Sessions

Presented by Ray Mitchell in Beginners.

If you’re looking to build a business website on the WordPress.com platform, quickly, this presentation is for you. You’ll hear about the differences between building your website on WordPress.com (the one in the TV commercials) and WordPress.org, learn how to prepare for building an effective small business website, and get a head-start on choosing and setting up theme that’s designed for your business. Even if you’ve built sites for clients on WordPress.org, you’ll pick up a thing or two that will help you work with clients on the fast growing, WordPress.com platform.

Presented by Alex Wharff in Developers.

Produce modern and secure site code using the Twig templating language thanks to the magic of the Timber plugin by Upstatement. Creating a library of modular view and partial files allows you to mix and match site elements into a starter theme to get you to MVP in no time, all the while using a custom functions framework made up of your code that ensures not only consistency but adherence to internal standards. We’ll discuss Twig, how to use it in WordPress, and how the initial costs in effort and time are far outweighed by the lasting benefits of using a starter theme you know completely and intimately from the inside out.

Presented by Frank Jones in Business / Marketing.

Does this quote resonate with you…

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Given the amount of data available today, you need to know what marketing endeavors are working for your business. With this information, you will be able to focus the marketing budget toward what is working and identify where things need to be changed.

In this talk, you will learn:

– How to measure your success with online marketing
– Common goals for internet marketing campaigns
– Ways to connect goals to KPI and ROI
– How to avoid common technical challenges
– Places to go for more information, guidance, and support

If you are confused by online marketing, you need to start with a foundation based on making decisions using data.

You know that other businesses are using online marketing to generate sales, find leads, and increase revenue. However, it’s difficult to figure out what works with content marketing, SEO, PPC, social media, and everything else. Some people suggest they know the “secret” to online marketing, and it turns out they only know how to help you get more followers and likes. Unfortunately, you can’t pay the bills with likes on Facebook.

This talk will show you how to move beyond likes, shares, and clicks to improve the bottom line for your business.

Intended Audience: Track 2: Business Marketing

Past Speaking Experience (not necessary to apply): Host Raleigh SEO Meetup monthly events since 2013
Host WordPress Help Desk weekly events since 2014
Speaker at:
WordCamp Asheville
Digital Marketing for Business Conference
Raleigh SEO Conference
NC Tech For Good Conference
Wikipedia edit-a-thons at UNC
Wikipedia conferences in Berlin, Washington DC, and San Diego
multiple local organizations and events

Presented by Laura Rabell in Designers / Power Users.

In the summer of 2010, I made the mistake of reading Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, while sipping tropical drinks on a beach vacation, and it ruined my life. Or rather, it encouraged me to rearrange my life to make more time for my passion for music and achieve location-independence. My husband and I founded Rabell Creative, a WordPress web design and digital marketing agency in 2012. After six years of experience building WordPress websites for clients full time, I will share with you our top tips and tricks for building beautiful websites efficiently, making your clients happy, and having time leftover to pursue your passions. I will outline the exact procedures and plugins that help simplify this process and discuss some of our most frequent pitfalls in dealing with clients, and how we avoid them. Since we can work from anywhere with just our laptops and the Internet, we moved to Nashville in 2016, so I could pursue my dream of becoming a musician and songwriter. Running a fully remote WordPress web design agency is allowing me to travel, play music, and live out my dreams, and I am so grateful for the awesome and supportive WordPress community that helps make it all possible!

Presented by Lauren Etheridge, Miles Elliott in Developers.

Gutenberg, the new WordPress editor released with version 5.0, represents a substantial departure from the status quo in WordPress development. Heavy on JavaScript and based around reusable “blocks” of content, developing with Gutenberg involves technologies not typically associated with WordPress like React, Node, and JSX. In this talk, we will cover how the central IT web team at NC State reworked development processes and tools to fit within a GutenWorld. We will discuss changing coding practices, new vocabulary, and cross-departmental collaboration all coming together in a campus-wide Blocks plugin. Attendees of this talk will come away with strategies for adapting to change and working collaboratively, as well as a plan for developing a set of blocks for your campus.

Presented by Ashley Cribb in Beginners.

You have decided to create a WordPress site. As you go through the steps you now want to host your website. How do you pick the best host for your site?

Presented by Peter Baylies in Designers / Power Users.

This session covers how to analyze and identify slowdowns and bottlenecks in your website performance, use the right tools and plugins to optimize your website page speed, and leverage Javascript and the WordPress REST API to add fast, dynamic content on your newly speedy site!

Presented by Jeff Matson in Business / Marketing.

In this talk, Jeff discusses proven techniques to bring excitement and growth to your business. Whether you’re an established business or just getting started, you’ll learn how to make the changes you need to reach your true potential.

Presented in Beginners, Business / Marketing, Designers / Power Users, Developers.

Presented by Micah Wood in Developers.

Come and learn about PHP generators, how they work and why you might want to use them. We’ll take the standard WordPress loop and show you how a generator could clean up your boilerplate loop code and help prevent mistakes when using WP_Query for secondary loops.

