Join us in the Gallery to Opening Remarks and useful information you’ll need for WordCamp Pittsburgh (like the WiFi password!)

Adam left college with a degree in Advertising Design and went straight to work on the factory floor making office furniture. It wasn’t the life he’d imagined but having been raised in a blue-collar family, he was taught that a strong work ethic would make you invaluable to “the company” and “they” would provide the financial security and stability needed to raise a family and enjoy life. In other words, this meant working in the same stark metal building for 30 years with 20-minute lunch breaks and two weeks vacation in the summer.

In this session, Adam will detail how he discovered WordPress and the open source community, the many businesses that he’s started and failed at, and how he’s utilized these experiences to continually fuel his entrepreneurial spirit and create his own path to a work/life balance and how you can too.

No matter what your passion, WordPress can be an integral tool to helping you achieve your dreams and success in your own business.

So, you want to build a site for your business, or perhaps start a blog. You’ve heard about WordPress, but you are not quite sure where to start. Come to this session to learn the basics that will set you on the path to building great things with WordPress.

WordPress 5.0 introduces a new block editor called “Gutenberg” and if you’re a WordPress developer, you need to know how to build blocks. This talk will get you started.

You will learn, what Gutenberg is and when you should create your own blocks. Then we will cover how to load CSS and JavaScript files for blocks, how to create blocks with static content and editable blocks. This talk is aimed at developers familiar with JavaScript.

Installing WordPress is just the start of any Web publisher or developer’s journey. Knowing how your visitors’ experience your website and/or blog assists you in making changes that can have a positive impact on your search results, keeping your visitors on your site longer, and converting more customers. And, there’s no better (and free) tool for this than Google Analytics.

This meet up is for Google Analytics (GA) *beginners*! We’re going to cover the basics including:

• How GA works, setting up GA, and getting around GA’s dashboard
• How to set up views with filters, understanding the basics of reports
• Setting goals for conversion tracking in GA

We’ve all had one, or two or more – the client from hell. Sometimes it’s because we didn’t want to say no and other times it’s because we didn’t know any better. In this presentation, you’ll learn how to weed out those who will suck up your time, micromanage a project and leave them happy, so they refer you to their friends and people in their networks.

You’ll walk away knowing…

• How to vet prospects before you say yes to them
• How to keep a project on track and make the client feel like a partner
• How to address out of scope issues
• How to provide follow-up to keep them coming back
• How to know if it’s time to terminate and fire that client

Running a business is hard and having clients from hell makes it stressful. This workshop is for businesses of all size, whether your a freelancer going it alone or an agency working with a full team.

Lee uses her years as a corporate manager and trainer who turned strategist and designer to have processes that leave no stone unturned and shares her secrets with you.

Presented in two 15 minute lessons that address the fundamentals of SEO and a offer a walk-through of how to configure the Yoast plugin on a demo site. Questions will be taken at the end. Audience members will gain knowledge of SEO fundamentals and experience in applying what they know on a demo site.

When you’re passionate about your content, how do you get others interested when you’ve only got 280 characters to pitch yourself in an authentic and passionate way? Especially, when you have limited time, and you have to wear multiple hats, how do you get your social media to work to promote your website without ripping your hair out or banging your head into a wall?

This session will cover tips, tricks, and best practices that let you work smarter rather than harder when it comes to plugging your WordPress site on social media. The talk will predominantly focus on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

We’ve all had the experience of a support technician being seemingly unable to answer our questions about their theme, plugin, or service.

Believe it or not, theme and plugin developers and their support techs really do want to help you. Their goal is to make sure that the technology they provide you isn’t just a sale, but useful, and, ultimately, works to make your website successful. To make sure that you are both working in the same direction, there are some things you can do to ensure a great outcome.

Do you know that there’s a link between your support tickets and better documentation?

Do you find yourself frustrated at developers and support reps who can’t seem to diagnose issues arising from their plugins or themes?

Do you want to find better answers to your support questions, more quickly?

Plus, the two-minute method of solving +50% of your support requests before you even send them.

Attendees can expect to walk away with a better understanding of how technical support works, how to diagnose and even solve their own issues, and provide actionable details that will result in better responses from support technicians.

The new visual editor sure does inspire consternation in the WordPress community. As with any disruption, there will be winners and losers in professional world – but what about the end-user? Can the new editor make life easier for them? And for professionals, how will Gutenberg change theme development? What about page-builders – things of the past? Instead of focusing on launch and transition issues, I’ll describe how we think the fundamentals of the WordPress experience will change (for the better) for both the end-user AND the professional.

