Josepha will take a brief look at the Digital Divide as it stands today and what current technological trends mean for it in the future. The talk will mainly be focused on what it takes to be literate in the digital landscape our students find themselves in and how WordPress can be used to build and perfect those skills.

As a designer, you are sometimes so excited at the idea of creating something that you just start creating it. That’s fine, but do you even know why you’re creating it? Anybody can make a website “look pretty”, (ya I went there), dribbble is proof things can look great without making sense. When starting a design, there should always be a goal in mind that makes the project a success. Define that goal first and ask all the questions! Are you not sure of something? Ask a question! Bring out your inner 5yr old and ask as many questions as you need to make sure your design is the best it can be.

In this talk, I’ll go through a list of UX Considerations to look into before you even draw a box on your sketchpad with a pencil. I’ll quickly glance over some basic topics such as User Research, User Empathy, User Interviews, accessibility and more. Each consideration will help you better shape your thinking towards a better overall design that will achieve your goals.

Podcasting is a growing medium and a perfect means to build a following around your service, product, or idea. In this session, you will learn how to use a branded podcast to build authority in an industry, learn more about your target audience, network with the right people, and make more sales.

Podcasting is a growing medium and a perfect means to build a following around your service, product, or idea. In this session, you will learn how to use a branded podcast to build authority in an industry, learn more about your target audience, network with the right people, and make more sales.

When I built my first WordPress sites I was learning on my own…and made a lot of mistakes. Ok, so things weren’t wrong, really, but several sites later, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve compiled a list of tips for set up, settings, shortcuts, saving time, and simplifying that I wish I had known sooner.

From the gamut of how to name your database through to unchecking “block search engines from crawling this site,” this talk will feature a list of somewhat random tips that can help make a WordPress website easier to build and easier to manage down the road. It includes recommendations for plugins and tools that can speed development and help keep you organized, plus a look at some of the settings options, and ways to improve your workflow. This talk is aimed at beginners, whether they be bloggers, developers or site managers. (Sorry, PHP programmers, you won’t learn much!)

In this talk I explore ways to harness artificial intelligence (AI) within your WordPress site as well as imagine what role it plays for the future. Attendees will learn about ways to engage with visitors using chat bots, personalized content, automated search engine optimization (SEO) and more.

Applying that logic what does the future look like? To answer that we will explore a not so distant future of the web, as well as changes to WordPress core to support these pioneering plugins and integrations.

We talk about protecting data. We talk about outside forces seeking to obtain our data by unconventional means.

I will speak about PROTECTING or DATA that is stolen from trusted individuals within.

We will focus on their psychological motivations, to identify the emotional precursors. Combining open-discussions, media, and PowerPoints, to illustrate, cultural adaptation, borderline personality disorder, psychological autopsy, precursors to ESPIONAGE, and SPYING.

The presentation will give participants innovative insights to conduct psychological field profile/assessments and verify potential risk factors. This presentation will outline the mental aspects regarding a Data Breaching and possible prevention Data Loss.

In today’s world of CYBER-RISK and CYBER-SECURITY, we sometimes forget about the individuals, or dare I say SUSPECTS behind the BREACH, ATTACH or THEFT. We neglect these individuals until it is too late, and the damage has been done.

Individuals such as:

EDWARD J. SNOWDEN The media hails him as a “whistleblower,” but MR. SNOWDEN stole DATA belonging to the NSA and disseminated said data to individuals with unauthorized access.

William Binney (NSA) •Jose Ignacio Lopez (GM) Chief of productions accused of corporate espionage. •Steven Louis Davis (Gillette) Pled guilty to theft of trade secrets

Patricia Dunn (Hewlett-Packard) Involved in a spying scandal

Ross Klein and Amar Lalvani (Starwood Hotels) downloaded confidential Starwood information to use later at Hilton.

I started a simple blogging project about 18 months ago as a way to recover from near-burnout as a graphic designer at a day job and as a freelancer. I wanted a fun project that would let me play and be creative. But of course, I’m a designer who specializes in brand management, so this little play-project turned into an experiment in building a brand to establishing myself as an authority in the niche I chose to play in (stationery supplies, art journaling, paper, and pens).

