Each year, we invite the speakers to a private party to thank them for all they have contributed to WordCamp RI. This year we are hosting a dinner party at KON where they will eat, drink and surely talk WordPress!  Speakers can network amongst themselves and also meet the organizing team! It’s always a great night and it’s something we at WordCamp RI love to do for our talented group of speakers.

Along with the organizing team, each speaker is dedicated to helping the WordPress community grow & flourish. If you think speaking at a WordCamp sounds like something you are interested in, please consider submitting a talk. We hope you are as excited about this year’s WordCamp RI as we are!

You have a beautifully designed website and regularly produce unique, high-value content. Yet, your website has really low engagement metrics and an incredibly high bounce rate! What could you be doing wrong? It may be your site’s information architecture.

I’m going to walk you through and help you avoid some common IA mis-steps that I see people making, and show you some must-have tools you should use to make sure people can easily navigate your site and find your great content.

Whether you’re a designer, a developer, or a business owner, there are some critical tips and suggestions here that you won’t want to miss!

Fast websites make more money, get more traffic, rank higher in Google, and have stronger brand loyalty. Your server, your theme, the way you load files—they all have an impact on how fast (or slow) your WordPress site is.

Wicked Fast WordPress provides you with a blueprint for building insanely fast WordPress sites, and a framework for analyzing web performance and advocating it to clients and managers. It covers everything from browser quirks to file optimization to server settings. You’ll learn:

• Why web performance matters.
• The right way to measure web performance.
• Annoying browser quirks (and how to fix them).
• How to reduce page weight for faster load times.
• Server optimizations that boost web performance.

Learn everything you need to know about building wicked fast WordPress sites.

Agencies and freelancers exist in order to serve clients: without clients, there’d be no work. Despite – or maybe because of- this fact, we often find those same clients frustrating.

In this talk I’ll share 10 lessons learned for managing clients: during the new business phase, while projects are ongoing, and as projects complete.

Managed properly, client relationships can be tremendously rewarding and fulfilling, even if they do occasionally make you want to bang your head against a wall.

I’ve found a new level of success as a freelance WordPress developer over the last year and I’d like to share my story with you. But more importantly, I want to teach other freelancers (or aspiring freelancers) how I made the transition successfully from full-time employment to full-time freelancing.

These are the tips, tricks, and strategies that I’ve personally implemented that have allowed me to earn at least $10,000 (five figures) each month as a freelancer.

I’m a 27 year old developer who’s recently made the transition himself and I’d like to help you set yourself up for a successful transition into freelancing as well.

When should you use a plugin? When should you create a custom solution? That is the question… Learn how a critical application and voting module for a high-profile WordPress build was fixed in the 11th hour and launched successfully just in time, after catastrophic plug-in failure.

In your quest as a developer to build a beautiful website, you may sometimes skip some of the best practices that allow Google to index it. In this presentation, I’ll take you through some common SEO mistakes that developers make, provide fixes, and leave you with resources that will help you into the future.

This talk is aimed at anyone selling Website Design and Development Services. In this rather unconventional industry, I have been successful selling using a less than traditional approach. This is not selling 101.  We’ll look at mindset, personality, strategy, money and perseverance – and more!

In this presentation I will discuss how selling with your personality is effective, and will earn you lots of projects.

An SEO plugin is a great help in tweaking your content to make search engines happy.

But if you pay attention to a couple of basic practices that we’ll go over in this session, you can use Yoast or All-in-one-SEO to check your work rather than struggle to back fit changes to get to that green dot!

WP-CLI is a set of command-line tools for managing WordPresss installs. Don’t be scared of by the command line — in this talk I will walk you through how to get up and running with WP-CLI and illustrate how much time can be saved by administering WordPress via the command line instead of admin interface.

Over the 7 years building WordPress website and training users I have found that even users that had a WordPress site before got some value from some of these tips & tricks. Some of the 20 tips are common, but worth a reminder, others I hope you will find helpful and new.

Only two things matter when picking a plugin, theme, or a developer of custom code for your website.

Does the plugin/theme/code do what you need it to?

and

Will it keep continue to work in the future?

The first question is easy to answer, install it and test drive (on a test site).

The second question requires digging deep into the code. Sound difficult? It may be easier than you think.

We will do a few simple searches looking for:

• Things that should be there
• Things that shouldn’t
• Dangerous stuff
• Really good signs

Slides at: https://goo.gl/hku2M1

Custom Meta Boxes in WordPress are a useful feature that allow you to add metadata to your posts. Unfortunately, they are not user-friendly out of the box. In this talk, Nate Allen will show you how to extend the functionality of meta boxes with plugins like Advanced Custom Fields and CMB2. Using real world examples, Nate will demonstrate how he creates powerful (but simple) administration experiences for his clients.

