Presented by Devin Sears in Beginner, Winter Garden Track.

You’ve built a website, you love your business, but now what? We’ll cover a wide range of tactics and marketing blends and introduce you to different mediums to begin your marketing efforts.

Presented by Alex Buran in Beginner, Marketing and Business, Minskoff Track.

Presented by Jennifer Brueske in Beginner, Shubert Track.

Choosing the right plugin can be overwhelming with over 55,500 plugins on the repository alone! We’ll discuss security and why using outdated plugins may cause vulnerabilities. We’ll also go over how to troubleshoot when a plugin causes your site to go down.

Presented by Jessi Gurr in Winter Garden Track.

“Freelance to Agency: How To Make The Leap This talk is geared towards freelancers who are ready to turn their small business into a full agency. We will go over some of the basics and necessary steps to incorporate a business, and give some tips and advice for freelancers with the entrepreneur bug. This talk is a bit different from many “”how to start a business”” talks, as we will discuss some of the critical support systems needed, and mindset changes that need to take place, when shifting your company from a freelance business to a full agency. A quick rundown of what will be in the speech:

How to stop thinking like a freelancer.

Defining your staff.

Learning to delegate.

LLC vs S-Corp vs Corp: What you need to know, where to file, and how to find legal resources.

Finding the right support system of professionals to get your business started on the right foot.

Increasing prices to pay for your bottom line.

Find the right team members. An overview of how to hire, who to hire, and how to keep your employees happy.

Things to consider when seeking out an office, or location to headquarter your business.

Goal setting: think toward the future.”

Presented by Kari Sletten in Beginner, Minskoff Track.

You can do so much more with forms than just collect names and email addresses. This talk will discuss using conditional logic to streamline the registration process, pre-populating forms with data, creating dynamic surveys that graphically display results, and creating custom PDFs using form data. This talk is based on using the popular Gravity Forms plugin and will have specific examples you will be able to implement immediately.

Presented by Rachel Cherry in Beginner, Shubert Track.

Web accessibility refers to the inclusive practice of removing barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to, websites by people with disabilities. When your website is inaccessible, research shows you could be excluding up to 20 percent of your visitors and customers. When your website is accessible, everyone can consume your information and interact with you and your services. Visually-impaired users can visit your website using a screen reader. Those who can’t use a mouse can navigate your site using a keyboard or other input device. Designing with accessibility in mind will also improve your SEO. Join my workshop to learn more about accessibility, the importance of universal design, and how to create a high-quality user experience that is inclusive and beneficial to all.

This workshop will cover:

РIntro to accessibility, universal design, and why it’s important

– WCAG accessibility standards and legal concerns

– How to add accessibility testing to your workflow

– Common accessibility issues and how to address them

– Easy accessibility fixes that make a big impact‚Ä®”

Presented by Alain Schlesser in Shubert Track.

An overview of the general concepts that govern development in the Gutenberg era.

Discussion of the different tricks & techniques you can use to gradually move your existing code from here to there, in a clean transition.

Gutenberg is a major change to how you develop software for WordPress. The changes will start with the WordPress editor but the long term plan is for Gutenberg to slowly take over the entire admin interface.

If you already have existing plugin or theme code that you need to maintain and make ready for the upcoming Gutenberg update, you will probably face some architectural design challenges. This session will help prepare you to make those changes in a clean transition.

Presented by Chloe and Colette Chamberland in Beginner, Winter Garden Track.

Everyone knows their site needs to be secure. But, just what does it take to make sure your site is optimally secure from compromise? In this workshop, whether you’re advanced or just starting out, we will help walk you through virtually every step it takes to make sure your WordPress environment is secure. We will start out with basics like what is security and general concepts about security. From there, we will walk you through selecting a secure hosting provider and choosing a secure password. Finally, we will go into more specific configuration details and the do’s and don’ts when securing your WordPress environment. By the time you walk out of this workshop you should feel like a WordPress security pro.

Presented by Alana Lemon in Beginner, Minskoff Track.

How to get your words from your brain to your paper? Do you have writers block? Unscramble your thoughts and uncover your true abilities. This class will show you how to formulate your words. It all begins with a thought. Lets begin to discover how creative you are.

Presented by Rodrigo Donini in Minskoff Track, Shubert Track.

This talk explains through an example the possibilities around the REST API of WordPress.

We can create any kind of integration with WordPress, it’s possible to create external systems to manage all the content and information behind the CMS.

This talk uses a small device with a microprocessor, like Raspberry Pi or Tessel to show the possibility of the integrations of WordPress with IOT.

In this specific case, I’ll interact with the crowd, asking them to scream very loud, and if they reach a number of decibels some post will be published inside the CMS by the integration with the WP REST API, and they can see live in the address that I will share with them during the talk.

I’ll explain briefly how it works the WP REST API and how this integration was made.

Presented by Steve Bruner in Minskoff Track.

There are tons of different frameworks you can use with WordPress.  Come to this lightning talk to find out how to choose and why to use them.

Presented by Christie Chirinos in Beginner, Shubert Track.

