Have you ever wondered why the same behaviors that come naturally to some individuals are incredibly difficult for others? Many web professionals blog daily and constantly interact with the community. Others go through their entire careers in isolation and take seven years to write a single blog post. The difference lies in a combination of our beliefs and our thresholds. In this talk, I’ll recount my journey of identifying thresholds and overcoming them in order to realize the behaviors that I’ve long known needed to happen.

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It’s a scary world out there, so come and learn easy ways to keep your website secure! While freelancing, I had more than one client approach me with a completely compromised website asking for help. I then learned the ins and outs of recovering and protecting their website, both with WP plugins and additional third-party tools. Key takeaways include why WordPress websites are inherently open to vulnerabilities, a list of free plugins to install today, and additional tools to use to keep your website healthy.

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Hosting providers are as numerous as the stars, and what they offer can be just as varied. Learn some lingo and evaluate what your unique needs are to choose the solution that not only gives you the POWER to run your website, but the peace of mind to sleep at night. I will not be “naming names” but supplying information for what you should be looking for!

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Looking to drive more walk-ins, leads, and phone calls to you or your clients local business? You’ll see how to select profitable keywords that get you more business; tips and tricks to getting more online reviews; the most common local SEO mistakes + ways to avoid them; how to get found in mobile searche results; and how to get an easy to measure ROI from your SEO while spending as little time as possible.

According to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level. While we are making great strides towards a web that is accessible to everyone, this population still remains largely under-served. How can we modify our understanding of “digital a11y” to include users with literacy challenges? This session will begin with a broad discussion of accessibility, for those who may be new to the topic, and then move into what we can do to meet the needs of specific users, with a focus on those who can’t read, read poorly, or read English as a second language. Participants will engage in a series of exercises designed to illustrate the importance of website accessibility, build empathy and understanding for multiple user communities, and develop skills to make more useful websites.

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Make your WordPress site fly with this one weird trick…except it’s more than one trick, and it’s only weird until you learn how it works. Varnish Cache can speed up information delivery by a factor of several hundred and earn you the coveted “A” in the TTFB column. This talk will provide an overview of Varnish Cache, what it is and how it works. Then we’ll explore setup and the ways you can integrate Varnish with simple WordPress sites before discussing more complex implementations, strategies for handling state, Edge Side Includes and other neat things Varnish does. HTTPS? Glad you asked. We’ll talk about that too.

Matt Mullenweg himself challenged the WordPress community to learn JavaScript deeply. WordPress is maturing into a full-featured platform for developing single-page and event-driven web applications using JavaScript and the WordPress REST API. WordPress is fully capable of supporting developers looking to add AJAX behaviors to their existing plugins, themes, and websites. We’ll examine some methodologies to deploy the REST API in event-driven applications. We’ll discuss how developers can add AJAX behaviors to their plugins, themes, or websites. For developers interested in building entire custom applications with the data management and user controls WordPress provides, we’ll talk how this can be done. During this talk, we’ll also touch on how libraries like React.JS (Facebook) are rapidly maturing and can be utilized with WordPress for front-end application development.

As creatives, we have a lot on our plates. Keeping it all straight can be a real challenge, particularly for those of us to whom it does not come naturally. Over the past few years as a professional creative, I have found that having systems and processes in place can make a huge difference. The trick? Don’t over complicate it. In this talk I’ll share how to get started creating and using simple systems and processes to help us do our best work while keeping our sanity in tact.

