WordCamp Rochester 2018

Themes. You love to hate them.

We’ll look at the Top 5 burning issues around Themes, including:
– How do you know which one is best?
– How do I choose one?
– Where do I find them?
– What are page builders, such as Gutenberg and Beaver Builder?
– What is a child theme?

We’ll also try doing the most basic set up for child themes so you can start to edit your themes and still be able to update them.

In this session, you will learn about security essentials for WordPress, including an overview of plugins and tools for setting up security best practices and monitoring your website’s security.

WordPress powers almost a third of the internet, making it not only powerful, but as an open source project, WordPress is a tremendous gift to all of us. So what do you do with an amazing gift like this?

• Make a living from it.
• Have fun with it.
• Give back.
• Pay it forward.
• All of the above!

I make a living with WordPress, but I’m also what you might call a “serial volunteer.”

In the years that I’ve created a career with WordPress, I have also set aside time to help others through:

• Mentoring
• Organizing Meetups
• Organizing Hackathons
• WordCamp organizing and speaking
• Creating WordPress classes and clinics
• Setting up WordPress coworking days
• Creating free and discounted non-profit websites
• and more!

There’s a side effect to giving and giving back with WordPress: I’ve found that the more I give…the more I’ve gained: friendships, clients, jobs, and the warm feeling that only comes from sharing good things.

Attendees can expect to learn more about the social power of WordPress, how the WordPress community functions, and how giving back is really a way to give to yourself.

Do you feel that part of your mission as a WordPress website designer is to enlighten and empower your clients? Sure, our bottom line is to build excellent websites that serve business goals, but we can build a better partnership and trust with our clients if we educate them along the way. How can we do this without wasting hours explaining basic concepts over and over? In this session we will discuss the website owner’s bill of rights and ways to bake the education into your client onboarding process.

Suggested questions:

• How can we measure the results of this time we invest in educating clients
• What if my client says, “I don’t care to learn about the website. That’s YOUR job.”?
• Is there any proof that this adds to client satisfaction with our work?

Don’t miss the follow up to last years blockbuster “Data Studio for WordPress, Really!” Think of how you will feel as master the of your web stats. No more shame when someone asks “Hows your site doing?”

• You’ll Thrill to the power of seeing all your information in one place!
• You’ll laugh at the ease at which we copy other peoples’ reports and make them our own – Muahaha!
• You’ll cry when you see the ease at which you can create client reports and realize how much time you can save!
• You’ll watch in wonder as we create a web application and embed it in a website before your very eyes!

Data Studio is bigger, and badder than last year – Check out the free service that can do all this and more.

Getting traffic to your website is only the first step. In this session, you’ll learn how to get quality traffic to your site and techniques you can use to increase the likelihood of conversion.

Are you being underpaid for a project? How are you protecting yourself from being taken advantage of? What expectations are being set from the get-go between you and the client? Everyone’s dream is to be independent and own their own business. However, as a freelancer or a service-based startup, you may come across several roadblocks and challenges, but there are ways to overcome them with a proper system.

In this talk, I will provide the most common issues and challenges that you may face as a freelancer and provide you with strategies on how you can get paid what you’re worth while building a great brand for yourself.

Open Source software, WordCamps, Plug-ins, After Parties, Happiness Bars and Meet-ups; what does this all this mean and how does the WordPress community work? Come learn how I transitioned from selling and using high end software solutions to the world of Open Source software. Learn how to get involved (even if you are not technical) in the fabulous and interesting WordPress community.

The right plugins can make a huge impact on what you can do socially with your site. Make WordPress easier to share, reach and commucite .

Over 15 million U.S. Internet users have some form of impairment that affects their ability to use the Internet.
In this talk, we will share some simple ways to improve your site’s accessibility. These changes help everyone. As an extra bonus, accessibility improves your search engine optimization (SEO).
By the end of this session, you will be able…
1. To understand why accessibility is helpful for everyone.
2. To help make your website better for the visually impaired.
3. To help make your website better for the hearing impaired.
4. To help make your website better for the mobility impaired.
5. To improve your website SEO.

