The most successful website designers and developers are able to stand out among thousands of others in the same field. They are crystal clear and concise on how they explain what they do, for who and why. During this session, you’ll craft that magical one-liner statement which will become the foundation of your brand messaging. It will attract and captivate your perfect client, set you apart from others, help you connect with the right partners and…drive revenue!
Workshop – Building Your First Site
Building your first website can be intimidating. There are a lot of things to consider and many decisions that need to be made. Unfortunately, most people don’t even know where to start.
The goal of this workshop is to:
- Educate you on the decisions you will need to make when building a site.
- Simplify decisions by providing you with frameworks for decision making.
- Help you gain clarity on your site’s content and structure.
- Provide a safe place where you can ask questions and get specific advice on your goals.
- Walk you through the process of inserting your content into WordPress.
- Show you how to select and install themes and plugins.
- Demonstrate how to build and launch a website (without code).
Workshop – Technical SEO Basics
SEO can be a scary unknown, especially technical SEO. It doesn’t have to be though. Come learn some basic things to be aware of like page speed and mobile usability. Walk away knowing how to do a basic audit of your site and what tools that will help you do it.
Workshop – Creating a Website that Sells
It’s hard enough to build a gorgeous, working website, but how do you build one that actually creates results and grows your business?
You know the one—that website of your dreams that sells your products, actively brings you new clients, and is out there on the interwebs, constantly hustling to tell the story of your business and your promise to your customers.
In this workshop, you’ll learn how to get exactly that.
From this workshop, you’ll learn:
- How to brand your business to inspire your customers to create a relationship with you.
- The key to writing content that compels your site visitors to stick around and actually do what you want them to do.
- The journey your average visitor takes through your site and the critical places you lose them along the way.
- How to avoid the biggest design mistakes that repel and confuse your audience.
- The single, most important ingredient to any great website that sells.
Workshop – Stop Guessing: Diagnosing and Fixing WordPress Performance
Speed matters. People are impatient. If your website or a client’s website doesn’t load quickly – within a just a couple of seconds – many visitors will abandon it completely. A slow site means lost time & revenue. But figuring out how to speed up a slow site can be HARD. Everyone’s got a suggestion and an idea for how to fix your performance issues, but most are just guesses, and not based on real data. STOP GUESSING. If you have a performance issue, or just want a faster site, you need to KNOW exactly what is slowing things down, and how to fix it. This talk will show you how.
Workshop – Take Command With Custom WP-CLI Commands
The WP-CLI gives developers powerful tools to rapidly manage WordPress sites, automate repetitive tasks and diagnose problems from the command line. But if you aren’t building custom commands, you’re leaving tons of time-saving potential on the table!
In this session we’ll explore best practices for creating custom command line interfaces, combining and reusing commands, plus other tips & tricks.
Experience with WP-CLI will be helpful, but not required to attend.
Workshop – Let’s Build Our First Plugin!
If you’ve ever wanted to build your own plugin for WordPress, this is the session for you. We’re going to start from scratch and work our way up.
First, we’ll take a look at the basic requirements of a plugin. Next we’ll take our example plugin idea and break it into the various components and steps that we’ll need. We’ll code up the plugin together and install it on our sites, debugging any problems that arise. Finally, we’ll look at ways that we could further extend our plugin.
This tutorial assumes some HTML and CSS knowledge, but you don’t already need to be familiar with writing PHP or JavaScript.
The steps that we’ll work through include: – Setting up a folder and PHP file for our plugin – The plugin file header and what it does – Creating a README file – Adding a menu item and sub-menu item in the dashboard for our plugin settings – Creating a plugin settings page, settings sections, and individual settings with the Settings API – Using WordPress hooks to enqueue scripts and styles, and display output for the user – Moving our plugin settings into the WordPress Customizer – Preparing our plugin for translation and future updates