SPEAKER: James Hipkin
TIME: 12:00 pm — 12:35 pm
ROOM: Calaveras

Design agencies across the country have commented that they are no longer designing websites because they struggle to money on their web design projects — in fact, they frequently lose money.

This presentation is a reaction to this industry belief based on our agency experiences. It will present an approach that will lead to profitable projects, showing you how, with a few changes to process, a design agency can make money from website projects.

SPEAKER: Mark Tilly
TIME: 12:00 pm — 12:35 pm
ROOM: El Dorado

Akismet, Jetpack, Disqus, all of these big companies are utilizing the cloud to deliver services through a plugin. Can a small WordPress development shop even attempt this? Yes, you can, and it’s not that hard to do. Heavy volume processing, shared data across clients, AI and big data are just some of the services you can more easily deliver through the cloud.

This talk will cover key concepts you need to know to get started, including:

• Identifying processing best delivered through cloud services
• Architecting a cloud service plugin
• Building a cloud service on Amazon with PHP/Apache
• Communication between your plugin and the Cloud Service
• Tips, volume metrics and other lessons learned in 4 years of supporting Artificial Intelligence and volume processing through a cloud service plugin

SPEAKER: Austin Gil
TIME: 12:45 pm — 1:20 pm
ROOM: Calaveras

This discussion addresses issues in design, development, and project management, where performance is affected. We will look at various opportunities and even techniques within each stage to get even more speed, and cover topics from beginner to advanced, with tips or advice that just about anyone can walk away with.

SPEAKER: Sallie Goetsch
TIME: 12:45 pm — 1:20 pm
ROOM: El Dorado

For me, CSS Flexbox wasn’t just a discovery, it was an epiphany. It’s become my number-one tool for responsive layouts, and I keep discovering new uses for it.

If you’re a front-end developer or a designer who codes and you haven’t started using Flexbox yet, come to this talk to find out how to save time, save math, and save media queries. If you build plugins that add new content types (events, products, portfolio entries) and ship stylesheets and templates with them, Flexbox is the easiset way to create layouts to display that content attractively in any theme, on any size screen.

Join me for a tour of real-life design problems solved with Flexbox:

• Vertical centering
• Equal-height columns
• Placing items at the outside edges of their containers
• Automatic spacing and sizing of items to fit into a row (no more percentages for widths or margins)
• Changing the order of elements on smaller screens
• Wrapping rows so the elements always fill the width of the content area
• New tricks with margin:auto
• Overlays using Flexbox z-index

No pick or shovel required!

The code for all the layouts I discuss will be available on GitHub.

SPEAKER: Dawn Pedersen
TIME: 1:30 pm — 2:05 pm
ROOM: Calaveras

Sure, you could do a lot of guesswork at the beginning of a website design project. Let’s build a template and throw in some placeholders, and see what becomes of it! Only to discover when the text and media come rolling in from your content creators that half the template needs to be rebuilt, and the menu structure you had in mind was way off-base.

This happens a lot, costing everyone involved valuable time and energy — especially you. Learn how to put content first in the sequence of design steps.

This talk will cover:

• Defining your audience and goals
• How to convince your client to provide content in a timely fashion
• Understanding, organizing, and prioritizing content
• Brainstorming ideas for optimal site and page structure

SPEAKER: Kevin Howe
TIME: 1:30 pm — 2:05 pm
ROOM: El Dorado

Over the past 6 years I have grown my agency from a one man shop to a team of 14, working for some of the largest names in our industry. In that time a lot has gone right, but a lot has gone wrong.

In this talk, I’ll pass on what I have learned learned and how things change when you go from one person to two, to three, to five and to ten. I’ll cover the peaks and the pitfalls we ran into — pitfalls that could have been avoided if someone would have just taken the time to teach me some basic things.

As designers and developers we are not educated in business management, in HR, in contract negotiations. All of these things are important and change the way we grow our companies. This talk covers the good and the bad, and where we totally screwed up.

SPEAKER: Ben Byrne
TIME: 2:25 pm — 3:10 pm
ROOM: Calaveras

Whether being used for a vast and loose affiliation of local chapter websites or a closely-held pool of topical blogs, WordPress Multisite can be an efficient and effective tool — provided it’s done right.

In this session, we’ll review this sometimes-esoteric technology and highlight appropriate use cases for leveraging it (as well as go over when to avoid it). We’ll also walk through some best practices for setting up and developing for Multisite Networks, highlighting its strengths, weaknesses and litany of “gotchas” so you can save yourself some headaches.

SPEAKERS: Cat Scholz and Tomofey Rytikov
TIME: 2:25 pm — 3:10 pm
ROOM: El Dorado

This session will feature two lightning talks from two different speakers. Each speaker will have 15 MINUTES to present and a group Q&A will take place at the end of the session.

An Introduction to WooCommerce

Cat Scholz will deliver an overview of what WooCommerce is. She will also cover how you can use it to setup an online store quickly and easily using only the free WooCommerce plugin and your existing paypal account.

WooCommerce Custom Product Types

Timofey Rytikov will discuss the creation and use of custom product types in WooCommerce, answering the questions:

• What are the custom product types in WooCommerce?
• Why would you use custom product type in WooCommerce?
• How it works and how to build a custom product type?

SPEAKER: Ben Ilfeld
TIME: 3:20 pm — 3:55 pm
ROOM: Calaveras

For better or worse, advertising is the lifeblood of the modern media ecosystem. Yet more times than most of us wish to admit, ads fail to load on pages, revenue unexpectedly tumbles, or ad campaigns end up on the wrong pages.

In other words, often times ads just FAIL.

This session will give you a roadmap for navigating likely the most infuriating and costly debugging many of us face, laying out the basics: data collection, data analysis, useful free tools and a little psychology. For engineers, the entire ad ecosystem of literally thousands of interconnected technologies and millions of advertisers is the ultimate black box. For ad operations, code is completely unintelligible.

Let’s avoid the finger pointing, fix those ads, and get back to changing the world!

SPEAKER: Jon Trujillo
TIME: 3:20 pm — 3:55 pm
ROOM: El Dorado

The main objective of this talk is to showcase the tools I’ve been using to get my WordPress projects designed, signed off, built and delivered — quickly but not in a cookie cutter or “turn and burn” fashion.

I’ll start by sharing the design tools I use. Then explain how I present the design to the client quick for review, and collect their feedback. Then move to a few key tools that I use for WordPress Development. And finally, we’ll cover how I deploy and manage sites.

SPEAKER: Anca Mosoiu
TIME: 4:05 pm — 4:40 pm
ROOM: Calaveras

Like Excel in the 1980’s, WordPress is transforming the way that large organizations collect, curate, and publish information on the web and in apps.

Marketing micro-sites, corporate blogs and intranets published with WordPress provide a quick alternative to more complex enterprise software and platforms, and have made it possible for managers to deploy and test their ides with less IT support. For web designers and developers, enterprise clients can be highly lucrative, but there are special considerations to keep in mind.

By attending this session, you will come away with new ideas for building with WordPress in complex, large-scale situations.

SPEAKER: Michael Kuhlmann
TIME: 4:05 pm — 4:40 pm
ROOM: El Dorado

This talk will focus on what I’ve learned about BuddyPress since it was in alpha seven years ago. Here are some of the key touchpoints:

• Quick history and evolution of BuddyPress
• When you should use BuddyPress — when the site requirements match up
• When you should not use BuddyPress — red flags
• What add-ons are available for BuddyPress
• Helpful resources to get started with BuddyPress