Eric will be here too!

Whether you have a few years under your blogging belt or still sport training wheels, this is your opportunity to quiz experienced bloggers about their recommendations for running a successful blog. From defining a niche, to developing engaging content, this guided Q&A session will touch on some of the main issues every blogger faces at one time or another. Let us help you navigate the ever-changing landscape of the blogging world.

Join former WordCamp presenters Crystal Edwards, Corrin Foster, Ilene Haddad, Amanda Quraishi, and Eric Weiss for a fun panel that’s sure to spark your creativity!

Would you build a building without having a plan? Neither should you build a website. Tips and ideas on how to organize and plan for your new site or how to change up your current one. We’ll touch on tags, categories, pages, posts, and the various ins and outs of WordPress to make your site both full of great content AND well-organized.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – Where should you start? Why should you care? What can you do as you plan your next post? Which parts of SEO are out of your control? How do strangers find you? Thinking about hiring it out? Have you heard that there’s a plugin for that. Find out more than just these answers – find out the essentials and best practices – because when it comes to SEO you have to do the parts within your control. And even if you hire it out you need to know what results to expect.

Many WordPress websites get little attention from visitors or traffic from Google. Learn how to not be one of those sites. In this class you will learn content strategies that any business can use, how to make your content convert into $ales and what to write about even if you have a boring business.

This is a talk for anyone who has ever considered blogging, then published their first post, and realized they had zero traffic. Austin will share his experience from the past 4 years of building online communities. Success with your online community depends on the right content, that is Consistent, Persistent, Engaging, and then building in processes you can automate. We’ll cover tools, techniques, and strategies to create meaningful relationships with your current and future customers.

Bring your business questions to this broad discussion with two of the top WordPress freelancers. We’ll walk through through some concepts that are important to us, and then open up for Q&A.

Thinking about hiring a WordPress Consultant? In this session you’ll find out how to hire the right one for your site. Are you a WordPress Consultant? Then you need to know how to be the Right WordPress Consultant for your future clients.

This presentation will give valuable information for people to be able to find the right WordPress consultant to meet their needs whether they are a company or a blogger or doing this for fun.

Ever wonder how some freelancers stay booked while others struggle to close the deal? The key is confident customer service. It’s not just what you deliver, but how you deliver it that makes a lasting impression.

Happy customers are the best (and least expensive) form of advertising for your business. From that initial client contact to the final site launch, I’ll share with you how to create and maintain relationships that will generate business for years to come. I’ll also offer some “recovery” tips to help smooth over those nasty conflicts that inevitably crop up. Your client will feel taken care of and you’ll look like a hero!

With over 15 years in small business ownership and customer service delivery, I’ll give you practical tips you can use to fill your project pipeline and increase your sales.

I guarantee you’ll walk away from the session with at least one tangible action you can take when you get back to your desk.

Q&A welcome afterward.

As business owners and freelancers, we’re often typically too busy doing the daily work and grind to step back and examine the health and performance of our businesses.

Cory Miller, founder of iThemes, will walk through the key areas of your business and offer insights into how to fine-tune your business systems for maximum performance.

He’ll help you look at your business like a car engine (a system to be tweaked for ultimate output), offering a checklist of questions to diagnose and analyze what’s working or not — identifying problems and opportunities in order to help you focus on the things that will supercharge your business and take it to the next level.

We’ll examine vital issues of your business like handling cash flow issues (the fuel of your business), identifying the best customers and clients, revving up your marketing pipeline, and ensuring your personal health and happiness.

We hear that the client is always right, but that may not always be the case. After all, only one of you is a web professional. But when we don’t manage customers and expectations, projects can quickly enter the “I lost all my profit” zone. Come find out how to protect yourself from that evil place.

Chris Lema is the VP of Software Engineering at Emphasys Software, where he manages high performers and oversees product development and innovation. He’s also a blogger, ebook author and runs a WordPress meetup in North County San Diego.

From uploading sitemaps and monitoring crawling issues, to optimizing data for search results and managing multiple sites, we’ll take a look at the tools and features available using Google and Bing Webmaster Tools to fine-tune your WordPress site’s SEO performance.

So you’ve installed the Google Analytics tracking code on your website. Good for you. Now what? Join us as David Vogelpohl shows you how to actually get value out of your Google Analytics tracking.

You’ll learn how to to track and value leads, sales, phone calls (you heard me), online chat, ad revenue and more in WordPress. Don’t guess at what’s driving value on your website, know.

David will share the exact custom report settings he uses every day to easily track the success of specific online ads, SEO, specific posts on social media, landing pages, blog posts and much much more.

Fly past the standard reports in Google Analytics and get the tracking and custom report settings you need to make intelligent decisions when managing your website.

If you don’t know if your landing page designs, traffic generation and content campaigns are actually driving value (and how), you need to attend this session!

What’s the best plugin for forms? Memberships? Events? Security? There’s a bewildering number of plugins out there. In this session we’ll talk about the best plugins available in each category and how to choose the one that’s right for you.

