Presented by Kathy Argyros in Manhattan.

Join this marketing seminar to gain a clear understanding of the must-have tactics to successfully build a website that builds business.

A bad website can kill a business. Outdated technology, confusing navigation and poor content are just a few reasons why websites fail. 

If done right, a website is a lean, mean, lead-generation machine.  If done wrong, you’re losing more than 50% of potential customers.

Attendees will learn how to:

• design for new web standards leveraging WordPress templates
• attain results for your business goals, while differentiating yourself from your competition
• develop robust, targeted content while leveraging WordPress plug-ins and SEO
• create strategies to capture qualified leads and build a marketing database

Whether you’re a web developer, designer or business owner, this is your opportunity to crush your competition! 

Presented by Shawn Hooper in Brooklyn.

WP-CLI is a set of command line tools for managing your WordPress site. It allows you to perform many tasks much quicker than you would be able to by other means. In this session, I will teach you how to get WP-CLI running, and show some of my favorite time saving features. Once you’ve started using WP-CLI, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it! This talk is appropriate for developers, designers and server administrators of all skill levels.

Presented by Terell Moore in Queens.

Work faster, not harder. You’ve probably heard of WP-CLI, but do you know everything you can do with it?

We’re going to take a deep dive into WP-CLI, from installation, to configuration and automation of your common WordPress maintenance tasks. It’s you don’t want to miss this!

Presented by Jack Reichert in Brooklyn.

Too many companies provide social services for “free,” quite literally banking on your data. WordPress is unique in that it charges (quite minimally) for the services it provides, and you own your data. I will explore various tools and paradigms — existing, and in the works — to develop and leverage your WordPress site as a central hub for your social data.

Presentation: http://www.jackreichert.com/2015/10/31/wordpress-your-world-your-data-slides/

Presented by David Laietta in Queens.

If you’re starting out with WordPress development, or plan to build your own themes and plugins, hooks are going to be very important. Even if you just want to make changes to existing themes, knowing all of the actions and filters available to you and how to use them can speed up development time and let you do things that you can’t by editing templates alone.

This talk will introduce you to WordPress actions, filters and hooks. We’ll cover what they are, how to use them and a few examples in action. Get ready to get more out of your site by powering up your themes and plugins with hook magic!

Presentation: http://obm.io/wcnyc2015

Presented by Cameron Barrett in Bronx.

Presented by Jordan Quintal in Brooklyn.

The focus of my presentation will be on WordPress and website accessibility; from a front-end perspective. First, I will explain what web accessibility is and why it is important. To continue, I will discuss AODA and Section 508 regulations for Canada and the United States. Then, I will go over some key WCAG 2.0 compliancy requirements a developer will need to ensure the websites they develop are fully accessible. From there, I will showcase a few web accessibility tools, then some WordPress accessibility plugins; followed by a quick demonstration on how to evaluate a website’s accessibility.

Presented by Scott Taylor in Queens.

4.4 is going to be an exciting release. This talk will give a first-hand account of the development process, changes and future changes planned for core, and a preview of all of the exciting things in the release.

Presented by Sara Cannon in Brooklyn.

Presented by Anthony D Paul in Brooklyn.

Working remotely can feel creatively isolating. Switching from a brick-and-mortar agency, to pants-optional sounds awesome—but if you’re accustomed to joining a coworker at the whiteboard, to hammer out a UI concept over marker fumes, you’ll agree the back and forth in GitHub/Slack channels doesn’t cut it.

In this talk, I’ll share how our work-from-home team overcomes technical and social hurdles, to mirror natural, in-person creative ideation (sketching, wireframing, etc.) with a mashup of hardware and cloud tools. This talk is best for teams allowing or considering telework, as well as freelancers who want to impress their clients.

Presented by Lara Schenck in Manhattan.

Presented by Josepha Haden in Bronx.

Josepha will take a brief look at the Digital Divide as it stands today and what current technological trends mean for it in the future. The talk will mainly be focused on what it takes to be literate in the digital landscape our students find themselves in and how WordPress can be used to build and perfect those skills.

Presented by Jennifer Ecker in Brooklyn.

Let’s talk type! We’ll take a look at the importance of typography in design, as well as some basic best practices. You’ll learn about a few of the top font services as well as methods and tools for implementing the right font for your WordPress site. Whether you prefer to work with a plugin, change your theme options, or manually edit your theme, you’ll walk away knowing a few ways to add shiny new fonts to your site. This talk will be useful for anyone wanting to learn how typography can improve their site, and designers who are unsure how to implement custom web fonts.

