WordCamp Portland Maine 2018

A required feature of any website these days is a contact form. There are many free and premium plugins for WordPress that can be used to create simple contact forms, surveys and quizzes, user generated content, email marketing captures, or even complex conditional ecommerce checkouts.

We’ll go through the options in what form plugins will allow you to do to suite your needs. Also, we’ll look at some features that makes your forms easier to fill out than others.

Traditionally, marketing and product design have been thought of as separate roles within many organizations. Often times, a gap is formed between the two, leaving an inconsistent experience from the time a customer is made aware of a product up through the time they’re an actual customer. Whether you’re a freelancer or part of a large company — join me as I dig into the growth funnel (AAARR model—Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue) and explore ways in which you can rapidly iterate in your marketing and product to provide a more cohesive experience for your target demographic.

Come get all your questions answered on building and growing companies from our group of seasoned veterans.

Moderated by Sam Hotchkiss

Come get all your questions answered on building and growing companies from our group of seasoned veterans.

Moderated by Sam Hotchkiss

Personalization, hyper targeting, and segmenting are far from subtle these days. In this session you’ll learn effective marketing techniques to help you actually connect with your users and customers. You’ll see real examples of how I learn about users and do it by providing them with value. We’ll also get hands-on with businesses from the audience discovering real world fair trade marketing opportunities. We’ll identify ways to raise your revenue and make customers happy doing it. And we’ll learn how to create up-sells that actually help users rather than just helping your bottom line.

Let’s stop duplicating the techniques and strategies we see across the Internet. Learn how to listen to your users, they’re already telling you what they need and how to connect with them.

What makes a database query fast or slow? Are WP_Query’s taxonomy queries fast? What about meta queries? In this talk, we’ll dig into the WordPress database schema, talk about what factors influence query performance, and learn how to sniff out potential performance problems before they ever give you a headache. Next, we’ll discuss strategies for refactoring queries to be as performant as possible, caching strategies, and more.

Curious how other WordPress professionals build sites, and what tools they use to get the job done? Two seasoned developers, one frontend, one backend, will go take you through how they approach building WordPress business sites from scratch (including from a starter themes), what priorities matter to them and why, and what software/techniques they use to build great sites.

Psst! Hey, buddy, do you have questions about quotation marks? Issues about italics? Concerns about commas?

If so, join award-winning author and editor Liz Coursen for this fun, fast-paced workshop that will have you writing like an Einstein after 50 minutes! Using real-world internet content, you will learn how to recognize, identify, and avoid the most common editing mistakes made every day by web content writers.

If you were playing hooky the day your high school English class reviewed punctuation and grammar, you will learn most of what you need to know about modern editing if—IF—you come in with one thing: the belief that you can learn the fundamental rules. Come in with an open mind and leave a better writer than 90% of the population! Come in with an open mind and leave a better, more confident writer! Come in with an open mind and leave with portable, permanent skills, actionable skills that will give you a significant edge over your competition!

WordCamp is the place! This is the session!

This topic will be an overview to the leg work to do before you jump into the design and development stage. I will give an introductory talk on site maps, user personas, content guides, and other things to consider about how your website will function before you start designing or developing your site.

As someone who builds WordPress websites for clients, you’ve probably learned that offering (or requiring) monthly maintenance contracts is smart business. It’s likely you’re including core software, plugin and theme updates as part of your maintenance plan, which ensures a steady income stream you can rely on and helps with your financial forecasting. But are you including website security as part of your project proposal and scope?

The security of your clients’ websites is often not a priority or is left till the end of a project (or sale?) as an optional add-on for the client to consider after going live. The value of a strong website security posture can be difficult to explain to clients, but when put in the context of their business and possible loss of revenue, it can become an integral part of your offering that separates you from the rest.

In this session, Adam will cover simple website security best practices that you can implement immediately for your own site and those of your clients. In addition, he’ll also offer advice and examples on how to best present the importance of website security during the proposal, scope, and maintenance package stages to your clients. Not only does this ensure your maintenance plans offer what every website needs, but also presents an additional revenue stream opportunity for your business.

At my job as a web developer at GreenBananaSEO, the senior web developer without notice left the company due to stress. It was now up to me to take on his work and lead the web department. My time management skills were put to the test in order to become the most productive web developer I can possibly be.

The first half of the lesson will be the tips & tricks learned from from the popular time-management books ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen and ‘Eat That Frog’ by Brian Tracy. These tips & tricks can be used by anybody – designers, bloggers, designers, developers, etc.

