WordCamp San Antonio 2016

Join all speakers for a moderated discussion on a range of topics, including WooCommerce success stories, plugins you can’t live without, and best practices for WordPress.

Decisions, Not Options

In this presentation, Carrie shares how you can lead your clients, your site visitors, and yourself to better choices by narrowing the field of available options.

Join all speakers for a moderated discussion on a range of topics, including WooCommerce success stories, plugins you can’t live without, and best practices for WordPress.

WordPress has many moving parts that can be updated at the click of a button through its native tools. Keep your repository up to date by learning how to optimally configure your local .gitignore file. Benefits include: less merge conflicts, greater collaboration between developers and environments and of course, ease for clients and end user experience.

In a nutshell: What should you be versioning? Answer: YOUR themes or plugins you develop.
Optimizing your gitignore to version only the relevant code per your project, or directories can assist with allowing customers to update other features, such as WordPress Core and plugins that are not designed by your team. Your repository is then more streamlined and focused on code. This also excludes any configuration files that would cause issues between development environments. In the long run, you have less code to review/version and customers have the ease of use to know that only code is being updated for the theme and no potential issue with pushing anything unnecessarily.

Join all speakers for a moderated discussion on a range of topics, including WooCommerce success stories, plugins you can’t live without, and best practices for WordPress.

You know the expression “in the right place at the right time?” Well, Congrats, that’s where you are … right now. The demand for Digital services, from web development to design, UX, SEO, PPC, etc. continues to grow at impressive levels. Add to that the prevalence of WordPress as the world’s most popular web platform – we couldn’t be in a better industry, at a better time. It’s time to challenge yourself:

• Are you doing everything you can do maximize the opportunity around you?
• Are you too busy working on your business when your business could actually be working for you?
• What and where are the most viable opportunities to seriously impact your life? (not just financially but lifestyle as well)
• What’s next? Where is the industry headed and how you can be on the forefront of the evolution?

This talk is aimed at all freelancers and business owners in the WordPress community who are motivated to maximize their potential and benefit from the enormous demand for their talent and skills. Whether you remain an independent freelancer or you wish to grow your business into a full-fledged agency, the time is now to create (or evaluate) your roadmap for success.

Join all speakers for a moderated discussion on a range of topics, including WooCommerce success stories, plugins you can’t live without, and best practices for WordPress.

In the past I’ve worked with a lot of different email form solutions, most of them have been cowboy-coded by developers but each has varied in ease of management. Our agency has been using Gravity Forms on all WordPress websites since 2013 and I’d love to share our insights on an incredible email form solution. A few topics I’d love to discuss are:

1. Initial Plugin Integration
2. The Proper Form Setup (with a few pro tips)
3. Email Form Creation
4. Confirmations
5. Notifications
6. Mind-Blowing Add-Ons

I may choose to scale the topics down depending on timeframe. I’m not a traveling speaker, I run an agency here in San Antonio so I’m always busy working in and on our business. I’m looking to help anyone I can from beginners to experts and love seeing tech grow in SA.

Join all speakers for a moderated discussion on a range of topics, including WooCommerce success stories, plugins you can’t live without, and best practices for WordPress.

I. An Intro to Video Libraries
In this session, I will be discussing the impact that a video library can have on your website. A video library is a collection of videos, typically organized into categories and groups, that members can view directly on your website.There is a place for video in almost any website, from marketing to content to customer service.

II. How to best utilize videos to engage your customers
I will cover the importance of a Video Library for Search Engine Optimization and how it helps keep visitors on your site for a longer amount of time. I will discuss how you can use video content marketing to better connect with your audience and communicate with customers. I will also present a number of strategic approaches to including videos on various types of websites.

III. Options for sharing and creating video libraries
I will include the different video sharing options that are available, how to create and host a video library, and how to utilize video for marketing, training, and communication.

IV. The best audiences for video content
Lastly, I would like to present the type of audiences that video is good for and statistically who is viewing videos on the web. This will include how to promote and organize your video library for your intended audiences.

Join all speakers for a moderated discussion on a range of topics, including WooCommerce success stories, plugins you can’t live without, and best practices for WordPress.

Failing to plan is planning to fail. Way too many otherwise talented WordPress businesses get bogged down in development hell. Pain Free(ish) Project Management is a product and method agnostic approach to setting goals, getting systems in place, and following through with consistent execution. The talk includes ideas and samples of flowcharts and systems that people can use on their own projects at no or low cost.

This talk is not only for businesses but also great for anyone building a WordPress site or doing any type of project.

Join all speakers for a moderated discussion on a range of topics, including WooCommerce success stories, plugins you can’t live without, and best practices for WordPress.

During my presentation I plan to touch on examples of customers going from a churn risk to a promoter. My intention is to educate business owners and entrepreneurs that learning from their customers will open the door to revenue streams that no amount of advertising or marketing campaigns can bring in. You’re only a great company if your customers agree.

It’s no secret, businesses need customers to be successful– so why not give them a channel to be heard? The cost of acquiring a new customer outweighs the cost of keeping and maintaining a relationship with a long-time patron– and long-time patrons become Promoters. Continuously learning what your business and team can do to be better in your customers eyes SHOULD be your #1 priority.

Join all speakers for a moderated discussion on a range of topics, including WooCommerce success stories, plugins you can’t live without, and best practices for WordPress.

A website is much more than an online business card. It is the central hub of your online presence and the face of your business to thousands of potential clients. To effectively reach your audience, you must have the proper elements in place, as well as the tools that will allow you to manage your WordPress website with the greatest of ease, functionality and power.