Presented by Elana Rudick in Brooklyn.

If you want to make money designing WordPress sites, it’s crucial to know when to go custom and when to stick with a ready-made solution. In this session geared to designers looking to make profitable WordPress websites, learn how to assess when to use a premade theme, how to pick the right one, and when to start from scratch.

Presented by Rami Abraham in Manhattan.

Presented by John Eckman in Bronx.

Inside the WordPress community, we often celebrate the data point that 24% of the web runs WordPress. But there’s a significant portion of the CMS market where the power of WordPress is poorly understood: the Enterprise market.

The Enterprise market still sees (in large part) WordPress as a “blogging platform” or only sees WP as an option for “simple” use cases.

This talk focuses on how we can better address that market and show the true power of WordPress’ focus on simplicity (of experience) even in contexts where complexity (of implementation) is required.

Presented by Matthew Boynes in Queens.

Rewrite rules are a thorn in many WordPress developers’ sides. In this session, we’ll discuss a simple way to add automated testing for your rewrite rules to help speed up your development and allow you to deploy your custom rules with confidence and peace of mind.

Presented by Boone Gorges in Queens.

The headline feature of WordPress 2.3 was what Matt called “native tagging support”. The taxonomy architecture that supported tags in WP 2.3 – an abstraction of the old Category functionality – is a critical component of how WordPress turned from a blogging platform to the more generalized content management system that it is today.

But this evolution has not always been smooth sailing. There was significant debate over how (and whether) WordPress’s general taxonomy framework should work. And the database schema that ultimately shipped in version 2.3 had technical ramifications that took several years to become fully apparent.

A close look at these problems, and how the WordPress team is addressing them, contains some useful lessons on how WP deals with breaking changes, the importance of unit tests and developer documentation, and how to weigh backward compatibility against future platform growth.

Presented by Melissa Cahill in Manhattan.

This is an update of a presentation I gave at WordCamp NYC in 2012. It provides an overview of what SEO is (and what it is not), best practices for business website owners and bloggers who want to do their own SEO, and advice for how to select an SEO vendor for those who don’t. Covers on-site, organic SEO using the All in One SEO plugin

Presented by Steve Bruner in Queens.

Whether you’re creating a theme or plugin for distribution on WordPress.org, or writing code for a client, you need to provide a great experience for the users who install your code.

Your added functionality usually means additional Settings, Post Types, Taxonomies, Custom Fields and overall Workflow. Don’t make users struggle to look for your settings page, or become confused and frustrated when trying to fill in fields for a custom post type. Provide them with inline help, where and when they need it

In this session you will learn how to limit support tickets, emails and general user frustration, by creating

-Dismissible admin notices.

-Pointers

-Help tabs

-Custom fields with inline help.

-Step by Step settings pages.

and much more.

Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/piklist/piklist-providing-inline-help-for-a-great-user-experience

Presented by Jason Resnick in Bronx.

Follow along as I explain how I managed to pivot my WordPress development business from being an hourly/project-based WordPress developer with a plate full of different clients and projects to one with exclusive clients who all go through the same funnel and process month over month.

Some items that we’re going to discuss is how to evaluate the parts of your business that can be automated so that you can concentrate on making sure the custom aspects are top notch, having the “hard” conversations with clients, and being the farmer rather than the hunter.

Presented by Alexandre Simard, Élise Desaulniers in Manhattan.

WordPress itself is available in more than 50 languages. If your language happens to be English or Mandarin, your content will be accessible to about one quarter of the world population. If you want to reach a larger audience, you will need to publish in multiple languages. How does WordPress fare in this case? Spoiler alert: not so well.

In this talk, we will outline the best practices involved in creating a multilingual site, then we will walk you through the benefits, drawbacks and pitfalls of current approaches to multilingual content with WordPress. Yes, we have (pretty much) tried them all. We hope that by the end of our talk, you will feel at ease if multilingual projects come your way.

Presented by Nicole Arnold in Queens.

The WordPress codebase contains thousands of functions, including many hidden gems that are often overlooked, virtually unknown, or just not talked about. We’ll cover a variety of WordPress core functions that you may not know exist. Regardless of your experience as a developer, you’ll learn a variety of new gems you can use every day. If you’ve enjoyed the “Core Functions You (Maybe) Don’t Know Exist” sessions in the past, come back to explore even more new functions.