The second half of the lesson will be how I implemented time management in WordPress development: task management, web maintenance, web development, theme development, plugin use & recommendations, launching sites, creating your own checklists, and more. All of this in order to increase productivity while continuing to build quality sites.

The wp_options database table is the center of all WordPress websites. It stores critical site data and is used on nearly every page in WordPress. However, it’s also very easy for the wp_options table to slow your site to a grinding halt. This talk will review best practices for keeping your wp_options table in check to keep your site performant.

An intro to React JS Framework and how it relates to Gutenberg. We will discuss React Core Concepts such as JSX, compontents and props, state and lifecycle, handling events, and lifting state.

The topic will cover WooCommerce core features that help store owners improve their site performance and sales. Often underutilized or overlooked we are going to look at these features, how to use them, and empower store owners.

Promote Products and Increase Conversions with WooCommerce Core Features

Come get all your questions answered on building and growing companies from our group of seasoned veterans.

Moderated by Sam Hotchkiss

The new visual editor sure does inspire consternation in the WordPress community. As with any disruption, there will be winners and losers in professional world – and lots of questions. Instead of focusing on launch and transition issues, I’ll describe how I believe the fundamentals of the WordPress experience will change for both the end-user AND the professional – and discuss potential opportunities for businesses in the WordPress ecosystem.

Google AMP was announced in 2015 and has been in the headlines for past few years. Many developers find it pretty difficult to adapt this latest technology. Pratik aims to make it simple and easy to understand Google AMP and will walk you through his journey where he and his team built a website using Native AMP and now developing a product that helps you build AMP Stories. Find more about stories here at https://www.ampproject.org/stories/

Gutenberg is making waves in the WordPress community and changing how we compose content forever. So what’s the essential new stuff that Gutenberg brings to content authoring? We’ll focus on the block–the brick that builds our content–and will learn how to build a nifty Gutenberg block from scratch to offer our customers an easy and predictable way to compose their content.

A code review process has lots of benefits. In addition to the many technical and organizational benefits, there are also invaluable opportunities to set team members up to grow and succeed when an effective code review culture is adopted by everyone.

While working at Boston University’s Interactive Design department, Jonathan helped create a code review process that not only met the organization’s technical needs, but also established a culture that encouraged collaboration between designers, developers, and other departments throughout the University through code reviews.

This talk is a guided tour of that new process. We’ll discuss the technical aspects (such as the tools and integrations used), the organizational and workflow aspects, as well as the human factors, which are often ignored but are the most important to establishing a sustainable code review culture that will help your organization flourish.

The security of your WordPress site goes far beyond it’s code and settings. In 2018 and beyond, your online habits and practices make you far more susceptible to being hacked than bad code.

Let’s talk about how to safeguard your entire online identity, and how doing so will help your WordPress site stay safe from hackers and malware. We’ll also talk about some realistic strategies for securing your WordPress install.

In 2014, The University of Maine determined that umaine.edu needed to be taken to the next level. A year later, a robust new website was launched to coincide with the incoming class and our 150th year celebrations. This session details the journey between these two points, and how we avoided common pitfalls in website redesign projects affecting hundreds of content contributors and their individual websites.

Do you struggle to hold your clients’ interest and keep them on task? Do you suffer from scope creep, money chasing and project fatigue (aka, the project the NEVER ENDS!)?

Clients need (and crave!) boundaries, deadlines and – dare I say – gentle harassment. Learn how to automate the process of content collection, nurture your clients throughout the entire web build process and protect your business from committing to another project that never ends!

“Why don’t we just use this plugin?” That’s a question I started hearing a lot in the heady days of the 2000s, when open-source CMSes were becoming really popular. We asked it optimistically, full of hope about the myriad solutions only a download away. As the years passed, we gained trustworthy libraries and powerful communities, but the graveyard of crufty code and abandoned services grew deep. Many solutions were easy to install, but difficult to debug. Some providers were eager to sell, but loath to support.

Years later, we’re still asking that same question—only now we’re less optimistic and even more dependent, and I’m scared to engage with anyone smart enough to build something I can’t. The emerging challenge for today’s dev shop is knowing how to take control of third-party relationships—and when to avoid them. I’ll show you my approach, which is to ask a different set of questions entirely.

WordPress provides many different data structures for storing information. From Post Types to Metadata to Taxonomies to blocks, it can be tough to pick the right tool for each job. In this Example-based talk, we’ll examine several real-world sites with somewhat complex data concerns, and we’ll discuss the advantages offered by various data structures.