At Caldera Labs, we think about contact forms – a lot. We’re obsessed with your contact forms because we believe that contact forms are more than just a contact form, they’re actually a crucial point in your sales funnel. We believe contact forms can make or break a business, especially for freelancers, consultants and service agencies. In this talk, we’re obsessing over contact forms: the platforms out there to collect your leads, accessibility in your contact forms, responsive design for your contact forms, overall design, psychology of forms, A/B testing forms, and continuous improvement of forms.

This talk will not be platform-centric nor an advertisement. Although delivered by us at Caldera Labs, we will equally and unbiasedly present all leading contact form product options in the WordPress space with a fair pros vs. cons comparison in the product section. The talk will mostly be about form best practices with only a brief overview of platform.”

Presented by Mary Baum in Winter Garden Track.

So. We’ve got CSS-Grid. We’ve got CSS columns. What do we need Flexbox for? I think Flexbox is great in one direction – vertical, for that smallest phone view, or horizontal, for navigation. For those restricted cases, you can learn it in under 15 minutes. Ten, actually, since this is a lightning talk. Because Flexbox … Is what’s on the menu.

Presented by Kaspars Dambis in Minskoff Track.

Learn how to write better code, add tests, coding standard and continuous integration (CI) support to your WordPress theme or plugin. Improve your developer workflow by automating all steps from writing to deploying your WordPress projects.

Presented by Eric Leu in Beginner, Winter Garden Track.

Did you know that over 50% of visitors will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load? Nowadays it is more important than ever to ensure your site is fast and efficient. Our talk will cover the essential steps to achieving an excellent PageSpeed score, and consequently, a blazing fast WordPress site. We will cover minification of CSS and JavaScript, asynchronous loading, image optimization and more, sharing a variety of plugins and other resources that will help you execute these steps.

Presented by Marc Gratch in Shubert Track.

An intro course to navigating the command line using bash and wp-cli. From simple to complicated, with examples!

Learning how navigate via cli/bash, how to improve efficiency by completing common (often time consuming tasks) via the command line and some useful code examples to understand how to write bash scripts.

Presented by Adam Warner in Shubert Track.

Simple website security best practices that you can implement immediately for your own site and those of your clients.

Advice and examples on how to best present the importance of website security during the proposal, scope, and maintenance package stages to your clients, ensuring your maintenance plans offer what every website needs, and also presents an additional revenue stream opportunity for your business.

Building WordPress websites for clients, you’ve probably learned that offering (or requiring) monthly maintenance contracts is smart business. It’s likely you’re including core software, plugin and theme updates as part of your maintenance plan; ensuring a steady income stream you can rely on and helps with your financial forecasting. But are you including website security as part of your project proposal and scope?

The security of your client’s websites is often not a priority or is left till the end of a project (or sale?) as an optional add-on for the client to consider after going live. The value of a strong website security posture can be difficult to explain to clients, but when put in the context of their business and possible loss of revenue, it can become an integral part of your offering that separates you from the rest.

Presented by Corey Maass in Beginner, Minskoff Track.

Put WordPress to work for you!

In this talk, I will share powerful methods that will help boost your business and improve your productivity by taking full advantage of your WordPress website.

WordPress is already known to be a powerful tool for growing and promoting your services and business.

But what you may not know is that WordPress can also be used to track time, manage your contacts, collect payments, brainstorm ideas, track your health, share files and much more, directly from within your own WordPress website.

We will explore many of the features that will help you take full advantage of your WordPress website to help empower you or your business to its fullest potential.

Presented by Gary Thayer in Winter Garden Track.

This talk will look at the best practices for building and customizing themes and plugins for WooCommerce. We’ll talk about:

* Keeping template files up to date;

* Useful actions and filters;

* Custom solutions for unique eCommerce situations

Presented by Ronnie Burt in Beginner, Minskoff Track.

Recent laws (with more on the way!) make it a requirement that even the most basic of sites and blogs have a Privacy Policy. And working with a law firm or consultant can prove to be costly and overwhelming. Luckily, recent WordPress updates have done much of the hard work for us, but we still need to spend the time to customize and personalize the policy which isn’t always a straightforward task. We’ll discuss the requirements of a Privacy Policy, how to use the new built-in WordPress privacy tools, and provide open-sourced examples that you can take and make your own. You will walk out of this session with everything you need to publish or update your privacy policy with confidence.

Presented by Mika Epstein in Shubert Track.

Have you ever wondered what happens when an automated system decides you’re evil? You wake up one morning to find an account closed or a system prohibited. All because a system didn’t understand the fine distinction between awareness and attacks. This is the tale of two automated reports that resulted in suspension from two of the largest services online: Amazon and Google.

Only one case had a happy ending.

Presented by Joe Howard in Winter Garden Track.

Hiring an employee or a contractor is difficult, but even more so when you’ve never met! But in today’s digital age, meeting someone face-to-face isn’t a requirement for working together. I’ll lay out some of what I’ve learned successfully and unsuccessfully hiring remote team members and growing a team of 10+.

