Check out the folks who attended WordCamp Raleigh 2018:
You can mark yourself as going to this camp in your account settings!
Crystal Tenan
Andrea Ferguson
We Like Big Buttons & We Cannot Lie: User-Friendly Design Tweaks for Your WordPress Website
Whether you’re designing a new website or updating an old one, user-friendliness is key. Large fonts, big buttons, and strategic color motifs make calls to action obvious.
Help users take the actions you want them to. Help website users be happy.
Happy website users convert to happy customers. Happy customers help your business thrive.
Jen McFarland
GutenReady for the Gutenpocalypse
When Matt Mullenweg announced in December 2017 that Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0 would be ready in just a few short months, we sat up and took notice. Knowing the landscape of our institution – and higher ed’s proclivity for denying change – we started making plans.
From the beginning we were thinking about the full spectrum of WordPress experience: from developers to the one-off content editors. We set to work learning as much as we could about Gutenberg, the user experience, the transition options, and eventually, arrived at our own examination of how Gutenberg could/should/would work at NC State.
Join us as we recap our adventure so far into the world of user testing, communication strategies, site assessments, and overcoming resistance. This is a story of change management as we safely navigate our campus to the other side of the Gutenpocalypse.
Peter La Fond
How a Solid Backup Strategy can Save your Livelihood and Sanity
Website owners dedicate a lot of resources and time for even the most basic of websites. Unfortunately… Servers do fail. Websites get hacked. And crucial website files can accidentally be deleted. Are you and your team prepared for the worst?
Most website owners have a false sense of security in regards to how they’ll recover from a website disaster. Backups are your last line of defense when things go terribly wrong. And, a reliable backup system can be the difference between a care-free day at the park with your family and a mental breakdown.
This talk will approach the idea of ‘Backing Up’ as a strategic disaster recovery system as opposed to a mere copy of website files. We’ll cover concepts like ‘Redundancy’, ‘Single Point of Failure’ and ‘Cold Storage’. If you’re a small business owner or website administrator, then this talk is for you.
Lauren Etheridge and Miles Elliott
The Blockenspiel: Tackling Gutenberg Development
Gutenberg, the new WordPress editor released with version 5.0, represents a substantial departure from the status quo in WordPress development. Heavy on JavaScript and based around reusable “blocks” of content, developing with Gutenberg involves technologies not typically associated with WordPress like React, Node, and JSX.
In this talk, we will cover how the central IT web team at NC State reworked development processes and tools to fit within a GutenWorld. We will discuss changing coding practices, new vocabulary, and cross-departmental collaboration all coming together in a campus-wide Blocks plugin.
Attendees of this talk will come away with strategies for adapting to change and working collaboratively, as well as a framework for developing a set of blocks for your campus.
Intended Audience: Developers
Eric Debelak
Creating Gutenberg Blocks
So you’ve probably heard about Gutenberg, but how do you
create your own interactive, dynamic Gutenberg blocks? I’ll
lead you through a simple example, and cover some advanced topics
like API calls to 3rd party services, server side rendering,
and using custom React components to help you understand the full
capabilities of Gutenberg – and even how to make some advanced blocks
of your own.
Keynote (Bldg EB2 – Rm 1025)
WordPress is awesome. Open Source is great. But what does that mean? It means that this free and open source software is maintained and written by a volunteer labor base. When you contribute to WordPress, that’s you.
With now 30% of the market share, WordPress is scaling fast — as a software and as a community.
In this talk, Bridget Willard will give actionable tips to help us be mindful of our entire health: physical, emotional, and financial.
Micah Wood
Gutenberg For Developers Part 3
Gutenberg, the new WordPress text editor, is currently under development and will be released into WordPress core soon. The goal of this workshop is to prepare you with a solid understanding of how Gutenberg works, how to write Gutenberg blocks, and considerations for theme development.
We’ll start with the technologies that Gutenberg leverages and the APIs that WordPress provides on top of those. Then, we will explore in detail how to build a simple Gutenberg block. There are a few different types of Gutenberg blocks you can create and WordPress provides different components you can leverage, so we will cover that as well. For those who are theme developers, we will make sure you are aware of best practices for integrating with Gutenberg.
