WordCamp Rochester 2019

This trio of freelancers will give you a ton of tips for getting started as a WordPress freelancer based on their own experiences. With business planning, resources, WordPress must-haves, networking, marketing, and more you’ll see what it takes to get going. Bring your own questions too!

A panel discussion with members of the WordPress community exploring ethical issues that can arise when working with clients, with each other, and within the WordPress community at large.

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.

This trio of freelancers will give you a ton of tips for getting started as a WordPress freelancer based on their own experiences. With business planning, resources, WordPress must-haves, networking, marketing, and more you’ll see what it takes to get going. Bring your own questions too!

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 that 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!

In this session I will share how I harnessed the power of WordPress to create and manage a successful multi-author blog. I’ll start with exploring the genesis of the idea for the site and then speak to the blog’s design and development. From there I’ll talk about blogger recruitment and training and end with an overview of my tasks as the blog’s sole editor-in-chief.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Discover one way to create a multi-author WordPress website
2. Learn how I recruited and trained all the writers and documented everyone’s roles
3. Gain an understanding of the time commitment required to manage bloggers so you can determine if creating a blog like this right for you
I firmly believe that the success of my blog can easily be replicated and adapted to any subject matter, and I’m excited to come talk to WCROCers about how they can do it too!

There is so much confusion about what types of things should be put on a page and what should be in a post. Static vs. Dynamic content is the best way to tackle this. An “About Us” page would be just that… A PAGE. If you are talking about something that is more time sensitive, then you want to do a post. Connected to this would be Categories and Tags. What are they? When creating a website, you can edit a menu to include not only pages, but also category archives that can create a more complete experience for small businesses. This is not just how to do it but WHY you should do it. This gives an in depth look at the justification for placement of content on your website and way finding.

At 10UP we make sure that WordPress websites we manage or highly secure and I have good experience WordPress security measures on the system side and also a little bit on the development side. In my speech, I will be discussing several best practices, which are easy to follow but it will make WordPress website highly secure.

My knowledge of code is minimal yet I have built a custom CMS using WordPress https://www.thenewshouse.com – the cms allows for student journalists to design pages on the fly using ACF Flexible Fields with no knowledge of code. I built a custom theme using Webflow.com and applied it to _underscores. Webflow allows me to quickly and rapidly design a page that can be used on the site in an agile way. The site is used every day by journalism students to tell the story of Syracuse University students.

Mother-daughter team goes for knockout in fight with Parkinson’s disease

How Millennials are redefining Christianity

Lou Reed’s Syracuse legacy rolls on

This trio of freelancers will give you a ton of tips for getting started as a WordPress freelancer based on their own experiences. With business planning, resources, WordPress must-haves, networking, marketing, and more you’ll see what it takes to get going. Bring your own questions too!

In this session, I will cover how to connect with others in the WordPress community, how to build relationships and trust with other professionals, best practices for successful partnerships and mistakes to avoid so that your partnership can thrive.

This topic is relevant to anyone who wants to get more connected in the WordPress community as a contributor or start working with others in the community in a professional manner.

Being a lead developer not only means being responsible for clean and optimized code, it also means mentoring and teaching junior developers. Having been a karate sensei for almost 9 years, come learn how I took cues from my time at the dojo, and applied it to helping junior team members. From learning styles to patience, and to self-confidence, much can be learned from the martial arts.

As more and more of the internet’s traffic travels over HTTPS, it becomes more and more obvious when a site fails to offer a secure connection. At this point, there’s no reason for your site to be one of them.

Despite assertions that an encrypted connection only matters for credit card transactions, TLS is an important technology that is of massive benefit to the privacy of your users in an increasingly hostile internet. A lack of available encryption makes your site look unprofessional at best, and at worst it tells your users their browsing privacy is unimportant to you.

In this talk, we’ll look at the real differences between HTTP and HTTPS traffic to illustrate just how much data is made visible on an unencrypted connection. We’ll examine real-world examples of ISPs manipulating the HTTP traffic of their users, and why it would have been impossible over HTTPS. Lastly, we’ll go over the resources available for implementing TLS on your sites, most likely for free.

Collecting and displaying information on your website can be cumbersome. Do you collect your information one way and then manually enter it another way? Get rid of those manual processes!

In this talk we will look at how to collect and display custom information on your website using plugins like Gravity Forms and GravityView. We will review some concrete examples including Community Events, Complex Registration Forms, Exchange Marketplaces and more.

Bring your ideas and see how you can bring them to life!

Whether you’re a designer or developer, you’re sure to work with all kinds of clients, but have you ever had a client insist on having admin access to their website? They own it, so they have that right…but how long did it take before they called you to fix what they broke once they logged in? Sometimes it’s as simple as having saved a page and wishing they had the previous content back, or as devastating as the “white screen of death.”

While clients who “break” things on their own sites are guaranteed revenue for you, those calls never come at a convenient time and are ALWAYS urgent (at least to them).

So what can we do to both empower our clients and make sure their sites continue to run well?

This talk will present several ideas for ways that we can do just that, including:

• Helpful plugins
• How to train a client in WordPress
• How to set user permissions
• How to set pricing for fixing mistakes
• Creating a user manual
• Other tips for managing the client relationship

Attendees will leave with some good ideas and action items to better help clients help themselves…or not.

