With the new Gutenberg editor, the possibilities for visually striking and engaging storytelling in WordPress have grown exponentially. For marketing content creators, journalists, and bloggers, harnessing the power of Gutenberg can improve the effectiveness of your messages, elevate your designs, and save you time.This talk will include an overview of marketing and content creation trends, as well as an introduction to block-based design, and how to make it work for blogs and content-heavy sites.

We all know better than to think that design is just about ‘making things look pretty’. But did you ever stop to think about the power you have as a web designer (or developer) to make the world a better place? It’s true! You have the power every single day to help make the world more just and equitable through design thinking and an inclusive mindset. We’ll explore how every person involved in designing and building the web can help lead the way, how to convince others to follow in your footsteps, and how to save yourself from being a plain vanilla designer.

Social Media Mastermind Orange County (SMMOC) was founded by Bob Watson in May 2009. SMMOC is a facilitated discussion group providing a safe* environment to share and learn social media, technology and the Internet. Come ready to listen and participate!

From our beginnings when we met at Peets coffee in San Clemente we have grown to a solid base of over 900 members worldwide and our meetings are now primarily held at The Vine, located at 5151 California street, Irvine in the University Research Park (California and Bison).

Our format is simple; no questions is a dumb question, no pitching of products or services, we have one conversation at a time, and we are an “acronym-free zone”.

In this presentation, I’m going to give a brief introduction to the WP REST API, how to create custom end points, and some tools you can use to test your API as you’re developing it!

Building eCommerce websites for your clients is a good niche for any WordPress Developer. But once the site is built, the goal is for sales. Setting up eCommerce Email Marketing can not only add value to your offering, but help your client get more sales.

In this talk, we will break down three key types of email subscribers: interested, engaged and lapsed. More importantly, will open up the dialog with the attendees so they get actionable tips to bring to their clients Monday morning.

Feel free to ask how eCommerce can be optimized with welcome emails, product promotions, abandoned cart sequences, transactional emails, page triggers, upsells, email coupons, birthday specials, re-engagement campaigns, and newsletters. You will want to bring your real-world questions and a notepad for this session for sure.

The performance of your site is important — there’s no questioning that. Regardless of your relationship to your website (developer, content manager, editor, administrator) you can have an impact on how well your content is served to your visitors. We will discuss a range of topics, from image management, to content delivery networks, to caching and more.

Practical Project Management isn’t about strict processes or guidelines. It is about taking a flexible, iterative and personal approach to managing projects. By taking a flexible, iterative approach to project management you can build a framework that will work with your unique project workflow, team makeup and client personality to eliminate friction and let everyone on the team focus on doing their best work.

We’ll start with a brief talk about the concept of Practical Project Management, and spend the remaining time discussing your unique project management challenges and talking through practical tips, tricks and hacks.

I plan to discuss how my creative business has grown over the past three years, and how WordPress was a vital tool in helping me to grow my business. Whatever I have needed to do, whatever changes needed to be made, I have been able to do those things with WP. Had I started with a different platform, it would not have been so easy.

Is WordPress insecure? Not at all! However, an outdated WordPress installation with a weak password and poorly chosen plugins is definitely insecure.

It’s often said that “security is a process”, and the security of your own site starts with you installing the WordPress. Why should you care about security from day one, when your website is brand new and only your mom reads it? What should you do yourself, while your site grows, even if you do not (yet) have the budget to hire experts? How can you make your visitors browsing safer? How can you minimize the chance you site got hacked?

In this talk I will go over some best practices you can implement to make your website safer and why you should care about them. None of these require a single line of code, only some common sense and understanding what is right and what should be avoided as a behaviour while you manage your site.

Feedback, given or received, can be a gift or a curse. Explore the subtle art of communicating feedback in a way that’s beneficial to both sides while also helping the overall health of the project you share. I’ll draw from examples in open source communities, collaborations, and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest to help attendees understand how everyone benefits when feedback is given about products and projects instead of individuals. While we’re in a feedback mindset I’ll talk about how to share critical feedback about the folks we work with while remembering that the person on the other end of the internet is a human too.

When leveling up as a developer, one of the most intimidating aspects often is using the command line interface, or CLI. In fact, it might seem downright terrifying. The reality is: If you can type, you can use the command line.

Every senior level developer will remember a time when they got overwhelmed by opening the terminal. Those same people will tell you this is one of the most important capabilities they acquired.

For Mac and Linux users your command line interface is Bash. Windows users can also use this tooling, so Bash can unlock the true potential of any machine. Besides gaining more control of your device, Bash lets you leverage hundreds of power tools like WP-CLI, Drush, npm, composer, and Behat, to name a few.