Join Taylor in this presentation to learn the elements that every WordPress website must have. You will learn how to:

• Ensure an SEO-friendly website
• Keep track of where your visitors are coming from
• Start building a marketable email list
• Use the tools that will save you time and headaches
• Make your website and blog posts more engaging

And much more!

Join all speakers for a moderated discussion on a range of topics, including WooCommerce success stories, plugins you can’t live without, and best practices for WordPress.

The WordPress Community is one of the most supportive tech community in the world. We help each other through code issues, site problems, ideas for improving the design of the site, and so much more. New WordPress users often struggle to understand how to get help, and confront similar challenges when they start building their site and hosting it.

• Where should they host their site?
• What type of design should they use?
• How do they manage all of their plugins, and which plugins should they use?
• Then what happens when their site goes down?
• How do they ask for help?
• Who do they ask?

This talk covers these type of topics and covers the life cycle of different types of users. WordPress is one of the most flexible platforms in the world that provides a ton of options. For a new user, or a seasoned user, it can be hard to navigate the WordPress Community. Users Need Our Help.

Join all speakers for a moderated discussion on a range of topics, including WooCommerce success stories, plugins you can’t live without, and best practices for WordPress.

In this talk I’ll show how to integrate your WooCommerce store with other systems that power your business. Perhaps customer data needs to be available to a CRM system, or the order data needs to be updated by the warehouse’s inventory system. All of this functionality an more can be harnessed by using WooCommerce’s built in REST API!

Join all speakers for a moderated discussion on a range of topics, including WooCommerce success stories, plugins you can’t live without, and best practices for WordPress.

Since I began my WordPress design and development business eight years ago I have always had a waiting list of clients. At times I’ve had folks wait up to six months to work with me. Is it because I’m the best designer around? Nope. Is it because I’m an awesome developer with coding skills like a ninja. Hardly! There are any number of people that could deliver the same product as me. But I don’t think there’s as many that could deliver the same experience of working with me. I will teach you how to attract the clients that YOU want to work with.
We’ll go through the entire process from initial email inquiry to proposal, site design, development, launch, and beyond. Great client relationships don’t end when the site goes live. We’ll discuss strategies for developing amazing ongoing client relationships and why that is the key to long-term success. ‘Clients from Hell’ might make for funny stories, but it doesn’t have to be your story!

Join all speakers for a moderated discussion on a range of topics, including WooCommerce success stories, plugins you can’t live without, and best practices for WordPress.

Going over the basics of design in WP theme building. How to help organize your classes, bootstrap (if someone intends on using it) and overall design output through desktop and devices.

Join all speakers for a moderated discussion on a range of topics, including WooCommerce success stories, plugins you can’t live without, and best practices for WordPress.

Remember what it was like when you first set up your blog? You were full of piss and vinegar and incredibly excited. It may have sustained you during a rocky time at work or in your personal life. It was a life force that energized you. After all, people would be reading what you had to say.

Then it happened. Your blog moved from being a life force to a life suck, taking away all the joy that you originally had. Updating it became a chore; you exhaled an audible groan every time you opened up wp-admin. Your blog turned into a vampire (and not of the Twilight variety).

This talk is geared around the four types of blog vampires I’ve encountered and strategies to help make personal blogging fun again. Regardless of where you are on your blogging journey, vampires abound, including:

The No One Is Reading My Blog Vampire—this is where a blogger becomes so despondent after realizing that no one, not even their friends and family, are reading their blog

• The Keeping Up with the Jones’s Vampire—this is where a blogger starts comparing themselves to others and has a feeling of inadequacy/jealousy
• Getting Caught Up in the Fame of (Minor) Celebrity—this is where the blogger gets an inkling of fame and PR people reach out along with the endless invites; but it’s to things they may not care about
• The Administrative Vampire—this is where the blogger gets mired down in all the SEO/tagging/socialing/posting minutiae and hates life

All these vampires make you want to just give up. But that flicker of light from the life force still draws you in. You feel confused on what to do and mostly trapped—I mean, isn’t this supposed to be fun? Having personally experienced all of these types of blog vampires, I’ll walk through strategies to vanquish them so you can enjoy the joys of blogging once again.

Join all speakers for a moderated discussion on a range of topics, including WooCommerce success stories, plugins you can’t live without, and best practices for WordPress.

Security is a crucial element of any WordPress site and too often site owners don’t put it on their forefront of development till it’s too late. A few steps provided in the WordPress documentation along with some tested practices can help.

Join all speakers for a moderated discussion on a range of topics, including WooCommerce success stories, plugins you can’t live without, and best practices for WordPress.

Can improv help you be a better content creator? Does Big Red go with Barbacoa? (The answer to both, is “yes.”) I’ll show you how I apply improv philosophies, such as “Yes, and,” giving gifts, and many more, in my roles as blogger, Community Manager and co-host of multiple podcasts. You’ll leave learning how you can use these same philosophies to create new and interesting content on your own or in collaboration with others.

Join all speakers for a moderated discussion on a range of topics, including WooCommerce success stories, plugins you can’t live without, and best practices for WordPress.

Turn your familiarity with WordPress plugins and themes into valuable content for your site’s visitors by writing a review! In this talk, we discuss how to write an in-depth review of a plugin or theme. This talk will cover what data to collect, how to put a plugin or theme through its paces, and how to share the review in a compelling format for the benefit of your reader.