Website and product launches and ad campaigns come and go, but stories live on. Content is essentially your digital body language and a great way to allow people to become familiar with your personal or business brand. A solid content strategy can allow personal and business brands to build audiences with creative storytelling that contributes to a relevant, human conversation and thus over time build stronger relationships as you continue to develop trust and gain credibility.

This session will cover building short term and long term strategies, measuring results using analytics and the importance of setting smart goals.

Join me as I show you the tools I’ve used to find success in WordPress. We’ll cover everything from design software to code management systems to email marketing platforms to customer retention programs. By taking advantage of these tools, we’ll learn how they make your life easier, your work less stressful, your workflows more streamlined and your pockets much, much bigger!

Orlando-based WordPress developer Adam Soucie will share his story on how two years ago he quit his job in sales to follow a career in web development and provide the road map for how you can find similar success using WordPress as your vehicle.

A return of the business agency panel from 2013. We’re going to talk with four agency owners in a moderated panel, and learn what makes them tick.

NOTE: This Panel runs two hours.

“We need a website”. That’s the starting point for a lot of projects. Companies large and small are left to figure out the next steps on their own. One of the most important things to be decided is “where are we going to put it?” If you get this one right, you are well on your way to a happy and successful project. Get it wrong and your project may not recover.

This talk will cover the basics of website hosting. It will not make recommendations as to who to host with, it will help attendees understand the terms used and the concepts that are bandied about.

Join the BrandCo developers for a panel discussion on how to build and grow a small development team. We’ll discuss how to manage clients, stay organized, maintain coding standards, and create consistency along with other principles we’ve learned along the way.

Learn how to contribute to WordPress. Instruction on working with core, as well as becoming a valuable community member and being involved in one of the many teams that power the WordPress project (including WordCamps!)

This is a hands-on contributor session, where you can learn how to get involved, and get started in the company of long-time contributors.

In this talk you will learn how to further your career, become better at what you do and make more money by helping others through writing about WordPress. I will cover how to use your writing strategically to grow your products and services, whether you’re writing on your own site or getting paid to write for other sites. You will learn the mechanics of writing useful, relatable content about WordPress, and how to ensure your writing delivers results for your readers and your career.

Content Marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action. WordPress is the top platform to deliver the content you’ve developed.

• An overview of Content Marketing
• Steps to Integrating Your Content Marketing Plan with WordPress

Step 1: Create Content
• Overview of Types of Content you Can Deliver through WordPress
• Scheduling Deployment of Content through WordPress

Step 2: Optimize:
• Optimizing Your Content by Setting it up Correctly in WordPress
• Suggested WordPress SEO Plugins
• Best SEO Practices When Using SEO Plugins in WordPress

Step 3: Share
• Top Plugins for Sharing Content in WordPress
• Best Practices to Increase the Distribution of Your Content

Step 4: Generate Leads
• Developing a Conversion Funnel through WordPress
• Developing Landing Pages in WordPress
• Creating Simple Capture Forms in WordPress
• Integrating Email Sign up through WordPress
• Integrating CRMs (like Salesforce) with WordPress

Step 5: Analyze
• Installing WordPress Plugins for Analytics
• Using Analytics to Track your Content Marketing Efforts

A new way of selling books and stories online. Use an ecommerce plugin to set up an author’s own online bookstore, incuding a member site for current works in progress. Why not tap into your fans’ dedication to your work in progress by publishing it before it’s done? Set up online sales of completed works as a regular online store, but treat your work in progress as a member site to generate revenue as you write. Establish a dialogue with your readers as your work progresses to generate new ideas and even change the course of your story. Let your biggest fans help you write your book. This talk will show you an example of how this can be done.

Is your blog receiving the traffic you think it deserves? Are you looking for ways to make more from your blog? In this session, blogging expert Syed Balkhi (founder of WPBeginner) shares actionable insights on how to grow your blog, optimize your workflow and increase your revenue. You’ll discover how to use Twitter to drive more traffic, how to scientifically utilize your site’s real-estate to maximize your results and how to keep more visitors on your site.