Presented by Kyle Laverty in Beginners.

It’s more than just a website. It’s a marketing tool, it’s your front-facing presence on the web, it’s what you’re about, and it’s much more! In this session, I’ll go over the importance of having a website, expected costs for a website, and where you can go with your website once you have one!

Presented by Tkeyah Lake in Business / Marketing.

Social media campaigns are like apple, or maybe blueberry, pies. There are many slices, or audience segments, that make up the pie to help small business owners reach their goal – website visits. In this talk, we will discuss the importance of slicing target audiences into digestible pieces in order to understand their habits. This helps to inform the audience persona building process and targeting criteria for building a strategic digital and social media strategy.

Attendees participating in this talk can expect to leave with these takeaways:

– Understanding why audience segmentation is important

– Knowing how to build audience personas for each segment

– Understanding the basics of how to target social and digital channels based on audience segments

– Understanding why this is important for optimizing and reporting

Presented by Derek Schmidt in Designers / Power Users.

What makes a website successful? Your website should be your top sales agent because it is available 24/7 and can close business for you while your’e sleeping. But a lot of people make several mistakes when it comes to their website such as adding too much “noise” and clutter or missing key items on their site that help their web traffic convert into customers. In this course we will break down the anatomy of successful websites and provide you with tips and actionable items you can do on your website to improve: time spent on site, bringing back abandoned traffic, increasing your conversions (leads/purchases) and several other factors. Followed by some tools you can use to continue to measure and optimize your websites overall performance.

Presented by Chuck Lovelace in Designers / Power Users.

An in-depth look at the biggest tax reform bill in the past three decades and how it will impact you. We will look at the new tax rates and brackets, Section 199A Qualified Business Income, different business structures and more. We will build your tax knowledge by exploring ways that you can take advantage of all the allowable IRS business deductions for your WordPress business.

Presented by Ian Oeschger in Developers.

A practical introduction to data science: what it is, the nomenclature, what tools to use, how to get and prepare data, how to visualize results. Note: I will use Python since it’s so dominant and legible, but want to focus the talk itself on the data: insights about local demographics for entrepreneurs, for example, or findings from website traffic.

Presented by Jennifer McFarland in Business / Marketing.

When Matt Mullenweg announced in December 2017 that Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0 would be ready in just a few short months, we sat up and took notice. Knowing the landscape of our institution – and higher ed’s proclivity for denying change – we started making plans. From the beginning we were thinking about the full spectrum of WordPress experience: from developers to the one-off content editors. We set to work learning as much as we could about Gutenberg, the user experience, the transition options, and eventually, arrived at our own examination of how Gutenberg could/should/would work at North Carolina State University (NC State). Join us as we recap our adventure so far into the world of user testing, communication strategies, site assessments, and overcoming resistance. This is a story of change management as we safely navigate our campus to the other side of the Gutenpocalypse.

Presented by Adam Silver in Beginners.

A website is a living and breathing piece of your overall business & marketing plan. You need to feed it! This presentation will cover why a website isn’t a “set it and forget it” entity.

Learn about content creation types, determine the need for enhanced features (eCommerce, membership, LMS), ways to encourage visitor engagement, website security and site backups and when it might be time to redesign the site itself.

Presented in Beginners, Business / Marketing, Designers / Power Users, Developers.

What:  WordCamp Wilmington 2017 After Party!

When:  Saturday 5PM (Following the final talk of the day)

Where:

Pour Taproom (Downtown, walking distance from conference)
201 N Front Street
Unit G101
Wilmington, NC 28401

Presented by Vasyl Martyniuk in Developers.

Building WordPress plugins is not an easy job, especially today with over 55,000 plugins in the official WordPress repository and hundreds of thousands themes and premium plugins that can be purchased online. A lot of times new plugins either get burred and lost under hundreds of already established similar plugins or developer looses motivation because of a lot of support tickets and negative criticism. In this session I’ll like to share with numerous tips on how to make a high quality plugins, how to maintain them and strategies to start monetizing them online.

Presented by Steve Schwartz in Designers / Power Users.

Images! We all need them in our WordPress sites to help tell our stories. Where do you get your images? Pay big bucks for stock photography or “borrow” images from the Internet. Neither is the most optimal solution. How about learning how to get out of “auto” mode on that camera you may already have? I can teach you how to shoot products, people, landscapes, and architecture to create stunning images that will add a new dynamic level to your (or your client’s) websites, and other marketing materials. Don’t think for a second that you can’t do it. I’ve been teaching kids (and adults alike) for years how to get more out of their cameras’. Come see, you’ll be the envy of your family and friends.

Presented by Beth Livingston in Beginners.

What are the questions you should ask yourself (or a client) before you begin designing a WordPress website?

In this talk, I will cover the importance of planning, how it reduces development time, and ensures the business requirements drive the design. We will cover the 33 specific questions I ask before beginning any WordPress project that helps determine the theme, the plugins, and the overall design of the site. This talk is appropriate for beginners as well as seasoned WordPress website providers.