In order to optimize your learning, please observe these requirements:
– Familiarity with basic HTML, CSS, and JS or PHP
– Laptop computer
– A local copy of WordPress installed (https://getflywheel.com/layout/local-wordpress-development-environment-how-to/)
– A code editor. We strongly recommend PHPStorm (https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/download/), but Atom (https://atom.io/) will work if you can’t purchase (or the 30-day free trial runs out)
Please try to have WordPress and a good code editor already installed and running on your computer before the workshop. If you are unable to do so, we will do our best to provide help before the workshop but cannot make any guarantees.
Gutenberg For Developers Part 2
Gutenberg, the new WordPress text editor, is currently under development and will be released into WordPress core soon. The goal of this workshop is to prepare you with a solid understanding of how Gutenberg works, how to write Gutenberg blocks, and considerations for theme development.
We’ll start with the technologies that Gutenberg leverages and the APIs that WordPress provides on top of those. Then, we will explore in detail how to build a simple Gutenberg block. There are a few different types of Gutenberg blocks you can create and WordPress provides different components you can leverage, so we will cover that as well. For those who are theme developers, we will make sure you are aware of best practices for integrating with Gutenberg.
In order to optimize your learning, please observe these requirements:
– Familiarity with basic HTML, CSS, and JS or PHP
– Laptop computer
– A local copy of WordPress installed (https://getflywheel.com/layout/local-wordpress-development-environment-how-to/)
– A code editor. We strongly recommend PHPStorm (https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/download/), but Atom (https://atom.io/) will work if you can’t purchase (or the 30-day free trial runs out)
Please try to have WordPress and a good code editor already installed and running on your computer before the workshop. If you are unable to do so, we will do our best to provide help before the workshop but cannot make any guarantees.
Gutenberg For Developers Part 1
Gutenberg, the new WordPress text editor, is currently under development and will be released into WordPress core soon. The goal of this workshop is to prepare you with a solid understanding of how Gutenberg works, how to write Gutenberg blocks, and considerations for theme development.
We’ll start with the technologies that Gutenberg leverages and the APIs that WordPress provides on top of those. Then, we will explore in detail how to build a simple Gutenberg block. There are a few different types of Gutenberg blocks you can create and WordPress provides different components you can leverage, so we will cover that as well. For those who are theme developers, we will make sure you are aware of best practices for integrating with Gutenberg.
In order to optimize your learning, please observe these requirements:
– Familiarity with basic HTML, CSS, and JS or PHP
– Laptop computer
– A local copy of WordPress installed (https://getflywheel.com/layout/local-wordpress-development-environment-how-to/)
– A code editor. We strongly recommend PHPStorm (https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/download/), but Atom (https://atom.io/) will work if you can’t purchase (or the 30-day free trial runs out)
Please try to have WordPress and a good code editor already installed and running on your computer before the workshop. If you are unable to do so, we will do our best to provide help before the workshop but cannot make any guarantees.
Jamie Schmid
Making Security Make Sense to Users and Clients
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 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, Jamie will cover simple website security best practices that you can implement immediately for your own site and those of your clients. In addition, she’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.
Creating Content in Your Client’s Voice
Beautifully designed, high functioning websites fall flat with poorly composed content. Search engines and readers value unique content. WordPress websites are the perfect place to showcase the details behind every client’s story and product. This talk will share tips and techniques for capturing your client’s voice and vision in your writing, giving insight into how attendees can great content in website pages and blog posts.
Examples of outsourced blogging gone wrong will be illustrated, showing how 2 minutes of additional research can be key to understanding topics. Helpful tips that allow copywriters to mentally transport themselves into the minds of their clients will be revealed as well.
Using real-world, every day client examples, attendees will learn to think and blog as their clients would, if their clients only had the time. This talk is not just for writers, it’s one agency owners and developers need in order to better evaluate WordPress website content and enhance quality control.
Intended Audience: Business
Tony Zeoli
Beginners Guide to WordPress SEO — Part 3
Speaker: Tony Zeoli
Search Engine Optimization is one of the best ways to help your intended audience find your blog, discover your services, buy your products, and even learn from your content. SEO is certainly not rocket science, but there are fundamentals to be addressed to ensure your WordPress blog, website, or Ecommerce store are optimized so Google, Bing, and other search engines crawl to return valuable content providing the best possible answer to a search querie.
