In this talk, I’ll walk through the steps that I’ve taken to change and develop our content strategy at an organizational level. I’ll walk through the process needed to make a cultural shift to create more content and how to get “buy-in” from your stakeholders to create blog posts.

This talk will cover:

• Writing about what you know
• Building Target Personas
• How to build a bank for Evergreen content
• Choosing the voice of your blog (what should be in your content style guide)
• Developing an editorial calendar
• How to promote your blog through SEO, schema, and accessibility
• How to measure success

I’ll cover how to do this with WordPress, talk about blogging best practices, keyword research, SEO, search engine competition, and A/B testing.

I’ll also talk about how to deal with internal politics about culture shifts and how to generate buy-in by highlighting the whole picture and focusing on the goals.

With today’s abundance of distractions and interruptions, gaining the attention of your audience online is harder than ever. Luckily, images can help your content gain traction and compete for attention on social media, on your website, and throughout the web.

This session will cover the ins-and-outs of using images on your WordPress site, including:

Best practices in using images on your pages and posts

How to build your visual brand through your images

Why performance matters, how images impact performance, and what you can do with your images to keep your site running fast

Image optimization for SEO

Plus, you’ll also get a list of plugin recommendations to help you better manage and display your images on your site

The JAMstack is a popular phrase for building modern websites and applications using JavaScript + APIs + Markdown. This stack is very popular as it provides improved performance and security.  By using this stack, developers can deliver rich user experiences at scale.  This will cover general use cases for the JAMstack with WordPress and how to get started. This talk will also include helpful file architecture and scripts to improve the development experience.  

This talk covers how to setup your WordPress website to support the JAMstack. The JAMstack is growing in popularity for architecting modern websites and applications. JAM stands of JavaScript + APIs + Markdown. Benefits of using this stack include improved performance and security.

There are countless examples of how simple changes have made a dramatic improvement in website performance. Website owners have found that changing the wording on their “add to cart” buttons can increase sales by 30% or even more. Simply changing the imagery or messaging in your hero area has increased online leads by over 100%. 

You’ll never “guess” your way into a high performing website, you need to run tests and see what performs better. This may sound hard, but it’s really not. In this talk I’ll show you how to start your first and second A/B test. An A/B test is where you test two different variations of the same page. 

While this may sound complicated it can be done in minutes and without any custom programming through a free tool called Google Optimize.

What makes a great logo? What’s the difference between a tagline and a slogan? What makes a great company name? What’s the difference between “brand” and “identity?”  So many questions … all to be answered in this power-packed presentation by Kevin Skarritt, Chief Peep of Flock Marketing.

Truly great brands get these things right and know how and why they are so critical to biz and marketing success.  Too little time and energy is spent by most small and medium-sized businesses on these foundational topics.  If you’re feeling like your brand is a little lackluster or if you find yourself struggling with effective marketing, it may be directly linked to your brand’s identity. 

Although there are a lot of moving parts, wrangling them and making sense of them is straight forward – if presented properly.  **In one session, you’ll be introduced to the key concepts that go into every great brand** … but, it’s not just the parts, it’s also how they interact with each other and which ones are the most important.  Join Kevin Skarritt in this eye opening review of everything you’ll need to know about brand identity.  

### Here are some of the presentation take-aways:

* What are the differences between: “Brand”, “Branding”, “Brand Identity”, and “Identity?”

* What are the *5 attributes of a rockstar logo?*

* What is the concept of “velocity” and how does it lead to a *great tagline?*

* How is a *tagline different from a slogan*, and why should you care?

* Should I create a brand style guide? (or, more importantly) *What’s a brand style guide?*

I can’t think of anyone better to speak on mental health than a teenager who’s at the end of all the emotional strain everyone goes through. I’ve spent the last four years with hands on experience learning how to maintain mental health, and I can’t wait to share what I’ve learned.

I’ll give tips on how to maintain your sanity during the busiest stages of life, and through the toughest work projects.

Do you envy the business owners or writers that seem to crank out content? It’s not easy, but if a self-proclaimed procrastinator can do it, so can you. Find out how author Allison Spooner wrote multiple books using flash fiction and how you can use it to flash your muse and get writing.

Hi, my name is Andy and I have ADD (attention deficit disorder).

On and off for the past 5 years I’ve been attempting to treat my ADD and deal with the consequences it brings to my work and personal life. Take a journey with me as I explain how ADD and other mental health issues are prevalent in the developer and creative community, my personal journey towards treatment, finding a career that embraces my disorder, and how we can all take better care of ourselves and our mental health.

We’ll cover the need for a visible legal agreement in the Return and Refunds policy. Suggestions and strategies on how to set up your policy. I’ll then go into finding ways to reduce refunds and get useful information from your refund processes.