Imagine my surprise when this little play project took off and I suddenly had an audience clamoring for more and more content from me. I had to figure out a way to publish these in-depth, long-form articles on the website while nurturing this growing community who was hungry for more content from me. I also had to figure out how to squeeze in content creation, website design, and learning about SEO and marketing while still holding down a day job that keeps me away from home for 12 hours a day.

That’s where my organizing and time management skills came in. I devised a way to chip away at content creation using a detailed checklist and editorial calendar. As a designer and writer, I have no desire to learn how to code – but that doesn’t mean I can’t have a beautiful, functional, and effective WordPress blog.

I’m not a professional blogger, but my blog is making me some extra money and I’m having fun learning new ways to use content to make more money.

I’m not a project manager, but I’ve had to learn how to manage this community of like-minded “nerds” and keep content creation on track and publish regular articles and about seven million other things all at once.

I’m not a marketing guru, but I had to learn how to leverage SEO and grassroots marketing tactics to spread the word and grow a following.

I’m not a coder or WordPress developer, but I sure can use the features of a theme to make it do what I need it to do without having to touch a single line of code.

I’m just a girl with a blog who had figured things out along the way and I wonder if there are others who might learn a thing or two from my methods.

Can you find 2 extra hours a week where, if spent diligently, will promote your brand, drive your social media, and make you look amazing? Of course you can! This is what a properly executed blog can do for any personal or professional brand. Discover how to easily create and promote great content.

You are an expert! You know what you are talking about when it comes to your business and your industry. You regularly answer questions, solve problems, and educate people. It comes naturally to you because it is your world. How many people could benefit from your knowledge? How many more people could you help if your knowledge could jump out of your head and onto a website?

The answer is A LOT! If those people are converted into clients, even better! So, how does that happen?

Blogging on your website has some amazing advantages beyond adding those all-mighty key words and phrases to your SEO. Content re-purposing can save you countless hours and promote your brand to new heights of awareness. Strategically marketed articles can grab market mind-share. Your brand can appear all over the place by investing just a couple hours a week on creating killer content.

This presentation will include the following: 1. Developing an easy system for content creation. 2. Ways to re-purpose content to save time and increase your brand. 3. Do’s and Don’ts for outsourcing content creation

At the end of the presentation, participants will have a list of great blog topics for their business and industry, plus a plan in place to produce the content and use it for marketing.

You can’t make it to the gym every day. Maybe you are prone to tight shoulders or a sore back. Your mind might wander to these issues or any others while you are trying to focus and get some work done- slowing down your whole day! I want to introduce the WordPress community to the world of Pilates and help them to increase productivity, improve their posture, reduce stress, and mitigate pains that come along with staying in one position for long periods. There are some simple exercises that can be done at your desk (standing or sitting- whichever you prefer) to help you have a low stress, productive, painless day.

Let’s get moving!

One of my goals for the fitness side of my life is to develop a program to help the good folks of the WordPress community to feel better while they work. The only thing I need is a group of people willing to exercise and help me generate the optimal program by sharing the experience with me.

By the time of the talk there will be a sign-up page on my website for anyone to participate in the development stage of this process. It will be free and offer instructional videos, text reminders to move, and periodic email communication to check on the impact of the movement.

In 2019 we don’t just compete with our peers in search. The knowledge Graph has arrived, and it is dominated by schema and structured data. Google is now a portal for search and our direct competition online.

Google has slowly migrated away from traditional search and pushed further into a world that is controlled by artificial intelligence and structured data. Few marketers have acknowledged this shift and adapted to Google’s usage of advanced SEO techniques.

While many marketers are starting to think about popular topics such as AI and voice search, they are missing the underlying code base that will help prepare them for the new world of digital marketing and search.

The search results page is evolving, and it is shifting even faster for certain types of queries. Will you be prepared?

Learning Objectives:

• Learn the basic elements of schema and how Google uses structured data to better understand your website and how it relates to a user’s search queries.
• Learn what exactly schema is available for the healthcare industry and how this applies to your website content.
• Learn the action steps necessary to prepare your organization for schema identification, implementation, and validation.