“From the brains of @themattyg and @andymci comes a panel discussion on the use of page builders now that Gutenberg is in core. Questions that could be touched on:
– What does Gutenberg solve that Page Builders don’t? Vice Versa?
– Should page builders continue to be their own interface or adapt and integrate into Gutenberg as a collection of blocks?
– Why would a user want to use both a page builder and Gutenberg on the same site? Would they want to?
– Should developers focus on developing for page builders, Gutenberg or neither?
– (Depending on panelists) How are you using Gutenberg today? How are you using page builders today?
– How do we change our approach to building sites for clients, when they have this new level of control?
– When starting a new WordPress site, what considerations would you take when choosing between a page builder, Gutenberg or the classic editor? Which one would you choose?
– If you already use a page builder on your site, would you consider switching to Gutenberg?”

Extending WordPress above and beyond the core functionality is part of what makes WordPress so powerful. However, the sheer number of plugins available can be overwhelming. A strategy for evaluating plugins makes both developing managing WordPress easier.

In this presentation, attendees will learn strategies and tools for choosing one plugin over another. We’ll also look at paid plugins versus free and find out if you get what you paid for. We’ll also look at how to manage plugin updates and evaluate security. We’ll find out how to research plugin security history and identify risky functionality.

How can you manage 48 WordPress sites at once? It’s a tall order, but at the Southern Tier Library System (STLS) we’ve accepted the challenge, and we’re excited to share what’s worked and what hasn’t. At STLS, 48 public library outlets each have their own, unique online presence in the form of a WordPress website. Staff tech skills at each library range from experienced web designers to first-time computer users. In order to support users with a broad range of experience and expertise, who also want to have a unique and distinct presence online, we’ve curated a list of recommended plugins and themes that are accessibility friendly and help keep sites up to date.

In this session, we’ll share our list of themes and plugins that are working well across 48 sites, as well as some that we’ve tried that haven’t worked out. We’ll also delve deeper into a few plugins that help keep sites running smoothly, automatically – without someone logging in to manage updates. We’re focused on creating sites that are accessible and sustainable, and we’ll also discuss our process for establishing a list of best practices for new WordPress users, leading workshops about WordPress, and sharing news about big changes, like Gutenberg, in a non-scary way.

WordPress plugins are not as complicated as you may think. They can be created with basic knowledge of PHP. This session will demonstrate how a beginner can start developing a plugin, and some common tools used by developers.

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 (expensive) software solutions to the SCARY world of Open Source software. Learn how to get involved (even if you are not technical) in the fabulous and interesting WordPress community.

How can you manage 48 WordPress sites at once? It’s a tall order, but at the Southern Tier Library System (STLS) we’ve accepted the challenge, and we’re excited to share what’s worked and what hasn’t. At STLS, 48 public library outlets each have their own, unique online presence in the form of a WordPress website. Staff tech skills at each library range from experienced web designers to first-time computer users. In order to support users with a broad range of experience and expertise, who also want to have a unique and distinct presence online, we’ve curated a list of recommended plugins and themes that are accessibility friendly and help keep sites up to date.

In this session, we’ll share our list of themes and plugins that are working well across 48 sites, as well as some that we’ve tried that haven’t worked out. We’ll also delve deeper into a few plugins that help keep sites running smoothly, automatically – without someone logging in to manage updates. We’re focused on creating sites that are accessible and sustainable, and we’ll also discuss our process for establishing a list of best practices for new WordPress users, leading workshops about WordPress, and sharing news about big changes, like Gutenberg, in a non-scary way.

WordPress can be used to start a blog, make a site for a club, or power a business, large or small.

WordPress can also be used as a way to document your life, and save important things for later. You can bridge WordPress to other parts of the web that you use to store all of your data in one place, without having to worry about an app, hardware maker, or social media site going out of business and taking all of your content with it.

I considered myself an interloper into the IndieWeb movement, until I realized that the movement — just like the technology that powers it — is decentralized. My habit of copying data created on other sites, as well as creating a website for my lifelogging, is part of what this community is about.

Come learn about how you can use WordPress to power and amplify your voice online, and reclaim the web from the walled gardens for the user!

WordPress has come a long way from its humble blogger beginnings. The official WordPress mission is to democratize publishing. But WordPress represents much more than just publishing. WordPress represents an alternative: An alternative to closed platforms, an alternative to centralized networks, and an alternative to behemoth corporations. It’s a free choice, an open choice, a responsible choice. It’s free for all to use, and free for you to make what you want of it.

Together, we’ll touch on:
– How did WordPress become what it is today?
– Is WordPress right for you?
– What can you create with WordPress?
– How can WordPress help you grow your idea into something bigger?
– How do you give back to the WordPress community?

This keynote session is a rallying cry for creative freedom and opportunity. We’re going to look at how anyone can make something with WordPress. If you’re a new user, take this as inspiration to go forth and make your ideas a reality. If you’re an experienced developer, use this session to rethink your assumptions about what WordPress can and can’t do. 

An online presence needs more than just a website. In this session you’ll learn how to plan for all the places where people intend to find you. We’ll walk through a simple checklist covering everything from reaching new audiences through turning your existing audience into an enthusiastic community of fans.

Come hear how a small community of small businesses joined forces to combat the big box stores with their own eCommerce Marketplace shop. You’ll hear how they handle aspects like shipping, orders, inventory, all while running their own retail store fronts.