What traffic is valuable to your goals?
Is that valuable traffic coming from Facebook, or Twitter, or elsewhere?

In Analytics: Gaining meaningful data from your audience, you will learn to address questions like that, and more. This will be a solid introduction to measuring and analyzing your traffic. You will learn key terms and metrics to keep an eye on, an overview of Jetpack’s Analytics, and an introduction to in-depth analytics using Google’s Analytics platform.

We will cover:

What analytics can do for your marketing
Key Terms and Metrics to watch for
Using Jetpack Analytics
Installation of Google Analytics
An introduction to the Analytics Dashboard

WordPress.COM (as opposed to WordPress.ORG) is for those who want to concentrate on their blog or website and not worry about the maintenance and security updates. Bring your laptop to this workshop and leave at the end of the day with your website up and running.

In this workshop we’ll get you started:

• Creating your website name (www.mywebsite.com)
• Begin building your pages
• Learn how to insert images and video
• Publish!

We’ll have WiFi in this session.

Before the day of this workshop be thinking:

• What is the purpose of this website/blog
  • Your work/academic portfolio
  • Ecommerce
  • Classroom or nonprofit website
  • Personal blog
• What website name would you like?  (Have several options, your first choice may already belong to someone else)
• Have access to any images you would like to use
• If you already have an account with WordPress.com, know
  • Your login url/web address
  • Your password

I look forward to helping you!

This session is for anyone new to WordPress.ORG. It answers questions such as, “How do I build a WordPress site?” and “How do I make changes to my WordPress site?”

This bootcamp style workshop will provide you with the tools you need to get going.

What you’ll need:

• Your laptop (we’ll have WiFi)
• Basic computer know-how (check email, access different URLs, etc.)

Topics:

• Selecting a domain and hosting provider
• Installing and setting up WP
• Getting started in the Dashboard – posts, pages, categories, tags, etc.
• Themes
• Organizing content – widgets, menus, text, media
• Plugins
• Security and Maintenance

We’ll end with a Q&A session.

Looking forward to seeing you!

There’s so much mystery around web proposals. They’re hard to categorize, right? Are they a just a formality? Or should you put in the 40 hours it’s going to take to write a custom proposal? How can you write better ones? These are all good questions, and I’m hoping to provide some answers!

Web proposal writing is probably one of the most daunting, yet creative, activities one can do in the tech space. In the technology industry, especially in WordPress, so many agencies and freelancers compete for business. Your proposal is either the gateway to a successful project, or the precursor to a resounding “thanks, but no thanks.” Writing good web proposals is a must. Writing good custom web proposals can reinforce a client’s decision, make you stand out from the competition, and even get a prospective company to pay more money.

Proposal writing is a journey of discovery, understanding, mapping the right solution, and giving your potential client something to get jazzed about. I’d like to walk you through the blueprint for writing custom web proposals that’s been effective for me, and show how you can apply these principles to your own process. In addition, I’ll also talk about the proposal flow, text-heavy vs. image-based, the use of nomenclature, and linking benefits to their technical counterparts. If you write proposals in any capacity (as a freelancer or an agency team member), this talk will be beneficial for you!

WordPress.COM (as opposed to WordPress.ORG) is for those who want to concentrate on their blog or website and not worry about the maintenance and security updates. Bring your laptop to this workshop and leave at the end of the day with your website up and running.

In this workshop we’ll get you started:

• Creating your website name (www.mywebsite.com)
• Begin building your pages
• Learn how to insert images and video
• Publish!

We’ll have WiFi in this session.

Before the day of this workshop be thinking:

• What is the purpose of this website/blog
  • Your work/academic portfolio
  • Ecommerce
  • Classroom or nonprofit website
  • Personal blog
• What website name would you like?  (Have several options, your first choice may already belong to someone else)
• Have access to any images you would like to use
• If you already have an account with WordPress.com, know
  • Your login url/web address
  • Your password

I look forward to helping you!

Creating an effective training manual for your clients isn’t an easy task. When you’ve gotten your project to the final stretch and it’s almost time to hand the keys over to your client you want to rest assured that your client has the proper training to successfully take the lead.

This workshop is meant to give you the know how and the tools you need to create a training manual for your clients at any technical skill level.

The After-Party is the perfect chance to relax, unwind and network with other WordPress enthusiasts like yourself.  It is also a great chance to speak one-on-one with the organizers, speakers and volunteers.

Date: Saturday, October 1, 2016, 6:00 – 11:00 PM
Entrance: FREE – Show your WordCamp RI Badge

Location:

Finn’s Harbourside
38 Water Street
East Greenwich, RI 02818