Focuses on new users and website developers. Gives a basic primer for how to setup hosting, avoid pitfalls, and stay secure. Good information for those who are do-it-yourself’ers, as well as consultants.

• Choosing how to host your site (managed hosting versus managed WordPress)
• Most common mistakes, and how to avoid them when hosting a WordPress site
• Top security recommendations for the site
• How to be prepared when disaster strikes

You’ve built the website, you’re managing the website… and then the website breaks. Now what? We’ll cover basic anatomy of a WordPress site, common types of errors and how to troubleshoot them, how to call the cavalry, and how to keep it from happening again.

Our success as freelancers is built upon the lessons we’ve learned from our biggest mistakes. In this talk, Nathan draws on more than 20 years experience in the web business to share important lessons he had to learn the hard way and common mistakes we all can avoid. Each lesson is summarized in a succinct, proverbial statement and then unpacked with examples that will make you laugh, cringe and think.

Will share with the attendees the value of using podcasts, radio shows, virtual summits, etc to share their stories, reach wider audiences, and build their brands. Will share the story of my first radio interview and how a horrible show lead to a long running appearance that would lead me to becoming the radio rock star I am today. I will talk about the benefits both emotionally and to their online presence. I will walk them through the five things they need to use podcasts like I do. 1: mindset 2: know your story 3: media kit page 4: online appearances page 5: base pitch email templet also plan to invite attendees to pitch me and my show called the What’s Your Excuse Show to help get them started and encouraged others to begin reaching out to show hosts and producers. And will touch upon post show promotion, equipment needs, and dealing with nerves. May handle this last one during q & a.

CSS Grid was released last year and it changes everything; for the web and for the WordPress Community. It means that for the first time ever we get to think of our layout as two-dimensional and fully responsive. CSS Grid is not another plugin hack or another bootstrap patch, it is the solution designers have been asking for. It is here to stay and right now is the perfect time to learn it!

You built your company, you have your website, and everything is looking great! But, you might be missing something- your compassion! Compassion is what drives companies and organizations to the right direction, no matter what you’re doing! It may be the small step to create a whirl of change for the people you serve. Follow Abbey Sager and her award-winning organization, Diverse Gaming Coalition, on how to shape your social media around kindness, boost your SEO with your philanthropy , and create an impact with your company.

My presentation will display three techniques on how to secure your 2nd, 3rd, and 4th client. I will talk about family and friends, client referrals, and (WordPress) community. This discuss will benefit freelance, and/or agency owners (as well as business owners).

Building up our online community means that we’ll earn more traffic, higher rankings, more engagement and high conversions. But what does it take to do this?

In building up our community online, we must understand deeply the role we play and the value we have to offer our people.

Are you looking to change the world and build up your communities in the process and use your creativity to make it happen? SEO can be a blueprint for your creativity.

SEO strategy is a process that focuses us in on the specific, powerful actions we need to take in order to reach our goals. We learn more about ourselves, our businesses, and our audiences in the practice of SEO.

We’ll cover three basic principles of building a community that we must tap into to be successful. We must:

Be intentional.
Be Aware.
Build Trust.

We’ll do this by using these 3 SEO strategies:

Keyword Research (being intentional with our ideas, our foundation of creativity)
Competitor Analysis (being aware of our industry, what’s going on in our niche and how we fit into the mix)
Content Writing (building trust by becoming an authority in our area of expertise, loyalty)

We’ll walk through each of these strategies to develop a narrowed focus in on what we need to be working on, right now, to begin building our online community. You’ll walk away with actionable steps to apply immediately.

With GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) now in effect, what does this mean for your site? Is the GDPR law geographically limited? Sam brings his 20 years of cybersecurity experience to discuss how you can protect your client data, what to do in the event of a data breach, and how you can prevent one. We’ll answer your questions and more including how your plugin choices can affect GDPR compliance.

Being a WordPress freelancer means you’re a little bit of everything: developer, accountant, and even project manager. In this presentation, we’ll talk about how to be a project manager extraordinaire when you’re freelancing or running your own WP business. From managing client expectations, tracking timeline and budget, and communicating both good and bad news, we’ll provide you with the tools and skills that you’ll need to make sure that you and your clients are happy and well-managed.