When you have a variety of contributors to a website, it can be challenging to quickly get everyone on board with how to use WordPress. Some participants may be veteran members of the IT Crowd, while others may come to the project with little to no experience with the web. In this session, we’ll look at tools and techniques that will help you identify your contributors’ strengths and enable each contributor to play an important role on the site.

In particular, we will focus on the use of plugins including Edit Flow, WP101 and Gravity Forms. We’ll then look at a case study that included custom post types to further split up the roles of the various contributors on a collaborative site.

Moving your WordPress site to a new host or even a new domain can be a difficult endeavor. Chris will show you how to accomplish a successful move without loss of data, your SEO, or your hair. The session will include pointers and tools you can use to make your move easier as well as a checklist to make certain you’ve covered all your bases, including how to work on your site using the IP Address. There will be a 5 minute primer on what domain names actually are and changing to a straight IP address and how to keep multiple sites live for development work.

There is significant debate within the design world (and amongst the developers who work with them) around the topic of coding. In this talk, I will present my thoughts on the advantages of being a coding designer and share some real examples of how knowing a bit of code helps me to be a better designer. I will also try to address some of the more common counter-arguments and provide a glimpse of my preferred tooling and workflow.

Mobile Responsive Design is still in its infancy and many clients are confused or misinformed. The designer has to act as an intermediary between the client and the developer – explaining and demonstrating responsiveness, and coaching clients through not only questions of graphic design, but now also information design, and technical functionality. This session will present our design experiences and best practices for explaining responsive design to clients, as well as detailing the questions developers will need answered before they can implement a successful responsive design.

This session will benefit designers who want to understand how to design responsive sites, developers who are becoming increasingly involved in creative decisions as part of implementing responsiveness, and end-users who want to understand their role, and the decisions they must make.

The open web doesn’t stop at our desktop. Smart phones and tablets not only contain more computing power and better browsers than the computers that started the Internet economy, they have better displays.

In this session presented by Christopher Schmitt, we will work through tips and tricks to develop future friendly images in our sites and apps:

jQuery is used widely in WordPress theme design, and chances are if you haven’t been using the nearly ubiquitous library in your themes, you have been thinking about it. Well, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do jQuery work with WordPress. This session provides practical tips and insight for the jQuery + WordPress theming newcomer. Learn to harness the tools WordPress core provides designers and front-end devs to include the jQuery library and your own scripts in your themes in ways that are compatible, efficient, and organized.

You’re building a site in WordPress and you need a second headline, a subhead. A site wants to build a directory of schools, listing various bits of information on each one. You need to have Testimonials on your site with the quote, who said it, and who that person is. These are all examples of how I used custom fields to meet the needs of different websites. We’ll look at some of these examples, going into how they were done and how you can use custom fields with your WordPress websites.

The biggest challenge for front-end developers today might be the staggering amount of diversity from one browser to the next. We try to build sites that last. We try to make them look good on all the things. Considering this, we’ll need to stay focused and build great looking sites that work well on any device. Common front-end layout patterns can certainly help.

In this session, we’ll dive into code for a jQuery plugin for responsive menus and take a look at off canvas patterns for device-agnostic layouts. The talk will emphasize large and small touch screen considerations.

This will be a technical talk that covers using Git for version control, why it’s useful for WordPress developers, as well as Git’s advantages over SVN. You’ll see specific use-cases from consultants and best-practice developers in the Community who use Git for their projects. We’ll walk through concepts like creating a repo, committing files, versioning, and using Git to work in teams and avoid “Cowboy Coding.” You’ll also get a walk-through of deploying to a WordPress site with Git, and conclude with Q&A.

The standard pattern for configuring a server environment and its sites’ themes is to define several constants, set a bunch of global variables, call a few functions, and sprinkle in a few filters into the wp-config.php and functions.php. This methodology to configure WordPress makes it burdensome to allow child themes to override settings in parent themes and for there to be environment-specific configurations across servers, from development to production.

My talk will delve into how we have tackled this problem for large multisite installs by using multidimensional configuration arrays that can be merged and extended before being converted into the constants, global variables, and filters that WordPress relies on. Beyond the increased consistency and convenience of a central configuration registry, we’ll see how using such extensible arrays allows for mixin configurations and “step-parent” themes. We’ll also see how storing all configuration in data arrays (as opposed to code) allows our code to be aware of its larger environment.

The web is becoming more and more of a JavaScript playground, and WordPress is no exception. From the recent overhaul of the media manager to some of the post revision functionality in 3.6, WordPress is undergoing a direction shift.  This session will go over the very basics of JavaScript MVC and how they can be applied to WordPress.

How do you go about redesigning a high traffic and well established site without annoying all the users? Let’s take a look and figure it out together. Oh, and It needs to be finished next week and it should be responsive.

(Liason’s note: I know this session looks sparse, but he’s talking about rebuilding thechive.com, which I would LOVE to hear about.)