Presented by Taylor Lovett in Queens.

WordPress search is notoriously lacking. Why? MySQL is not search optimized. Elasticsearch is a scalable database that when coupled with WordPress produces extremely powerful results. This talk will cover what Elasticsearch is, why it’s important, and integrating it with a WordPress website using a 10up open source plugin called ElasticPress. ElasticPress has become increasingly popular in the WordPress community even being leveraged by popular hosting companies such as WP Engine.

Presented by Michelle Schulp in Bronx.

No matter who you are, everyone seems to need a website, and that often means hiring a designer, developer, or agency to do some work for you. But how do you communicate about something that is outside your realm of experience, much less help direct the project to suit your business? That’s why you hired sometone, after all! We’ll unmask the “magic” of web design and learn to ask constructive questions, give useful feedback, and develop a collaborative relationship that will benefit both of your businesses.

Presented by Aaron Jorbin in Manhattan.

Science Fiction and Fantasy can teach web creators many valuable lessons. From seeing how Daleks with too narrow of a goal always fail to understanding the Klingons value of honor, to hundreds of other we can become better web creators by borrowing lessons from Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Presented by Lauren Pittenger in Brooklyn.

Do you walk the line between designer and developer? Are you more comfortable using a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and find the black screen that is the command line a bit intimidating? This session will look at some of the basic commands needed to get comfortable using the command line. Though designers may need the command line for little more than version control or compiling SASS, having a basic understanding of the command line can help speed up your workflow.

Presented by Taylor McCaslin, Matt Johnson, Becky Davis, Marguerite Halley in Brooklyn.

Custom post types, post formats, taxonomies, meta fields, menus, sidebars, categories, tags, related posts, and the upcoming WordPress API. There are so many things to consider when building with WordPress. At the end of the day, you just care about making it easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for. That’s what Information Architecture is all about.

During this panel we will openly discuss content structure, content strategy, content discovery, development tips, and end with an audience Q&A. We will help you make sense of all the things you have to consider when setting up or improving your site’s Information Architecture, and share some of the secrets and pro-tips that we have found work well.

This session will have something for everyone, and you’ll leave with actionable items to help you structure your site so visitors more easily find what they are looking for.

Presented by Alex Vasquez.

I just gave this talk at WordCamp OC and was surprised by the response to it so I figured I might try to give it again.

I talk about stress, anxiety and self-doubt that I personally and many freelancers, business owners and everyone can feel in our Open Source community. We are harsh on ourselves when we don’t kill it like Pippin, or build a world-renown agency like 10up within our first few years of opening our doors. I talk about my journey, the mental toll it’s taken and how I’ve tried to cope.

I don’t have the answers, but I know it’s something we should be talking about more, yet so few of us do.

Presented by Alex Vasquez in Bronx.

I’ll talk about stress, anxiety and self-doubt that I personally and many freelancers, business owners and everyone can feel in our Open Source community. We are harsh on ourselves when we don’t kill it like Pippin, or build a world-renown agency like 10up within our first few years of opening our doors. I talk about my journey, the mental toll it’s taken and how I’ve tried to cope.

I don’t have the answers, but I know it’s something we should be talking about more, yet so few of us do.

Presented by Eric Andrew Lewis in Manhattan.

What exactly is HTTPS, how does it work, and what kind of security does it offer? 

If you haven’t heard of HTTPS, your website is probably sending (and receiving) web content to users over HTTP, an insecure protocol. This is not good. You are exposing your user credentials to nefarious middle-men when logging into wp-admin. 

HTTPS is The Way Forward™ for the web, as various web leaders are penalizing sites that still serve over HTTP. Search Engines are ranking insecure sites lower in search results. Browsers are limiting capabilities and stripping away features from sites serving HTTP.

This talk will focus on what HTTPS is from the very ground up, and some direction on how to set it up for your site.

Eric will also be available at the Happiness Bar during the day if you want hands-on help migrating your site to HTTPS.

Presented by Tom Ransom in Bronx.

You can stand in line at the store or stand in line online to get your hands on this “hot” New York pastry. This session will discuss the lessons learned in building an ecommerce site for James Beard Award-winning Chef Dominique Ansel’s Cronut. Learn how WordPress stands up to the crowds when we sell out of hundreds of pastries within 15 minutes every Monday morning. We’ll discuss things to consider when planning an ecommerce site and things we failed to consider until we were faced with overwhelming demand.