Leave this session understanding

• A brief history of the command line
• The basic commands for manipulating your files and folders
• An overview of tools that are only available through the command line
• The basics of Bash scripting, the secret to automating anything

In this session we’ll look at strategies and tools to help you drive greater revenue from each transaction on your store. We’ll talk order bumps, one-time orders and the effective use of coupons.

Google Search Console is the most powerful free SEO tool available to you and your website. But, it’s intimidating. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be. This talk will walk you through the nuts and bolts of Google Search Console so you can go home with the confidence you need to use it and start acting upon the insights you gather. The actions you take with your newfound knowledge will lead to better search results and more of the right kind of visitors to your website.

All across the web you’ll find respected professionals and internet famous creatives preaching the benefits of a content first approach. But what happens when a content first approach isn’t the answer or it fails? In this presentation, you’ll discover deep industry-wide misunderstandings and myths around the content first approach, what content-first really means, why different clients require a different content strategy, and how you can create a website content system that works for you and your clients.

You can do so much more with forms than just collect names and email addresses. This talk will discuss using conditional logic to streamline the registration process, pre-populating forms with data, creating dynamic surveys that graphically display results, and creating custom PDFs using form data. This talk will be based on using the Popular Gravity Forms plugin and will have specific examples you will be able to implement immediately.

Let’s face it, the technical solution from one WordPress provider is probably going to look a lot like the next one. There will be a theme, plugins, maybe some custom css or a little coding – but generally, the proposed solutions will be similar. So how do you set yourself above your competition when your technical skills and solution are fairly equal?

What if you were able to tell your client that:

• you have a way of estimating the project so that there are NO surprises along the way
• you have a way to plan for and manage change that does not include an arbitrary “pad” amount added to the estimate
• you have a way of defining the website and gathering the content that reduces the chance for scope creep
• you have a way to ensure that the project gets completed on time and within budget

In this presentation, I will show attendees how to craft these sections of their project management methodology and use it as a unique value proposition when presenting to a client.

Do your customers and your prospects have an accurate image of your company values and strengths? Branding is not your business name, logo, or color scheme. Rather, your brand is how others perceive your business. This talk will help you build a successful brand image for your company. We’ll explore brand consistency beyond just the logo and colors, and help you take control over how your customers view your brand. When your current and potential customers have a clear grasp of your brand, they will in turn become brand advocates for your business.

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 workshop will show you how.

Talk about updating plugins, what to do when you get locked out, how to rollback plugins, how to choose plugins, etc. 🙂

If you can never seem to find time to redesign your own website or launch a new service because you’re too busy with client work… you’re not alone, and this talk is for you!

Attendees will leave with a (1) better understanding of why it’s so hard to move our businesses forward when we’re busy with client work, (2) a clear strategy to address this very common issue, and (3) the motivation to make it happen!

WordPress Contributor. These words mean many different things to different people. WordPress is a large open source project with thousands of contributors helping out in countless ways. But what defines a model contributor? This talk is a retrospective of a WordPress developer’s journey from Tinkerer to Full-Time Contributor and Core Committer. What makes a successful contributor? What should your expectations be? How do you get started? When do you ask for help? When do you offer help? How should you receive feedback? What factors make up the right mindset? Leave this talk informed and inspired to begin your WordPress contributor story!

Question and answer with awesome panel:

Steve Zengut (moderator)
Chris Ford
Nathan Ingram
Jen Bourn
Chris Lema

In my session I will be exploring several ways to create a cohesive branding strategy, by delving into posting schedules, content strategies, relevant social media (what you actually need), and more. By the end we will all have (hopefully) learned something about what the current web users consider important, and what actually attracts your targeted audience.

Every version of PHP from 7.0 and below has been designated end of life (EOL). Currently, WordPress’ minimum PHP requirement is 5.2.7 which was EOL’d over 8 years ago.

In the 2018 State of the Word Matt said we would be moving to PHP 5.6 as a minimum requirement in April, 2019 and increasing the minimum to PHP 7.0 by the end of 2019.

This presentation will attempt to describe the safeguards put in place to avoid breaking the internet.

I explain what the WCAG 2.1 guidelines are and why they are so important.

Then I will offer easy and actionable steps that you can take as soon as you get home to help you become compliant.

I also go through and explain and give examples of each step so you will understand clearly.

Finally, I offer some links to free software that you can use to test your websites Section 508 compliance.

How to create a multilingual business website that will make money

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.

Securing WooCommerce can sometimes feel like a moving target. In this talk, We will review some easy and actionable steps for securing your store without annoying or scaring off customers. You’ll also learn to integrate free services that will improve the security of your website or store.

This session will help you find answers to these common questions:

1. Do I need to worry about security? I don’t get that many visitors.
2. My site keeps getting hacked, what should I do?
3. Do I need to do anything if I am using managed hosting?

I may only be 13, but I’ve been running m blog for several years and I’m happy to share some blogging tips with people who are just getting started.