🇺🇸 WordCamp Rochester 2020

One evening at a WordPress Meetup presentation in a northern valley of Los Angeles, an attendee turned and punched Joe A. Simpson, Jr, in the arm saying, “accessibility makes me sooooooo angry!” Why does baking even the most basic WCAG 2.0 guidelines into your project cycle create such a reaction?

In this presentation, we’ll debunk common misconceptions designers, developers, and business owners have and learn how advocating for access to all improves your site SEO, design, user experience, and function through interactive audience examples and discussion to ease the pain of compliance.

The pandemic has forced all of us – WordPress designers and developers – into the role of essential experts for all the businesses we serve.

To truly serve our clients we have to learn design and develop WordPress websites that become the center of the business. Generating leads and revenue.

In this talk, I will give you specific, simple, actionable design patterns and examples that will immediate increase your site’s lead generation capabilities.

Sales folk get a bad rap. They are often described as being ‘pushy’, ‘aggressive’, ‘selfish’, ‘two-faced’. But the fact is, to sell and to negotiate is to be human. And the ability to move people and negotiate allows us to thrive not just survive.

We ALL participate in the act of selling and it’s nothing to fear or be ashamed of.

In this presentation you will learn how to reframe the act of selling and embrace the true nature of what it takes to move others and inspire positive change. You will also gain access to important tips for reading a room and learn how to negotiate the most effective way; through collaboration.

Never waste a bad move. Success as a business owner is built on the lessons we’ve learned from our biggest mistakes. In this talk, Nathan draws on 25 years of experience in the web business to share the most important lessons he had to learn the hard way. Each lesson is summarized in a succinct statement and then unpacked with examples that will make you laugh, cringe and think

Key Takeaways:

1) Mistakes I made and how to avoid them
2) Tips on where to focus to make your business profitable
3) What really matters when you’re building a business

In less than a year, over 100 guests on WPCoffeeTalk have been asked the same set of questions in order to learn about them, their work and their community involvement. 

What we’ve learned is that they have so much to offer, and so many different perspectives, talents, passions, and interests.

Our aspirations are varied. Our inspirations are many.

This talk will share data, anecdotes, clips, and conversation about who we are as individuals, and who we are as a community.

For the next two years, there are at least seven WordPress releases scheduled. While some features are yet to be determined, there is already a rich and interesting list of enhancements that are planned.

What does the future have in store for the WordPress industry? If you are part of it, you should be aware of what’s in the pipeline for 2020 and beyond and how it could affect you and your business.

Join Francesca, the current release co-lead, to hear the latest news and plans from the WordPress project.

We will start at the beginning to understand what a plugin does and why you would want one. We will answer common questions like:
– Where do you find plugins?
– How do you know which plugins are good?
– How many plugins should you have?
– How can you find out more about a plugin before you download or purchase it?
– How can you work with a plugin developer to fix issues you are having with the plugin?

Adapting to Gutenberg could be challenging for PHP developers who have minimal knowledge of JavaScript and React. It’s a paradigm shift and to re-learn how to do what we did with PHP in JavaScript can be overwhelming . In this talk I will discuss how a php developer, with minimal js knowledge can build blocks quickly.

How can the php developers survive the amount of technologies to be learnt for Gutenberg? Can creating a custom block be as easy as running a couple of simple commands?

Sharing my story, research and methods (How would we solve the problem?)

You will know about my personal experiences that helped me build blocks quickly and allowed my clients to migrate to WordPress site, with the power of Gutenberg. ServerSideRender component can simplify creating the editor representation for dynamic blocks. My talk will show how the some build tools like @wordpress/create-block, wp-cli and dynamic blocks can help anyone who wants to create reusable blocks quickly with minimal JavaScript.

Conclusion (Leave the audience smarter)

My talk will leave you with a clear understanding of how you can dive into block development quickly without knowing much JS, then expand your knowledge further into the areas of our need.

Go on the journey of “mere mortals” (people without a computer background) on how they learned WordPress, designed four business sites and opened an on-line store with Woo Commerce. Your trip guide will take you through the WP basics, identify tripping and stumbling points, direct you to where to get information, introduce you to the language of WordPress, where to “hotel” your site, and overview safety tips for your journey.

Ever spend hours on an estimate only to discover that your idea of a “reasonable budget” and theirs were so far of base it’s not even funny? Or worst yet, crickets?

Well, that ends today!

During this talk you’ll learn the 5 Essential Questions you need to be asking on a sales call to not only ensure you don’t waste your time, but that you land the project.

In addition, we will dig into how to create an estimate that converts and how ensure you get new leads & sales well after the website has launched.

WordCamp Rochester is thrilled to welcome Kathy Zant to present our keynote session at WordCamp Rochester!

This year has been a year like no other, challenging each of us to rethink how we work, play, relate and create in our community and our lives. To think of thriving in such uncertain times seems like a challenge in and of itself. As digital creators using WordPress, we have an empowering foundation available to not only create security for ourselves, but also for those we connect with. Though the times might be uncertain, our capabilities and tools aren’t. By staying focused on our purpose as creators, we can find our way to thrive and stay secure no matter what is happening around us. 

About Kathy

For over 20 years, Kathy has built web applications for large Fortune 100 corporations, independent entrepreneurs, and everyone in between. Kathy has worked with a number of technologies, but feels most at home working with data-driven applications like WordPress. She is passionate about making complex technology easily accessible for everyone. She’s adept at finding solutions to complex problems and helping customers optimize their online presence. She has held numerous roles at Wordfence helping customers optimize their security posture and is a frequent speaker at WordCamps around the world. Kathy was Executive Producer of the documentary short Open | The Community Code about the WordPress community.

In February 2020, I was laid off from my job after almost two years. I started looking for a new job, but a couple of weeks later, we were in a global pandemic. Job postings started drying up, and hiring came to a halt.

The next logical thing to do is open my own business, right? In this talk, I’ll discuss all the motions and emotions that I went through from never wanting to have my own company to starting up my own web development business during a pandemic. We’ll look at some of the things I did right, what I did wrong, what (and who) helped and what you need to consider before you do it yourself.

This talk is designed for small business owners and is for all skill levels.

When the pandemic assaulted the physical world, many people reluctantly transitioned to the digital environment of social and business platforms. Applying digital tools and being thrust into a land where innovation and creativity demand new ways of thinking.
Each voice has an authenic and influential tone, inflection and quality
that now has to rise above the static and noise.
WordPress can help individuals, businesses and entrepreneurs to
amplify their voice to get noticed and attract attention.
Learn how to use WP to amplify your authentic voice.

Many developers know to NEVER do changes directly on a live website, lest we break it.

What if though, you don’t have access to a staging or development environment? Or even if you do, what happens if you are in a situation where you do not have reliable internet access! Local development environments to the rescue!

We’ll touch on why it’s so important, and discuss the plethora of options available. Please note all examples will be shown from a Mac OS, but environments for Linux and Windows will be discussed.