Presentation: http://bitly.com/gonein600

Presented by Hristo Pandjarov in Bronx.

A live case on how I improved the website of a big interior design company. The site had great content but suffered from serious performance and structural issues resulting in slow loading time (more than 6 seconds for the index page). This was caused by excessive server resources consumption and after I analyzed the problems I managed to turn it into a perfectly optimized website.

This talk will cover:

• Problems with switching hosting providers – the challenges we faced when migrating a site with more than 16,000 images from one hosting company to another
• Proper WordPress URL and SEO site structure – how to handle problems with non-UTF8 URLs, managing redirections, bulk redirections and more.
• Identifying and prioritising your site performance issues – how to analyze what has to be done both in terms of content and technology.
• Plugins clean-up – how to clear the mess created by old translation plugins, galleries, stat modules and more.
• Switching themes – possible issues you can face when switching themes on an existing site.
• Speed and usability benchmark – testing your changes is crucial for the process – here’s how to do it in the best possible way
• Tips on how to avoid performance issues if you’re launching a new site – if you’re starting from scratch, learn how to avoid all the previous bullets

Presented by Laura Hartwig in Bronx.

Presented by Andrew Wikel in Brooklyn.

In this session, we will be going over how to design and secure your site, so that your users trust your site (and you), and then teach you some basics on how to make sure that you aren’t betraying that trust.

We will cover some thoughts on why users trust what they do, and then some practical things that you (as the shop owner) can implement to keep your visitors’ info safe and secure, as well as convey that to your customers.

Learning Outcomes:

The user that attends this session should walk away with an understanding of the importance of gaining your user’s trust in e-commerce, and then various ways to help grow that, as well as make sure that you don’t betray their trust.

Presented by Tom J Nowell in Queens.

Think your theme is secure? Your plugin API can be trusted? Think again. I’m going to show you how to make your site iron-cast by escaping your way to security

Presented by Beth Soderberg in Queens.

One of our goals as WordPress developers should be to build user friendly websites and admin interfaces. In many cases once we’ve added custom post types, taxonomies, plugins, and other features required by a site’s design and structure, the WordPress admin panel can become unwieldy and may be confusing to site managers. In this session we’ll explore a number of strategies and techniques that will help make site administration an empowering experience for your clients. We’ll discuss modification of the admin panel, strategic use of custom fields, managing permissions, use of labels and help text, and more, all with the goal of making hand offs to non-technical website managers stress free.

Presented by Morten Rand-Hendriksen in Brooklyn.

Web design is about communicating with people through the web, but when we design and build websites, it’s easy to get caught up in the technical minutia: What hamburger icon should I use? Where does the sidebar go? How do I allow more space for ads? It is time we start thinking about the people who visit our sites. What devices are they using, and how are they using them? What is their purpose for visiting, and what situation are they in when they do?

This talk brings the focus of web design back to its core subject: How to communicate with people. You’ll learn about user research, empathy in the design process, communication patterns, real-world testing, and designing from the content out. Web design is about empathy for the user, and the users who visit your site are people. This talk will teach you how to prepare, design, and build websites with user experiences that communicate clearly and make the people who visit the site the top priority.

Presented by Michael Arestad, Sarah Whinnem, Mel Choyce, Mikel King in Brooklyn.

Join WordPress designers Sarah Whinnem, Michael Arestad, and Mel Choyce, along with moderator Mikel King, as they chat about designing modern WordPress websites and applications. What tools do they use? What are their thoughts on design trends? What do their design processes look like? What are the best techniques for designing responsively?

This panel will function as a Q&A, so come prepared with your questions.

Transcript of Sessions: PanelDesigningforWP2015.txt

Presented by Ryan King in Brooklyn.

Slow FTP uploads… database merging nightmares… constant struggles keeping content in-line…

I knew there had to be a better way. I went on a mission to find the ultimate development and deployment setup. Thankfully there are tons of options out there now (Vagrant, Docker, Capistrano, Ansible, etc) — but it’s still tricky getting them up and running smoothly. Save yourself hours of exploring tools and technologies by learning from my successes and failures. I will present a brief overview of the current state of deployment tools and then walk you through two of my favorites, followed by an open discussion for individuals to share what works well for them and ideas on best practices for the WP community.

Presented by Tom Harrigan in Queens.