What’s worse than a 9-5 office job? Hardly anything, right? But feeling isolated, unmotivated, and distracted as a person who works remotely isn’t much better. In this session, I’ll share my story about working remotely, first as a CPA consultant and now as a full-time blogger. Plus, we’ll talk about the three things I do every morning before 10am that keep me motivated, productive and energized throughout the day. Hint: only one of them is a drug.

Working in a distributed team environment has it’s challenges. How do you not run into each have other? What kind of work flow do you use? Well, it depends. Let me show you what I’ve decided to use after pouring tons of my time into what works best given a WordPress environment.

When you started your WordPress business, you either wanted to earn extra money or you wanted to improve your lifestyle. I accidentally stepped into the market, was thrust into business, and have decided to change my family tree using WordPress. If you’re not seeing the results you want from your business or are still looking to start a business, there are fool-proof methods, and I’ll share them.

So, you want to create a website, and make money, but don’t know where to begin? Or maybe you’ve got a site and dabbled a little, but still need more ideas on how to generate cash flow? Well, this is the presentation to be at.

We’ll be talking about:
1. Ways you can make money using WordPress
2. Tips to set you on the right path
3. WordPress plugins to assist you along the way

Hopefully by the time you walk away from this WordCamp, you’ll be able to start creating your own plan, implement some of the tips mentions in this talk, and begin making some money with your WordPress website.

WordPress theme development has traditionally been a messy business: template files everywhere, the infinitely scrolling `functions.php` file, theme meta defined in the CSS file. What could go wrong? A new kid on the block is setting the standards, though: meet Roots (http://roots.io), a starter theme (not a theme framework!) that is Bootstrap-built responsive, cleanly organized, and packed with peanuts… I mean, awesome developer features… to make your WordPress themes clean, mean, and super awesome. David Rogers, organizer of the Orlando PHP user group and long-time WordPresser, will take you through a brief discussion of what Roots is, why you should care, and how you can learn more.

Every project you work on has its share of technical debt. Maybe you coded it in a hurry to meet a deadline; maybe you were almost finished when you realized that everything would have been more robust and more flexible with a different architecture; maybe you were learning a new library or framework, and your naïveté is reflected in the code you wrote with it. Whatever your reasons for taking on debt in your code, now you have to deal with the consequences: interest payments. You get constant bug reports; every new feature causes another to break; chasing down interdependencies doubles the time you spend in your code. You feel trapped, unable to make any progress, bogged down by the weight of your past indiscretions. You’re ready to throw it all away and declare bankruptcy. It doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t have to abandon your plugin; you don’t have to rewrite it from the ground up. Start making small changes now. Automated testing, refactoring, documentation, design, style guides—even a little bit will have immediate returns. By paying off your small debts, you’ll find that you have the resources to begin tackling your larger debts. Let’s get started today, identifying the low-hanging fruit to get your technical debt snowball rolling.

Getting past yourself – from hiring a second employee, to asking for help, to having your vision…adjusted…is all part of the challenge of growing a company. Come hear my story, with tips for those looking to grow their business past themselves.

Essentials of video in WordPress – from the user to the developer.

As WordPress grows so does the sphere of people using Professional Paid WordPress sources. The top Developers, Freelancers, Agencies, Freemium plugin creators, all wish they could give you a few initial pointers about what you should expect when jumping into the WordPress ocean of resources, but often don’t get the chance. This talk will teach you how to be the kind of user the Pro’s love!

Whether you want to be identified as a WordPress Developer, Humor Blogger, or Super Hero, Rich will help you identify and operate as one voice and personality across all social media. He will start with a focus on WordPress components (favicons, taglines, themes, etc.) to help define your personal WordPress voice, and then address how to express that voice consistently across the social media gamut (Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter).

Plugins are the Worst! Plugins are the Best! These are just some of the things I have heard from developers and users alike. I have been working with WordPress for about 7 years. Over that time, I have installed, used and UNinstalled hundreds of plugins. I will cover what plugins are necessary to maintain a healthy website and which ones are worth paying for. WordPress has over 25,000 plugins and not all of them are worth your time. A site should not only look beautiful, but function properly. Come learn about some proven ways to boost your site to the height of usability! (A must have class for all graphic designers who are becoming developers.)