Presented by Carrie Cousins in Business / Marketing.

It’s time that everyone understands that copywriting and website design are two separate things. Many clients expect website designers to also write all the content for the design. That’s not a realistic expectation in most cases – not all designers write copy, for starters – and there’s a lot of thought that goes into a well-written webpage. From research to SEO to audience personas to calls to action to microcopy, it’s time to give copywriting its due. This session will include practical tips for designers who need a copywriter to partner with and how to talk to clients about those services, and will provide actionable tips for business marketers looking to get the best of both worlds. In today’s competitive market you need a great design AND great copy to stand out … and it doesn’t come cheap.

Presented by Tiffany Kuchta in Developers.

If you’ve been a developer awhile, you remember when CSS finally became powerful enough to overtake the almighty table. You probably also really love Flexbox, even if you, like I do, still need to reference the same darn CSS Tricks article sometimes when you use it. So what’s Grid’s deal? What makes it so great anyway, and when can you start using it in real life? What if you don’t want to duplicate development, building complex fallbacks for legacy browsers? How do you decide if a project is a good fit for CSS Grid, and then how do you even get started? We’ll discuss these questions, review some tools and tricks, and look at examples of CSS Grid in action.

Presented by Mickey Trivett in Designers / Power Users.

Let’s be real with one another, BUSINESS is HARD! So you want to start a web design business! I aim to go over the things that I have learned from starting my business from day one all the way up to where I am today! Some of the things that we will discuss are what I refer to as the hills and valleys of being an entrepreneur; trust me, there are plenty. How I landed my first client and manage to get new ones. How gathering feedback will improve your business and much more. I think you will leave with a golden nugget or two, along with saying “Why didn’t I think of that!”

Presented by William Jackson in Business / Marketing.

The discussion topics: 1. The difference between your and the public’s perception of how valuable and relevant your content is as a content creator. 2. How to connect across generational lines for increased engagement. 3. Defining and understanding the dynamics of SoLoMoCo Social engagement, Local activism, Mobile digital technology, Community perceptions and expectations. 4. Accepting diversity in gender, culture, generational usage of technology and age is a good thing. 5. Applying new learning to be a digital leader on and off line. 6. Don’t rely just on SEO, conventional marketing and analytics. The ability to connect with the diversity of Social Media can mean increased exposure, new clients, expanding your content into diverse markets, broadening the scope of your Brand. Content creators and digital innovators must be aware of the perceptions of others that are viewing, reading, digesting, comprehending and enjoying content. Social Media is designed to be engaging, fun and embracing the diversity of thinking. Everyone has the potential to be awesome on social media because of their authentic content. The understanding that SEO and Analytics are only part of the pieces to promote your Brand. Marketing requires an engaged plan of execution to build the proper exposure to your Brand, business or service that is offered. Being mindful of the perceptions that people have from the content created that is posted online. Photos, videos, interviews, etc play a key role in creating a Brand that allows for positive perceptions and even in a digital environment. The first impressions are still important.

Presented by Jeremy LeRay in Beginners.

I must confess that I am a late adopter of page builders. I struggled with column layouts and positioning on pages using just the WordPress editor and CSS. Our tech savvy clients that updated their own content often called with frustrated questions regarding layout and positioning for photos and text.

We will discuss the benefits of using a page builder with your WordPress website and cover some of the features and highlights of Beaver Builder.

Presented by Mary Ann LeRay in Business / Marketing.

Consistent delivery of content to your audience starts with integrity. What word is hidden in INTEGRITY? GRIT – takes grit to be accountable to oneself in delivering consistent value to others. Fall in love with the process of blogging your brand to attract others to who you are becoming. People buy you, then your product/service.

Presented by Matthew Woodard in Designers / Power Users.

I would like to help people learn how to use WordPress to start or grow their freelance business. I will also touch on some points such as, marketing, SEO, conversions, etc.

Presented by Aida Correa in Beginners.

Navigating through WordCamp for Better Social Media Engagement WordCamp is such a great experience for the WordPress novice, expert and everyone in between. But, how exactly does one apply all the great information they’ve learned from the conference? Using humor and simple step – by – step advice. I’ll start our journey with how I dove head-first into becoming a passionate WordCamp attendee, my love of Wapuu and some of the great people I’ve met along the way. Then I’ll walk the “WordCamper” through the whys of attending WordCamp and complete our adventure with how-to practically apply it all using social media. This talk is great for the novice to the experienced and for the simple blogger to the busiest CEO.

Presented by William Earnhardt in Developers.

Whether managing or developing a website, you or your customers are going to encounter issues. Solving those problems quickly and efficiently is critical to the success of your business and the happiness of your customers. I’ll discuss simple strategies that you can apply to any scenario to help you troubleshoot more effectively, and even go over a few examples of how those tactics can be applied to some problems that might come up when working with WordPress.