In this three-hour WordPress SEO workshop, we’ll focus on helping those new to SEO understand and apply tools and techniques to WordPress to assist search engines in identifying your site, blog, or Ecommerce store as either the best possible result returned in search.
We will review how WordPress natively handles SEO for posts, pages, taxonomies, custom post types and custom taxonomies, and media. well as how you can improve WordPress SEO by using the freely available, All in One SEO Pack plugin to optimize your site. For this workshop we will use All in One SEO Pack, not only because it’s a great plugin, but for its choice to provide free support in the WordPress.org forums.
In this session, we will cover the following topics:
Beginners Guide to WordPress SEO — Part 2
Speaker: Tony Zeoli
Search Engine Optimization is one of the best ways to help your intended audience find your blog, discover your services, buy your products, and even learn from your content. SEO is certainly not rocket science, but there are fundamentals to be addressed to ensure your WordPress blog, website, or Ecommerce store are optimized so Google, Bing, and other search engines crawl to return valuable content providing the best possible answer to a search querie.
In this three-hour WordPress SEO workshop, we’ll focus on helping those new to SEO understand and apply tools and techniques to WordPress to assist search engines in identifying your site, blog, or Ecommerce store as either the best possible result returned in search.
We will review how WordPress natively handles SEO for posts, pages, taxonomies, custom post types and custom taxonomies, and media. well as how you can improve WordPress SEO by using the freely available, All in One SEO Pack plugin to optimize your site. For this workshop we will use All in One SEO Pack, not only because it’s a great plugin, but for its choice to provide free support in the WordPress.org forums.
In this session, we will cover the following topics:
Beginners Guide to WordPress SEO — Part 1
Speaker: Tony Zeoli
Search Engine Optimization is one of the best ways to help your intended audience find your blog, discover your services, buy your products, and even learn from your content. SEO is certainly not rocket science, but there are fundamentals to be addressed to ensure your WordPress blog, website, or Ecommerce store are optimized so Google, Bing, and other search engines crawl to return valuable content providing the best possible answer to a search querie.
In this three-hour WordPress SEO workshop, we’ll focus on helping those new to SEO understand and apply tools and techniques to WordPress to assist search engines in identifying your site, blog, or Ecommerce store as either the best possible result returned in search.
We will review how WordPress natively handles SEO for posts, pages, taxonomies, custom post types and custom taxonomies, and media. well as how you can improve WordPress SEO by using the freely available, All in One SEO Pack plugin to optimize your site. For this workshop we will use All in One SEO Pack, not only because it’s a great plugin, but for its choice to provide free support in the WordPress.org forums.
In this session, we will cover the following topics:
Doug Foster
Beginners Guide To WordPress Part 2
Speaker: Doug Foster
Length: 2 hours
Everyone has a story to tell; and you think the web is the perfect place to tell it. But how do you start? Welcome to WordPress for Beginners. WordPress powers over 25% of the websites on the global Internet. There’s a reason for that number. It’s SO simple. Spend an hour and you can publish to a global audience of more than 3.5 billion people. And it’s SO complex. You can spend years learning how it works.
So what can we cover in two hours? Enough to get you started & going in the right direction!
Beginners Guide to WordPress Part 1
Speaker: Doug Foster
Length: 2 hours
Everyone has a story to tell; and you think the web is the perfect place to tell it. But how do you start? Welcome to WordPress for Beginners. WordPress powers over 25% of the websites on the global Internet. There’s a reason for that number. It’s SO simple. Spend an hour and you can publish to a global audience of more than 3.5 billion people. And it’s SO complex. You can spend years learning how it works.
So what can we cover in two hours? Enough to get you started & going in the right direction!
Adam Sewell
Beyond the Website – Small Businesses and WordPress
In this talk, we will discuss several other uses a small business can use WordPress for rather than “just a website”. The WordPress ecosystem has grown well beyond a blogging platform and informational websites. It’s now possible to run an entire business off of WordPress.
Intended Audience: Business
Kyle Laverty
Freelancer’s Guide to Survival with WordPress
Surviving as a freelancer can be tough. I didn’t have a guide when I started. I read some articles, looked at other freelancers, and still it wasn’t a very straightforward process. I wish I would have had a guide.
