Registration

Welcome & Thanks to sponsors. Introduce Keynote

WordPress – 23% and Growing

Brandon Kraft

WordPress is the most popular CMS—powering over 60% of the top 10 million websites using an available CMS (23% of the top 10 million websites overall). We’ll look at how did WordPress reach this point and how did we contribute to that. What does the future hold?

Communication is king

Wayne Geyer

Before there was “content,” there was basic human communication. And while the model has evolved, the fundamentals are the same: Good content is good communication. So, how do we create that? Wayne Geyer has some ideas. In this discussion, Wayne shares his approach to crafting simple, clear communication that informs thoughtful content. Among other things, it’s about pursuing self-awareness, anticipating your audience, and distilling your message to its essence. Using Wayne’s process, you can get to the right ideas faster—and connect with the right people more clearly.

Caching your WordPress internally and externally

Anthony Burchell

The speed of your site is an easy indicator as to how receptive your users will be to your content. Patience is a thing of the past when it comes to online views. Retain your visitors! Join the WordPress Guy from Rackspace as he talks on the advanced features of WP-Supercache and how to utilize caching both locally and externally with Redis.

Zero to WordPress

Michele Butcher

We will go from buying a domain to publishing our first post in this wild ride. From plugins and widgets to posts and pages, we will learn all the basics to getting your website concept live and running.

DIY PR for bloggers

Marjorie Asturias

Interested in attracting media attention for your personal or professional blog? Wondering how you can get a mention in your local paper, an industry journal, or even the New York Times? Believe it or not, it’s not as out-of-reach as you might think, nor do you need to hire a publicist to do it. In this presentation, you’ll get actionable tips on using online resources like HARO to do your own effective PR campaign. Find out how I was able to get mentions in — among numerous publications — the New York Times, Mashable, Fox Business News, Reuters, Ladies Home Journal, and numerous online publications.

WordPress is advancing rAPIdly

Wayne McWilliams

Whether you are a designer, developer, blogger, or business owner using WordPress it is important to stay up-to-date with all of its advances. In this session, Wayne will explore what the new WP API is, how it can be used right now, and how it will impact you in the future.

What to do when you don’t know what to do

Jarrett Gucci

We all love WordPress but know that things can go wrong from time to time. What if you knew exactly what to do whenever a WordPress issue arises? This can include anything from a theme or plugin issue all the way to those really bizarre things that can happen leaving you clueless how to troubleshoot them. No high level amount of technical experience needed with the tricks you will learn. Being equipped to handle WordPress issues can really help you keep things running smoothly on your site and focus on the fun stuff rather than hair pulling and other madness.

The WordPress Theme Repository relaunch

Konstantin Obenland

Millions of websites depend on the WordPress.org infrastructure every day. Parts of it is almost a decade old, ancient in software terms, and most of it is not even based on WordPress itself. At the time of WordCamp San Antonio, we will hopefully have finished a project that drastically modernizes the theme repository and moves to over to a WordPress installation, complete with a redesigned front-end and a more robust backend. This session will go over the changes involved, and will look into how WordPress.org works and what the underlying structure of it looks like.

Four steps to determine value and start pricing

Kirk Bowman

Pricing Most service professionals (designers, web developers, consultants, etc.) charge the customer by hour. The problem is there is no correlation between how long something takes (the hours) and the result the customer wants (the value). No one ever asked a car dealer how long it took to make a vehicle. What is really important to the customer, even if he does not realize it, is the result your craft will help him achieve. If you insist on identifying the value first, you can help the customer make better choices and contribute to a real impact on his life and business. So, how do you do it? There are four core steps to learning to determine value and start pricing. In this session, you will learn the four steps and how to implement them in your business. Explore the fear that comes with a new business model, questions you should ask the customer, and how you can set a price based on the value you help create.

LUNCH BREAK

Lightning Rounds / Q&A

Things I’ve Learned from 5+ Years of Blogging

Garrett Heath

After blogging for five and a half years (which is like 74 years in Internet time), I’ve learned a lot about maintaining SA Flavor, my local blog on San Antonio food and culture. While WordPress has made it easier than ever for people to get their thoughts out there, aspiring bloggers often start with a lot of gusto and quickly abandon their blogs. My presentation is designed to be part humorous and part insightful to help bloggers not just stick with their blog, but to also give them some key insights to make it better.

SEO 2015 – What’s in and what’s out

Kori Ashton

Start off the New Year with the best game plan for your search engine optimization. Learn what is new for 2015 and what old habits you need to kick to the curb. Walk through some great tips with Kori Ashton and be sure to bring your questions for Q & A time.

How to grow from a freelancer to an agency

James Walters

Are you a freelancer looking to grow your web development business? Then you will benefit from what I have to say. I will share with you what I learned through years of trial and error that have keep my business profitable and growing. Some of the topics I will cover are sales, marketing, putting together a team, technology, and of course, wordpress!

