🇺🇸 WordCamp Virginia Beach 2020

Vital plugins that you need to get started

Starting a new business, especially during a global pandemic, is a scary and risky process. But when you strongly believe your business idea has a market and it’s worth the risk, you need to get it out to the public.

Using WordPress as a foundation, you’ll be able to leave the coding and heavy lifting on website design to the WordPress community, while you focus on your business.

I’ll go through some key features of WordPress that directly benefit you as an entrepreneur and vital plugins that you need to get started so you don’t need to spend hours on your website. Most of your time should be spent directly on growing your business.

Discussing the benefits and downsides of increased automation

Providing automated responses to customers can save a lot of time in what would otherwise be repeated effort. But should we be reconsidering our use of auto-responders, bots, and the like? What impact does obvious automation have on your customer’s perception of your service?

Highlighting the benefits and the, rarely talked about, downsides of increased automation, this talk will offer alternative solutions to what is a rarely discussed side of this topic.

How I turned WordPress into a framework to build ChatBots

In the last 4 years, I have created, in custom PHP, about twenty Chat Bots for Telegram and Facebook Messenger. Being made without the use of CMS, every maintenance or update operation, even the simplest, required code-side changes taking away a lot of time.

Hence the idea of using a CMS to help me manage my ChatBots. In this talk we will see together how this idea was born and which WordPress tools helped me in this challenge.

Abha Thakor is an experienced communicator, journalist, researcher and digital professional. She has specialisms in evolving technologies, artificial intelligence, strategic communications, sustainable development and cross-cultural working. She is on the WordPress Release squad for 5.5 and 5.6.

She is a WordPress Marketing Team Rep and Communications Lead for WordPress Translation Day. She is active in a number of other teams building cross-team collaboration, including WordPress.tv and Community. She supports events in WordPress and other tech and management areas through mentoring and championing communications, inclusion and accessibility.

She was Communications Lead for WordCamp London 2019 and a co-organiser for WordCamp London 2020, Europe 2019 and 2020, Abha is also Communications Lead for WordPress Translation Day and its mini-events. She has helped lead or facilitate the marketing team and various projects for Contributor events in Brighton, Milan, Zurich, Dublin, Belfast, Stuttgart and Mumbai. 

With her journalistic training, she has developed a number of projects including the #ContributorStory series and the video marketing initiative, and runs training events in a number of environments. She is also the professional development lead for a number of organisations and writes on technology, AI and machine learning. She is an editor of the ‘People of WordPress’ series on WordPress.org/news.

Earlier this year, Abha was awarded fellowship of the international Chartered Institute of Public Relations in recognition of outstanding services to that profession and the industry. She is also a Chartered PR Practitioner and a Chartered Manager, and champions lifelong learning in communications and IT.

Creating communication plans

Did you know that the Project Management Institue now considers Blogging to be an official part of running a project?

This talk will focus on communications strategies and using blogging to communicate with multiple levels of stakeholders (and customers!) at every stage of the project lifecycle. We’ll tackle strategies for “Early Access” programs and ways to build customer engagement into every stage of your projects.

• We’ll look at creating a Communication Plan and outlining the needs of your project’s stakeholders.
  
• Then, some examples from within WordPress on how contributor teams communicate specific milestones within a release cycle.
  
• Next, we’ll dive into a few Early Access examples and how to set proper expectations for your users, provide status updates at regular intervals, and incorporate user feedback into the ongoing project.
  
• Finally, we’ll look at some tools and templates that will help you get started.

SEO isn’t just about content

In this session, we’ll cover the basics of SEO including but not limited to performance, user experience, content creation and publishing, and advertising.

Attendees will walk away with a solid understanding of the role optimization plays in driving high performing traffic and lead generation. We’ll look at why SEO isn’t just about content, and how mobile-first indexing is a front of mind topic.