WordPress is awesome, but everyone runs into issues now and then. Whether you own, maintain or build WordPress sites, troubleshooting is a skill set that will save you time and money.

In this session, you will: – Learn about the 7 types of WordPress issues you may encounter and how to diagnose them. – Discover the step-by-step processes that will help you find the root cause of an issue. – Learn what your next steps are once you know the source of an issue. – Learn what information you should be providing when interacting with developers or your web host to help speed up the problem resolution process.

The sad truth is that a good portion of the software we build is — in the grand scope of things — absolutely meaningless. Countless hours, an obscene percentage of our lifetimes, spent building marketing sites to convince people to buy products they don’t need. But what if it didn’t have to be?

There’s a great feeling of satisfaction that comes from building a piece of software: using only our minds and a text editor, we’ve manipulated the machine, bending it to our will. Now and forever, we shall be recognized as the technical wizards who helped…sell more cheeseburgers?!

The sad truth is that a good portion of the software we build is — in the grand scope of things — absolutely meaningless. Countless hours, an obscene percentage of our lifetimes, spent building marketing sites to convince people to buy products they don’t need. Or building web apps to collect user data, which can then be sold to the highest bidder.

At some point in your career, you may find yourself at a crossroads: continue getting paid for work that ultimately leaves you unsatisfied, or take a step back and try to give your career purpose? This talk is about the latter: how to find meaning in the work that you do; after all, aren’t we supposed to be building software to help people?

User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience (CX) design are in high demand while diversity in tech (or lack thereof) is a persisting problem. So it should be of no surprise that the intersection between these two big issues is the blind spot in companies both large and small. Big companies are throwing big money at trying to be “more diverse”, and at the same time are still seeing huge lawsuits filed against them for inaccessible products and/or discriminatory practices. There is a simple reason why: the tech industry (among many others) has a diversity problem.

Let us look at the problem through logic, psychology, human behavior, and learn concrete actions to make a difference, wherever and whatever role you find yourself in.

When you’re pitching a potential client a project, you’re asking them to risk their time and money.

By utilizing the Joyride model, you’ll not only lower risk and gain the trust of your potential clients. You’ll also win more projects not for being the cheapest, but because you’re the best option.

What’s harder than asking somebody who’s never paid you to pay you $1?

While most creatives are willing to gamble on the traditional sales approach of wasting countless hours in writing and revising proposals, Hien Lam and Matt Hansen, co-founder of Huck Finch, believes there’s a better way. They call their concept “joyrides,” which involves short-term, lower-cost workshop experiments with clients that validate ideas before anyone writes a line of code or crafts a page of marketing material. Joyrides are a way to charge for a small, fixed-price engagement that delivers a huge amount of value to a client while preparing them to invest in a much larger engagement.

In this talk, they’ll share how anyone, regardless of industry, can put this concept to use to de-risk projects, validate customer vision, and build trust with clients.

Do you create custom proposals for your clients? Do you have to continuously slash the price of your creative work just so a potential client will say yes?

If so, then let’s take a joyride together!

Everyone hears they should be doing SEO, but what does that really mean? I will cover the core basics of SEO and provide insights and strategies that are actionable for attendee’s that day.

The presentation will include: – SEO as A.R.T. – Topics vs. Keywords – Title, Meta, and Content Optimization – Importance of backlinks and citations – Intro to technical considerations

Get a beginner-level introduction to running WordPress “local” on your computer: without buying hosting or having a live site on the Internet. Discover how a local WordPress installation offers a more forgiving playground for hands-on learning and experimenting.

You need to impress the client with catchy, high performance animation for the modern web, that also works well on every device? At one time that was browser and device-dependent technology. It doesn’t have to be that way, not anymore. Explore an amazing JavaScript toolkit called GreenSock, aka, GSAP, with a wide array of plugins. Learning modern JS is fun with animation. By seeing and experimenting, I think you’ll catch the bug too. SVG graphics and animation is code, which means great performance and beautiful, elastic, and interactive things in your theme. In this talk, you will see a live coded introduction, building interactive objects from hover to click.