Awesome happens when we take great tools and services and bring them together in new creative ways. We’ll dive into a mash up of the Polldaddy API and Fieldmanager (custom fields) to create a tournament-style bracket system. We’ll look at creating an interactive experience that’ll keep users coming back for weeks through voting, round procession and dynamic match-ups. Under the hood we’ll get into custom fields, data storage, scalability and leveraging the power of existing services/functionality to make our projects better.

Presented by Josh Pollock in Queens.

Presented by Jamie Schmid in Bronx.

This session is an introduction to putting the practice of Content Architecture to work on your WordPress site to build the most flexible and manageable site possible. You have your content (MAYBE), your site graphics are designed, you know what functionality you need, and now all you have to do is… shove it all into WordPress? Somehow? This session will show you how to figure out what are your WordPress-specific content types, what they need to do, and how to build them. Understanding how to structure your content in WordPress is an invaluable skill to have no matter what level you are at. You will leave understanding your own content structuring needs, and how to translate those to WordPress content types. Be prepared to leave full of ideas for your next project!

Presented by Winstina S. Hughes in Manhattan.

Council meetings sit empty until a road closes, a subway schedule changes, or property taxes increase. Suddenly, meetings are packed with concerned residents. It’s often too late by that time. Use WordPress.com as an interactive digital communication tool to engage the public before meetings are crowded. Incorporate the public’s voice in your local planning process with simple steps outlined in this session.

Presented by Chrissie Pollock in Manhattan.

What does it take to get a better-looking site, stronger writing skills and readers coming to your blog? Just a little bit of time and a whole lotta fun when you tap into the WordPress community. Whether you have a personal site or a business site, or whether you are a novice or professional, you can take steps to make your site stand out. Improve your writing skills, get feedback from other readers and experts, learn how to take stunning images (even using your cell phone). These (and other) tips, tricks and resources will make your blog/website stronger and get your voice heard.

Presented by John P Gamboa in Bronx.

Recent growth in places like China, Vietnam, India and Russia brought astounding economic and technological successes that also yielded some of the largest networks of censorship in history. The Great Firewall of China, DPI and SORM in Russia, and SmartFilter in Iran and Saudi Arabia are just a few of the tools used to block the free expression of millions of people.

For this talk, we will discuss how WordPress can empower users while still understanding the pitfalls and considerations required to reach those affected by censorship.

Other topics will cover how WordPress sites and plugins get blocked, issues designing and maintaining sites, and how the OpenNet Initiative affects WordPress. John will also give insight into his own experiences working with censorship and the Web from his time working in China.

With this knowledge in hand, you’ll be able to leave the talk knowing what you can do to understand and combat censorship for your new or existing WordPress sites in a global web.

Presented by Mendel Kurland in Manhattan.

Guilty of giving users too many choices? Few things clobber user experience more officially than option overload. Even if your site harbors the cleanest code, the sharpest design, and the most legit SEO, when it comes to guiding a user down the path to conversion, you’ve got to keep it simple.

This session covers how to deliver a clear call to action (CTA)–whether that means nudging users toward a product/service page or teaching them how to grow gladiola bulbs. Strategically scale down your users’ choices, and you’ll boost site usability and quite possibly your bottom line.

Presented by Aaron D. Campbell in Manhattan.

Everyone’s goals are different. Maybe you want bigger, better clients. Maybe we want a new job or a promotion. Maybe you want to work less and focus more on traveling, family, or your hobbies and interests. Aaron walks through his experience building and leveraging his reputation in the WordPress community to do all these things, and shows how you can, too.

Presented by Sarah C. Hines in Bronx.

When you work in WP-Admin every day, it’s wicked easy to navigate. But for users who are new to WordPress or only update their sites occasionally, the admin area can be full of WordPress-centric-lingo and not intuitive.  If you’ve created a customized front-end experience, why not take a few extra moments and tighten up the admin? It’s not difficult to make users happier and reduce the number of questions you get! We’ll cover customizing primarily via code, adding your own help documentation or metaboxes to the admin, and current best practices.

Presented by Lindsay Branscombe in Manhattan.

Have you ever felt painted into a corner because the content needs to do one thing but WordPress is forcing you to do another? Have you ever developed elaborate workarounds only to find out that WordPress has a much more elegant solution built in?

Data architecture. The key to a smoother development process and a happier relationship with your clients. In this talk I will define “data architecture”, talk about what you need to know about WordPress before entering it’s realm, questions you need the answers to before jumping in to it, and how to use this information to properly plan your data before programming.

Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zQMQuesFL6qPb9IJCo4j3r7b25jKj_dWbok7P9EQdro/edit?usp=sharing