This year Florida State College at Jacksonville transitioned the student-led newspaper from a print format to an online publication using WordPress. This presentation will discuss the process and detail how the students used the features of WordPress to collaborate and design the promotional, technical and creative aspects that made this shift possible and successful.

In this talk I will go through the process of migrating a WordPress website to a new server. I will list the issues that users will probably face and how to overcome them. I will show easy to follow tips and tricks that will make moving WordPress possible even for beginners.

From copyright and trademark concerns to changing privacy laws to determining how to comply with the range of open source licenses software publishers use today, the number of issues that a web developer can face in trying to determine how to comply with it all can become daunting. This session will present best practices to avoid some of the common pitfalls, and how to make the process a bit less painful in the future.

Using WordPress in Your Language is straightforward enough. 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 more reach, you’ll need to publish in multiple languages. Where we come from (Canada, eh!), government sites are required by law to feature the same content in English and in French. How does WordPress fare in this case? Spoiler alert: not so well.

We will walk you through the benefits, drawbacks and pitfalls of current approaches to multilingual content with WordPress. Yes, we’ve (pretty much) tried them all. We hope that by the end of our talk, you’ll feel at ease if multilingual projects come your way.

Come learn how the WordPress Theme Customizer can help you make more intuitive themes with easier to use theme options. Quit writing your own admin pages for your theme options and use the tools that WordPress has to offer. For the more advanced users, we will look at how to expand upon what WordPress offers. I will also share some utilities I have written to further simplify the process.

The old “waterfall” model of design, development, and client partnerships, where projects are expected to be handed off from one entity to the next, often falls short among changing scopes, project discovery processes, and evolving requirements. We will discuss the added value that up-front communication and agile collaboration methods bring to a web-based project to save time, money, and headaches. Primary: for project managers, contractors, agencies, and anyone else who has to manage or work with multiple team members on a web project

Tools and Tips to Exceed Expectations and Still Keep Your Sanity

As a small shop we are often tempted to start from scratch every time with each new project. We think we need completely unique design and code. Meanwhile, all our clients want are clean, effective websites, that go live NOW. (Oh, and they need to have all the bells and whistles too.)

The beauty of WordPress is in its strength of community, resources and effectiveness. But without a plan in place, our projects can slow down and stall under the weight of all those possibilities. Learn how to jumpstart your process by NOT starting from zero each time. You’ll learn about the power of frameworks, child themes, templates, design inspiration, preferred plugins, integration services and quality research to build a custom workflow that speeds up design and development. It makes for happy clients – and a happy you!

Many times when we develop something new, documentation is the last thing we think about. In this talk, Jeff Matson discussed techniques to write better documentation to increase user experience and decrease support tickets.

Use real metrics to create value-based pricing for your customers’ success. For details inquire within 😉

Arguably one of the most important user interface metrics is speed – Or, more importantly, perceived speed. While much can be done to speed up a user interface by beefing up servers and minimizing the weight of resources, optimistically processing interactions can greatly increase the perceived speed of your website. This talk will discuss real-life use cases of optimistic programming in apps you use, as well as a few ways to use optimistic programming on your WordPress website.

This talk will cover the theories and functions dealing with validating input and sanitizing output. It’ll start at the very basic, and wind up with some discussion of the trickier parts of how different kinds of data should be filtered.

The WordPress REST API is coming in WordPress 4.1. Come to learn what the REST API is, how to use it and how it can give you a new perspective for WordPress as an application platform.

We will walk through examples on making HTTP request to the API, and authenticating to perform more sensitive actions such as creating, editing, and deleting resources. As well as getting you thinking on how you can use the REST API in component or projects you might be working on.

This talk starts with an explanation of what WordPress action and filter hooks are and how to use them. We then go into the most common and helpful hooks for theme and plugin development. This will include helpful information for people who have not yet begun to use hooks much as well as supply those who do use them regularly with some helpful hints.