WordCamp San Antonio 2015

After blogging for five and a half years (which is like 74 years in Internet time), I’ve learned a lot about maintaining SA Flavor, my local blog on San Antonio food and culture. While WordPress has made it easier than ever for people to get their thoughts out there, aspiring bloggers often start with a lot of gusto and quickly abandon their blogs. My presentation is designed to be part humorous and part insightful to help bloggers not just stick with their blog, but to also give them some key insights to make it better.

Interested in attracting media attention for your personal or professional blog? Wondering how you can get a mention in your local paper, an industry journal, or even the New York Times? Believe it or not, it’s not as out-of-reach as you might think, nor do you need to hire a publicist to do it. In this presentation, you’ll get actionable tips on using online resources like HARO to do your own effective PR campaign. Find out how I was able to get mentions in — among numerous publications — the New York Times, Mashable, Fox Business News, Reuters, Ladies Home Journal, and numerous online publications.

this is a ‘sequel’ to the talk I gave at WordCamps last year; taking the principles I spoke about and putting them into practice, I will talk about how in Parsec, I made images responsive, lightened load time, and introduced Sass into the original theme from my book. “

It will be geared towards agencies, developers, and anyone who would have to provide clients with support for WordPress. Through different methods of troubleshooting WordPress, different plugins to help them manage multiple WordPress sites, and also through discussion of how a hosting partner can play a part in supporting WordPress.

We all love WordPress but know that things can go wrong from time to time. What if you knew exactly what to do whenever a WordPress issue arises? This can include anything from a theme or plugin issue all the way to those really bizarre things that can happen leaving you clueless how to troubleshoot them. No high level amount of technical experience needed with the tricks you will learn. Being equipped to handle WordPress issues can really help you keep things running smoothly on your site and focus on the fun stuff rather than hair pulling and other madness.

This presentation will be on the Do’s and Don’ts of advertising on Facebook and Twitter. Here you’ll learn some of the tips and tricks to jumpstart your campaigns to build your brand or sell your products. If you’ve been thinking of doing any advertising for yourself, your site, or a client, then this is the event that you don’t want to miss.

If you want to help your web design clients get amazing results online AND you want to make more money as a WordPress consultant, then focus on great design strategies … because design changes everything.

James Dalman will provide you with key thoughts about design and how it relates to your client’s goals and objectives, how it improves their brand and yours, and how websites that look better sell for more money.

You don’t need to be a designer to attend this session. We are talking about how great design impacts everything you do in a WordPress focused business.

Site speed is incredibly important, but it’s often neglected in the WordPress world. We’ll discuss tools to evaluate page performance and techniques to help speed your WordPress site up. Speed isn’t just about fast hosting, it’s also good design decisions and plugin choices. The talk will cover a number of easy to implement suggestions for any site owner, and then briefly cover some advanced developer techniques for writing efficient front-end code.

Before there was “content,” there was basic human communication. And while the model has evolved, the fundamentals are the same: Good content is good communication. So, how do we create that? Wayne Geyer has some ideas. In this discussion, Wayne shares his approach to crafting simple, clear communication that informs thoughtful content. Among other things, it’s about pursuing self-awareness, anticipating your audience, and distilling your message to its essence. Using Wayne’s process, you can get to the right ideas faster—and connect with the right people more clearly.

We will go from buying a domain to publishing our first post in this wild ride. From plugins and widgets to posts and pages, we will learn all the basics to getting your website concept live and running.

Pricing Most service professionals (designers, web developers, consultants, etc.) charge the customer by hour. The problem is there is no correlation between how long something takes (the hours) and the result the customer wants (the value). No one ever asked a car dealer how long it took to make a vehicle. What is really important to the customer, even if he does not realize it, is the result your craft will help him achieve. If you insist on identifying the value first, you can help the customer make better choices and contribute to a real impact on his life and business. So, how do you do it? There are four core steps to learning to determine value and start pricing. In this session, you will learn the four steps and how to implement them in your business. Explore the fear that comes with a new business model, questions you should ask the customer, and how you can set a price based on the value you help create.

Millions of websites depend on the WordPress.org infrastructure every day. Parts of it is almost a decade old, ancient in software terms, and most of it is not even based on WordPress itself. At the time of WordCamp San Antonio, we will hopefully have finished a project that drastically modernizes the theme repository and moves to over to a WordPress installation, complete with a redesigned front-end and a more robust backend. This session will go over the changes involved, and will look into how WordPress.org works and what the underlying structure of it looks like.

The speed of your site is an easy indicator as to how receptive your users will be to your content. Patience is a thing of the past when it comes to online views. Retain your visitors! Join the WordPress Guy from Rackspace as he talks on the advanced features of WP-Supercache and how to utilize caching both locally and externally with Redis.

Your sales systems on your WP site can make your business a lot easier or very very hard. You probably have a lot of small improvements that could add up to big wins all over your landing pages, blog posts, and sales pages. Let’s put all these pieces together with copywriting and design tips from Karl Staib, so that your pages layer together, creating a domino effect that allows you to help more people and grow your business.

Applying usability techniques doesn’t have to involve a lab with one-way mirrors. Just-in-time usability techniques like heuristic evaluations, card sorting, user personas, task scenarios, and in-person and online testing can make a huge difference in the user’s experience — and your business results.

Creating content in WordPress isn’t just about putting words on the page. Optimizing that content, and making full use of the options in WordPress, will help your content convert, rank better,
and be found by more people. Just a few of the topics we’ll cover include:

• Writing compelling and optimized headlines
• The visual vs. the text editor, and the pros and cons of both
• Categorization—should your categories be included in your URLs?
• Tags—are they necessary, or are they creating duplicate content?

We’ll also talk about a few content-related plugins every site needs:

• Yoast WordPress SEO
• Comment Redirect by Yoast
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
• Open External Links in a New Window
• CoSchedule Editorial Calendar
• CoSchedule Click to Tweet

Are you a freelancer looking to grow your web development business? Then you will benefit from what I have to say. I will share with you what I learned through years of trial and error that have keep my business profitable and growing. Some of the topics I will cover are sales, marketing, putting together a team, technology, and of course, wordpress!