Optimizing Your WordPress Site For Speed

Devin Price

Site speed is incredibly important, but it’s often neglected in the WordPress world. We’ll discuss tools to evaluate page performance and techniques to help speed your WordPress site up. Speed isn’t just about fast hosting, it’s also good design decisions and plugin choices. The talk will cover a number of easy to implement suggestions for any site owner, and then briefly cover some advanced developer techniques for writing efficient front-end code.

Fire Drills

Drew Cox

Without verification your plan is only a hunch. You can choose to verify your plan on your own, on purpose, in controlled circumstances; or while your site is down during the biggest day of your career. Having a plan is only half of the equation. Learn how to test your response plan on your own terms, by planning and executing “fire drills.”

Subscribe For More (Building a YouTube Community)

Jason Merrell

Over 6 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube every month. That’s nearly one hour for each person on the planet — Every. Month. There’s no doubting the power of YouTube; it is the world’s second largest search engine,after all. The question is: how do you harness it? Jason Merrell — a popular YouTuber with over 70,000 fans — believes that being successful on YouTube is about more than the meta data, it’s about building a community.

Building Parsec (a fully responsive WordPress theme)

Joe Casabona

This is a ‘sequel’ to the talk I gave at WordCamps last year; taking the principles I spoke about and putting them into practice, I will talk about how in Parsec, I made images responsive, lightened load time, and introduced Sass into the original theme from my book. “

Design Changes Everything

James Dalman

If you want to help your web design clients get amazing results online AND you want to make more money as a WordPress consultant, then focus on great design strategies … because design changes everything.

James Dalman will provide you with key thoughts about design and how it relates to your client’s goals and objectives, how it improves their brand and yours, and how websites that look better sell for more money.

You don’t need to be a designer to attend this session. We are talking about how great design impacts everything you do in a WordPress focused business.

Paid social advertising on Twitter and Facebook. Basics for beginners.

Kyler Patterson

This presentation will be on the Do’s and Don’ts of advertising on Facebook and Twitter. Here you’ll learn some of the tips and tricks to jumpstart your campaigns to build your brand or sell your products. If you’ve been thinking of doing any advertising for yourself, your site, or a client, then this is the event that you don’t want to miss.

The mechanics of content creation in WordPress

Michelle Lowery

Creating content in WordPress isn’t just about putting words on the page. Optimizing that content, and making full use of the options in WordPress, will help your content convert, rank better, and be found by more people. Just a few of the topics we’ll cover include:

• Writing compelling and optimized headlines
• The visual vs. the text editor, and the pros and cons of both
• Categorization—should your categories be included in your URLs?
• Tags—are they necessary, or are they creating duplicate content?

We’ll also talk about a few content-related plugins every site needs:

• Yoast WordPress SEO
• Comment Redirect by Yoast
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
• Open External Links in a New Window
• CoSchedule Editorial Calendar
• CoSchedule Click to Tweet

Supporting WordPress from the ground up

Terell Moore

It will be geared towards agencies, developers, and anyone who would have to provide clients with support for WordPress. Through different methods of troubleshooting WordPress, different plugins to help them manage multiple WordPress sites, and also through discussion of how a hosting partner can play a part in supporting WordPress.

Usability techniques to enhance UX

Susan Price

Applying usability techniques doesn’t have to involve a lab with one-way mirrors. Just-in-time usability techniques like heuristic evaluations, card sorting, user personas, task scenarios, and in-person and online testing can make a huge difference in the user’s experience — and your business results.

Basics of WP CLI

Roberto Villarreal

COMING SOON!

Web Traffic: Because We Know That Getting Found Means A Big Difference

Yusuf Chowdhury

Building a successful website is a very challenging task. One must have the knowledge and skills to build up the right balance in every aspect of it. In the end, a business product, service, and content will always be the most important part on the platform; however, all of these would come to waste (money, effort), if not given with the right web traffic.

Digital marketing can be overwhelming in the sense that the Internet is constantly changing from search engines algorithm updates, social media platforms updates, online advertising to mobile apps and its usage.

However, if your 2015 plans involve boosting ranks, generating leads, online sales, and building awareness, then maybe it is time that we need to focus on big things and we explore more creative solutions. And I will get you there by discussing about: ‘targeted’ traffic and methods of getting it, social media, off site SEO, link building and many more things that will help convert traffic to ranks and sales.

WordPress.org Mobile App Development

Aaron Douglas

Did you know there are two actively-developed WordPress.org mobile apps for iOS and Android? Did you know the code is open source and available on GitHub? Did you know we need your help to contribute?

We’ll talk about the contribution process for both of the apps as well as some tips and tricks on how to get started. Both apps are great tools for learning how to develop native mobile applications for a more enterprise scale. Aaron is primarily an iOS developer so he’ll go in more depth with the architecture of the iOS application as well.

Improving your website conversion

Karl Staib

Your sales systems on your WP site can make your business a lot easier or very very hard. You probably have a lot of small improvements that could add up to big wins all over your landing pages, blog posts, and sales pages. Let’s put all these pieces together with copywriting and design tips from Karl Staib, so that your pages layer together, creating a domino effect that allows you to help more people and grow your business.

Closing Remarks

Official Unofficial After Party sponsored by Pressable