In this presentation, I will go over what it takes to not just survive as a WordPress freelancer but hopefully thrive as well. I will provide useful tools, links, and info on how to find work, where to look for inspiration, mental health, and work/life balance as a freelancer.
The proper care, feeding and growth of your WordPress website.
A website is a living and breathing piece of your overall business & marketing plan. You need to feed it! This presentation will cover why a website isn’t a “set it and forget it” entity.
Learn about content creation types, determine the need for enhanced features (eCommerce, membership, LMS), ways to encourage visitor engagement, website security and site backups and when it might be time to redesign the site itself.
Intended Audience: Beginner
Alisa R. Herr
The Ultimate Guide to Building the Worst Product
Let’s face it. There’s a gap between what developers care about and what users care about. In this session, we’ll explore what happens when we ignore this simple fact. We’ll discuss what UX is and why the user’s experience matters, how to think like your users, and some new rules we can all get behind. After all, UX is more than just about visual design, but also about making sure systems are set up in a way that makes them easy for people to actually use.
Intended Audience: Developers
David Grubb
Site Maintenance
How to manage a single WordPress website to keep it safe, secure, updated and backed up.
Intended Audience: Power Users
Alex Centeno
Save 15 minutes or more on WordPress a day: Intro to the Command Line for administrators
In the life of every WordPress administrator, saving a few seconds here and there can make a big difference at the end of the day.
We have heard of the command line before, tools like Bash, SSH and WP-CLI are considered too complex for the average administrator.
In this introduction, we will take an introductory look at these tools in a language that administrators can understand and in a way that we can start using them right away.
We will look at topics like:
1. Connecting to a remote server via SSH.
2. Executing simple WP-CLI commands to create fast database backups, export a list of users, or “search and replace” for a string on a website without the need of plugins.
2. Creating and using simple scripts in bash.
Intended Audience: Administrators / Power Users
Steve Mortiboy
Optimizing Images in WordPress to Improve Performance and SEO
This session is aimed at beginners who want to understand how to leverage images to improve their website. We’ll take a hands-on look at things you should do when adding images and common mistakes to avoid that could negatively impact your site, especially with search engines.
Intended Audience: Beginners
John Cornthwait
How to Win at Information Architecture
A solid Information Architecture is the backbone of a successful website. In this session, we’ll define what Information Architecture is, why it’s important, and how you can quickly incorporate best practices into every project with real-world examples. Attendees will learn tips and tricks for organizing a website’s content, building easy-to-use navigation systems, and what to do when you get stuck.
Brian DeConinck
GutenReady for the Gutenpocalypse
When Matt Mullenweg announced in December 2017 that Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0 would be ready in just a few short months, we sat up and took notice. Knowing the landscape of our institution – and higher ed’s proclivity for denying change – we started making plans.
From the beginning we were thinking about the full spectrum of WordPress experience: from developers to the one-off content editors. We set to work learning as much as we could about Gutenberg, the user experience, the transition options, and eventually, arrived at our own examination of how Gutenberg could/should/would work at NC State.
Join us as we recap our adventure so far into the world of user testing, communication strategies, site assessments, and overcoming resistance. This is a story of change management as we safely navigate our campus to the other side of the Gutenpocalypse.
Thinking About Accessibility Before You Hit Publish
When content creators build posts and pages, there are lots of common errors that can make life much harder for users with disabilities. Developers can make sure their theme and plugin code is accessible, but they have relatively little control over what goes in the content.
NC State University has tens of thousands of potential content creators, far more users than we can realistically train in accessibility best practices. So how can we ensure that university websites are accessible? How do we guide content creators toward making good choices?
In this session, we examine the NC State Accessibility Helper, a homegrown plugin that makes accessibility testing a part of WordPress. We will discuss common issues reported by users of assistive technology and how those issues are introduced when creating content. We will then discuss how our plugin addresses these issues using an open source accessibility testing engine called aXe.