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At any given time, 1 in 5 Americans is living with a mental illness, such as depression, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, substance use disorder, burnout, or ADHD. Statistically, all of us working for an organization with 5 or more employees have at least one colleague who is affected. At the same time, the tech industry is often characterized by high stress, long hours, workplace pressure to be available by phone and email after-hours or sometimes even while on vacation, social pressure to constantly network and attend conferences and make a name for yourself, and the precarious balance between trying to do good by contributing to open-source and maintaining some semblance of free time that doesn’t involve coding. Given how this demanding environment increasingly blurs the line between our professional and personal lives, how can we ensure that the most vulnerable among us aren’t being left behind? As a community, the single most damaging thing we can do is continue to treat mental health as a personal shortcoming that can’t be talked about openly. We shouldn’t think of it as “somebody else’s problem”; the 4 in 5 of us who don’t currently have mental health disorders must do our part to help end the stigma. This talk will begin with an overview of key statistics about mental illness, followed by the efforts of the non-profit organization Open Sourcing Mental Illness to gather more data about mental health in the tech industry, the ALGEE action plan taught by the Mental Health First Aid training course, and finally conclude with ideas and strategies for making our tech workplaces more accommodating and inclusive.

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Many freelancers, developers, and website managers will eventually run into a feeling of being an “imposter” and fear that others will discover that we are not good enough. In this session, we will look at the “imposter syndrome” and how we are not alone in this adventure. Learn also how to overcome and conquer this roadblock and how not to let this fear of not being good enough stop you from developing into the person you want.

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Blogging works when done well and correctly. Long-time WordPress blogger and two-time author Christoph Trappe will share with you the seven steps to get on a blogging routine and stay with it!

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WordPress projects can quickly derail into a series of scope creep items, frustrations, and missing clients. Having a simple and streamlined process to get information from the customer, gathering adequate feedback and keeping your project on task requires some easy adjustments to your process. Stop struggling with bad clients, projects that never end and designing websites to creating a whole experience that will turn nightmare clients into brand ambassadors. Running a WordPress design business is hard work, and there’s more to it than just making websites. Lee has put together real action steps that will take you from welcoming your new client to following up with your happy clients and your new referral sources.

Are you looking to hire remote workers to scale your business? Want to find cream-of-the-crop developers, support reps, or others?

Ben is the Senior Support Technician at WordImpress and was their first full-time remote hire. Come to this talk to hear from the employee’s perspective how the team at WordImpress has gone above and beyond to support him and make him not just feel like a part of the team — actually make him a part of it.

This talk, geared toward WordPress agency owners and HR folks, will cover the following topics:

• The fastest way to burn out remote workers and how to avoid it.
• The one non-negotiable quality to look for in a remote worker.
• Tools to effectively manage remote employees without micromanaging them.

Plus come for the one key thing you are forgetting to look for in applicants to work remotely.

If your marketing isn’t working, it might be because you haven’t properly branded your business. This session will cover how to develop your own brand, how to position it in the marketplace and attract the right clients. We’ll also cover ways to develop messaging for your business.

This session will be a condensed version of the work we do with all new clients to prepare their business for effective marketing. This will be easy to understand and practical.

You’re a rockstar with the front end and the WordPress admin, but the back end is… a mystery. Ever wonder what happens when you create a user or save a post? Where does the data go? Let’s dive in to the MySQL database via phpMyAdmin. We’ll explore the WordPress core tables and investigate the fields to see how the data is stored. We’ll also touch on optimizing your tables and creating database backups without a plugin.

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When podcasting became a thing over a decade ago, there weren’t many options for distribution.  In order to share our podcasts, we needed to develop a home for them – somewhere where people could find us online that was easier to work with than simple listing sites like TalkShoe or iTunes.  That’s why we took advantage of resources we were familiar with – specifically WordPress.  We have individual websites for our in-house podcasts – as well as a network page which is home to our growing catalog of Pittsburgh podcasts.  I’ll show you how we’ve been able to do that and how you can do it, too.

So, you want to build a site for your business, or perhaps start a blog. You’ve heard about WordPress, but you are not quite sure where to start. Come to this session to learn the basics that will set you on the path to building great things with WordPress.

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Being successful in the WordPress space is more than simply doing good work. It involves building a good reputation for yourself or your business in the WordPress community. Your relationships here can make all the difference in helping you grow, so you’ll need a few strategies to make friends, build a trusting network and get the support you need to thrive.

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