Discover techniques, tips, and resources to help create and/or strengthen your content marketing strategy.

WordPress is a great place for visual artists to share their work, but getting things set up can be challenging. I’ll cover everything from preparing imagery of artwork for the web, using the built in WordPress Gallery functionality, and improving the viewing experience. I’ll talk about my favorite plugins, and present a free theme, optimized for artists.

Version 0.3 of this presentation will feature new plugins, an updated theme, and content improvements over the previous 2 iterations 🙂

Gutenberg is great for bloggers who want better publishing tools, but what about developers who need to craft customized CMS experiences for their clients? If you use a lot of custom fields and are horrified at the idea of giving clients any design control, this session is for you. We’ll talk about:

– when to use Gutenberg, and when not to;
– what should be a block, and what should stay a custom field;
– how to limit a client’s color and text options;
– the magic of block templates and block locking;
– and how your theme development will change.

Now is the chance to create new site building best practices and drive the evolution of block editing. Let’s get excited for what’s possible!

You might’ve heard a thing or two about Gutenberg, the new default editor for WordPress.

Like many longtime WordPress users I was hesitant, if not reluctant, to start using it. But guess what? It’s not bad! In fact, it’s pretty great.

In this session we’re going to look at Gutenberg from a practical point of view: how it changes our day-to-day work with WordPress, and how it opens up a new way of thinking about content on the web.

You’ll leave with a greater appreciation for the new editor, plus a handful of tactical tidbits to drop into your own WordPress workflow.

WordPress plugins can appear to be magical, but they can be created with basic knowledge of PHP. This session will demonstrate how a beginner may develop a simple plugin or a more complex plugin using a boilerplate template.

Google, Bing, Facebook, Yelp, and several other sites automatically publish your business’ hours, phone number, and location if you tell them. Learn how these services see your site, how schema.org markup conveys meaning to them, and how to easily select and install a WordPress plugin to handle all the technical complexity for you.

You’ve invested time, money, and energy into your website. What would you do if something happened to your site? Do you know how to get it back to its former glory?

I talk about backing up your website a lot. I think my friends (and maybe some clients) are sick of hearing about it. But I know what it feels like to lose a site – to wake up one morning and have it simply be gone, or hacked, or inaccessible because of server issues. With regular backups, you can avoid this issue and restore or move your site quickly so it’s not affecting your business.

During this presentation, I’ll show you some of my favorite plugins to backup/restore your site, as well as how to do it manually.

WordPress web design takes a different approach when creating websites for nonprofit organizations rather than a brick and mortar or eCommerce business. It is more than just driving traffic to a site but getting the visitor to buy into the story that the nonprofit is telling. Picture the ASPCA commercials we all have seen on TV, then convert that into pictures and words. Stories that pull at the heartstrings open the wallets for donations. Providing secure portals to accept not only one-time donations but also subscription based, monthly reoccurring is key. By designing a website that creates emotion and engagement as well as a place to share the stories of the nonprofit. In turn donations and exposure will increase for the organization as well as their digital reputation.

In this presentation I will discuss plugins that I have found that work well for donation-based model websites. I will also share ways to create a user experience that increased donations and awareness. Proper theme selection, seo, plugins all enhance the way we not only tell the nonprofits story but also build brand awareness and in turn a sense of comfort with the donor that they are supporting a cause whose story resonates with them. Whether it be animal welfare, orphans, trafficking, no matter the cause a properly designed site can provide donor dollars and exposure that the organization would likely not have otherwise.

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 forms plugin will allow you to make the form that suites your needs. Also, we’ll look at some features that makes your forms easier to fill out than others.

Learn how to boost your SEO to build a bigger community online with these strategies: Keyword Research & Organization, Leveraging Competitor Insights and Writing Content that Resonates. This talk will cover the basics of each strategy to offer actionable steps to start using right away.

In the past four years, we have launched two WordPress plugins (one freemium, one premium). Come hear about the journey – what works, what are the roadblocks, and what leads to success!