You’ve been thinking about writing a blog for some time now, but don’t know where to start. This talk is for you. A practical presentation on do’s and don’ts for starting a blog

Talk will cover platform selection, writing tips, how to find pictures to use, how to find content, length of posts, how often you should post, best practices and SEO.

In this talk we will go over the basics of designing, developing and testing for accessibility. We will cover accessibility principles (POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust) and approaches to achieving accessibility guidelines including: Color Contrast, Sizing & Spacing, Device Independent User Input, Page Structure, Headings, Testing Tools, Extensions, Testing with a Screen Reader.

We all have favorite web tools and plugins, let’s share, so we can all be better and more efficient.

Roundtable discussion where each participant share’s 3 -5 web tool or plugins they like and why.

Did you know that it is possible to create SaaS applications with WordPress? We will discuss some of the successfully created applications, and how to go about building one. We will cover what kinds of software makes sense to be a SaaS application instead of a standard plugin, and the kinds of built-in advantages WordPress add to the process. In addition, we will compare different options for provisioning new accounts and how to secure and scale your applications.

The WordPress plugin ecosystem numbers in the thousands, but there is still a comparatively small set of software for the WordPress platform that goes beyond plugins. We will cover what kinds of software makes sense to be a SaaS application instead of a standard plugin, and the kinds of built-in advantages WordPress add to the process. Using Laravel as an example, we’ll also discuss the basics of how to integrate your application as well as compare different options for security and monetization.

There’s a lot about modern networking that we all should un-learn. Showing off your knowledge and targeting the “important” connections is the wrong approach. If you genuinely want to be an effective networker, you have to shift away from looking at these interactions as transactional. That said, it’s still hard to find people to talk to, and even harder to know to start up a conversation. I’ll give you tips that will help you work through those issues and ultimately make you more comfortable in new spaces with new people. You’ll come away from this presentation with advice you can put to use immediately.

As creatives, we hear objections from potential clients all the time.

Unfortunately, we don’t all respond appropriately and we end up losing business. In this talk, we explain how creatives should respond when a client says you’re too expensive, don’t have enough experience, or aren’t an expert.

Closing the sale is hard, and it doesn’t help when a client hits you with an objection that could derail your pitch entirely.

But instead of losing projects because of objections, we can actually use them in our favor. Whether the objection is due to you being too expensive, not having enough experience, or not being an expert, you can still win the project if you tweak your sales approach.

In this talk, we share how we land gigs even though we’re more expensive than our competitors, don’t have double-digit years of experience, and don’t have any expertise in any particular industry.

The BigCommerce WordPress plugin uses headless ecommerce to create a hybrid of a SaaS and WordPress. It’s powerful, fast, easy, scalable, and inexpensive. This is not a deeply technical talk, but rather a discussion about how the ecommerce landscape is changing in WordPress.

This is not intended to be a sales pitch for BigCommerce, but rather a plugin overview, similar to an “Introduction to WooCommerce” talk. Obviously BigCommerce must come up, but this is more about the evolving landscape of ecommerce in WordPress with the move to SaaS based plugins.

“Advertising” and “marketing” may overlap, but marketing doesn’t have to be expensive! Would you like to learn how to market your small business on a small business budget?

In this session, you will learn:

• how to identify your ideal client (target market)
• how to market to them in a way that they will respond to, and
• how to do this effectively for little to no cost

With 20 years of experience, helping small business owners with their marketing and online presence, I am ready to teach you the strategies that actually WORK for small businesses. I will help you discover the clients you WANT to work with, which sounds overly simplistic, but in reality, most small business owners can’t identify their ideal client. I will teach you how to communicate with your ideal prospects in a way that helps them to know, like, and trust you, which encourages them to respond positively to your message. Finally, I will equip you with a list of free and low-cost tools, giving you some tips on how to best use them to reach your target market.

I have been using these tools and strategies with and for my clients for two decades. Not only can you use the knowledge you learn in this session to reach your own target market, but you can also add value to your business by teaching these strategies to your clients. By the end of this session, you will learn the methods that helped me gain more visibility, credibility, and profitability as a small business owner who actually THRIVED during the recession and has kept growing ever since!

Calling all freelancers! Whether you focus on design, development, content creation or marketing, there’s more to freelancing than just being good at your trade. In order to be able to service your clients, you have to keep YOUR business running and that means getting those finances in order. We’ll talk about the basics (fixed vs. hourly, time tracking, invoicing and profit to name a few) as well as more advanced topics (like IRAs and planning beyond this month). There will be spreadsheets.

No one got into web design to be a privacy expert. But times have changed and privacy is more relevant than ever. What you’ll learn:

1. Why privacy is important;
2. What websites need to have a Privacy Policy;
3. Why you should be the one talking to your clients about it.