Amanda French
Building and Managing Communities with Multisite, BuddyPress, Commons-in-a-Box, and bbPress
In this session, attendees will learn about the basic features of some of the most popular and powerful tools for making a WordPress site into a community hub: Multisite, BuddyPress, Commons-in-a-Box, and bbPress. We’ll also discuss how and whether to offer particular functionalities with one or more of these tools:
* Collecting specific user data (BuddyPress Extended Profile Fields)
* Letting users talk to one another on your site (forums, groups, private messages)
* Allowing users to create their own sub-communities on your community site (sites with Multisite, Groups with BuddyPress)
* Displaying user directories and profiles
* One-way communication with users (dashboard messages, mass emails, enabling email subscriptions to blog posts)
Intended Audience: Power Users, Developers
Getting started with local SEO
Join Josh Gellock of Expander Digital for a talk on local SEO. Find out how to reach local searchers, manage your online listings, and use structured data to optimize your business’ search presence.
Corey Freeman
Things Your Clients Won’t Tell You
Deep in the heart of every client lurks the same secrets: things they don’t (or can’t) say to their service providers. This session will explore the fears and insecurities one must understand to provide top-notch customer service.
Colin Lord
I Know I Should Use SVGs, But I Don’t Know How
Using SVG images are a lot like going to the gym. We all know we *should* be using them when we write our front end code, but we end up putting it off for another project down the road. And when SVGs are used, they are often implemented in a way that doesn’t unlock their full potential.
During this presentation, we’ll discuss the best practices for SVG implementation and how they vary depending on the size and audience of your site. We will also go through what an SVG sprite is, how to create one, and why they’re awesome. According to Advanced Web Ranking.com, only 3% of sites on the internet use this technique…but 97% of browsers support it!
After this talk, you’ll be ready to work on your SVGs like you’ll be ready to work on your summer body!
Sharon A. Dawson
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: Repurposing Your WordPress Content
Writing a new blog or page for your WordPress website can take hours of research and crafting to get it just right. Learn how to leverage plugins and social media to re-promote that content from your WordPress site in ways to save you time and effort.
In this session, you’ll learn:
– The best plugins for re-promoting your content and settings to use on those plugins
– New content types you can create from your original work
– What social media sites are best for promoting your content in new ways
– Tools to share your content over and over again with very little time on your part
Don’t let that well-researched, well-written piece get stale and lose all engagement on your website.
Session Summary: (key takeaways)
Attendees will learn plugins, social media platforms, and time saving free tools to help repurpose their existing content to get more traffic to their WordPress site.
You Don’t Have Any Business Cards?
This happens a lot at formal networking events, but it happens even more frequently at WordCamp. Do you feel intimidated when it’s time to give your “30 second commercial”? Do you run out of things to talk about once you’ve exchanged names?
Effective networking is an important part of building your WordPress business. This presentation will help you get past the “grip and grin” stigma that people associate with networking and cover some ways that you can get the most out of mixing it up at networking groups, “business after hours” meetups, and of course the Hallway Track at conferences like WordCamp. Whether your an introvert or an extrovert, you’re sure to pick up a thing or two.
Amanda Gorman
3 SEO Strategies for Building a Bigger Online Community
Learn how to boost your SEO to build a bigger community online with these 3 strategies: Keyword Research & Organization, Leveraging Competitor Insights, and Writing Content that Resonates.
Intended Audience: Web designers, developers, Nonprofits. Beginner
Laura Rabell
How Running a WordPress Design Agency Allowed Me to Follow My Dreams of Becoming a Musician
In the summer of 2010, I made the mistake of reading Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, while sipping tropical drinks on a beach vacation, and it ruined my life. Or rather, it encouraged me to rearrange my life to make more time for my passion for music and achieve location-independence. My husband and I founded Rabell Creative, a WordPress web design and digital marketing agency in 2012. After six years of experience building WordPress websites for clients full time, I will share with you our top tips and tricks for building beautiful websites efficiently, making your clients happy, and having time leftover to pursue your passions. I will outline the exact procedures and plugins that help simplify this process and discuss some of our most frequent pitfalls in dealing with clients, and how we avoid them.
Since we can work from anywhere with just our laptops and the Internet, we moved to Nashville in 2016, so I could pursue my dream of becoming a musician and songwriter. Running a fully remote WordPress web design agency is allowing me to travel, play music, and live out my dreams, and I am so grateful for the awesome and supportive WordPress community that helps make it all possible.
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!
Jen McFarland (+ add me)
Lisa Linn Allen (+ add me)
Michael Torbert (+ add me)
Ben Meredith (+ add me)
Steve Mortiboy (+ add me)
Lisa Boyd (+ add me)
Details TBD.
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