and out of your website. Goal setting, campaign tracking, and what various metrics represent will be explained with practical examples.
In addition to reporting and tracking, how to implement an analytics platform in WordPress will be discussed. Adobe DTM and Google tag managers will be explained.
Chris Heine
Marketing Automation – Without it Your Customer Has a Hole In their Marketing
In this age of digital marketing, many if not most business owners consider a website a stand-alone destination. Once it is built, they may just assume that visitors will automatically click, text or call if they are interested. In reality, no matter how much traffic you can drive to your website – whether that is through traditional advertising, digital ads or other business development actions – chances are very good that the largest percentage of visitors are genuinely interested, but not quite ready to buy.
When a website is properly designed to utilize Marketing Automation, your client should be able to segment her or his prospects depending on the product or service they are specifically interested in. This enables the business owner to trigger a series of communications just on that topic – which should make these emails more welcome and more relevant to the consumer. Marketing Automation is a powerful tool to offer your WordPress client – not only that, but you can use it for your business too.
Brian Anderson
My Life Behind Barcodes
As a commonly recognized symbol of commerce and logistics, the barcode is often taken for granted as the most primitive form of middleware. We think of them as tiny printed clipboards that transfer data from one computer to another. Barcodes have a plethora of uses in online transactions.
This talk will focus on building a barcode generating plug-in for wordpress, but will also cover the history of the barcode and how to recognize the various uses of barcode standards.
Mark Dubois
How to Create Graphics When You Are Graphically Challenged
This will be a hands on session. Participants will be exposed to several tools, such as Adobe Spark, to quickly create higher quality graphics and videos for inclusion in their WordPress sites.
High quality content is more important than ever. We will review approaches to generating such content quickly and for free.
Voice is the New Keyboard: Voice Interfaces in 2018 and Beyond
The next generation of devices is here, and they’re all voice enabled. With the rise of technologies like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana, businesses need to think about how to structure their offerings to be compatible with these interfaces. This talk will explore how voice search is influencing SEO and customer acquisition as well as how to adapt to give customers a viable voice-interface option to interact with your services.
We’ll interact with Alexa and Google Assistant live to see how they can take your WordPress site to the next level and provide a unique interface to your content.
David Needham
Intro to Drupal (for WP folks)
Drupal is an open source content management system and is in many ways similar to WordPress. It’s used to make many of the websites and applications you use every day. Over the years Drupal and WordPress have matured alongside each other — borrowing many of the features or techniques that work best along the way. In this session, I’ll offer an introduction to Drupal’s functionality and best use cases while comparing and contrasting what we already know about WordPress.
Key takeaway: “I can be a better developer and site builder by leveraging the diverse community in other open source projects.”
These are the people that make this event happen. They work tirelessly for weeks and months to plan, coordinate, and execute the best event possible. If you get a chance to thank them, please do!
Brandon Wickwire (+ add me)
Erika Knollenberg (+ add me)
Scott Lungwitz (+ add me)
Mark DuBois (+ add me)
Tammy Finch (+ add me)
Details TBD.