Presented by Larry Swanson in Beginner, Minskoff Track.

In this workshop, we’ll develop a content strategy for a WordPress site-development project. WordPress agencies and freelance designers and developers have all developed content strategy skills. We’ll draw out those skills and plug them into a proven framework for crafting an actionable, state-of-the-art website content strategy. If you’ve ever used “lorem ipsum” placeholder copy as you struggled to extract content from your client, this workshop is for you.

Presented by Zack Rothauser in Winter Garden Track.

Since the introduction of the WordPress REST API, the potential for using it to power React applications has generated much excitement among developers. But what is an actual use-case for these technologies, and how can it improve the user experience? In this presentation we’ll show how WordPress was used as a foundation for building an in-gallery video kiosk for the Clyfford Still Museum.

We’ll begin by looking at the design process for a museum experience: How digital design can reflect the physical space in which it is installed, and how graphic and movement choices affect visitors’ sense of intimacy. We’ll show how the video kiosk platform was built to scale with the museum’s growing video library, how we made the videos accessible to people with hearing impairments, and how we designed the system to be content-managed from afar.

From there, we’ll demonstrate how content-management via WordPress combined with the REST API and a React front-end provide an intuitive experience for administrators and users, save development time, and provide a smooth native-app-like experience. We’ll finish by detailing the hardware used to present the system in-gallery.

Presented by Andrew Schulkind in Beginner, Shubert Track.

Join digital strategist Andrew Schulkind as he lays out the process he and his team have developed over 22 years of tackling web development and other digital marketing initiatives for a range of B2B clients. In this session, you will gain insight into:
• Convincing stakeholders of the value of proper planning process (hint: it actually saves time and money)
• Aligning the process with your desired outcomes
• The document templates you’ll find most useful
• How the planning process helps post-launch

You’ve built dozens of WordPress sites, maybe even hundreds. You know what you’re doing. So when starting a new site it’s tempting to roll your sleeves up, dive right in, and get to work.

Or maybe you’re a marketer or business owner about to build your first WordPress site. Sure, some things seem daunting, but you can let your developers hand the confusing bits, right?

On even the simplest of sites, something nearly always gets lost in translation between the client’s expectations, the designer’s vision, and the developer’s execution.

A solid planning process and proper documentation minimizes the potential for confusion and miscommunication. You save time, you save money, and most importantly, the finished project is more likely to successfully achieve the desired results.

Q&A to follow the presentation.

Presented in Minskoff Track, Shubert Track, Winter Garden Track.

Presented by James Hall in Beginner, Winter Garden Track.

Over the past few months HeX are going through a journey of becoming a certified accessible agency through the ShawTrust. X will talk you through the thought, the team and how workflows are maintained. This will include why this is right from a moral value along with the business process to show how agencies can offer more value to the client and their customers.

A live demonstration of assistive technology will also be included.

Presented by David Wolfpaw in Minskoff Track.

If you’ve ever wanted to build your own theme for WordPress, this is the session for you. We’re going to start from scratch and work our way up. This tutorial assumes HTML and CSS knowledge, though there is no level of PHP requirement. We’ll go through all of the core files needed for a theme; some supplemental features that can be added; and how themes should be structured for clients, public free release, and sales sites. We’ll also cover some tools that can help with your theme development.

Presented by Judi Knight in Shubert Track.

You’ve made a few WordPress websites. You‚Äôre proud and excited about what you‚Äôve accomplished. You get a few website clients. Soon, the headaches begin, staying up till 3 AM looking for the perfect theme, adding 435 products to an online store since that you didn’t specify in your proposal. You make a different mistake with each new project and it dawns on you that you’re making 3 bucks an hour, building websites for clients – and it’s so much harder than you thought.

What’s happening is that you’re stuck in the dreaded Bermuda Triangle of web designer’s hell. You don’t what you don’t know and you can’t see any way through it.

I’m not clairvoyant, I just told you my story. And, in this presentation, I’ll share with you how I got through this and what it will take for you to learn to price, close, create, and deliver effective WordPress websites and sail on to a great career.”

Presented by Colin Dowling in Minskoff Track.

Whether you’re a full-fledged agency or a freelancer dipping your toe into for-profit WordPress development, the number one problem you’ll face is finding new customers.

This session focuses on simple things everyone can do to gain more prospects, expand opportunities with current clients, and grow your business. Whether you build websites on the side for a little extra income or are on a mission to be a digital powerhouse, you can learn something here. We’ll talk about hard stuff (like outbounding, lead magnets, and PPC) but mostly focus on easy stuff (like the RIGHT way to ask for a referral and how to get leads out of your blog).

Lead generation and business development is easy if you have a repeatable process in place. I’m happy to share the recipe I’ve developed over the years so you can put it to work for you.

Presented by Frank Corso in Winter Garden Track.

Imagine a website that is getting 1000 users a day. Now imagine that about 50 of them are spending money on the site. You probably want to get more of the users that are spending money on the site but how do you know where these users are coming from? Maybe you know that all of them are coming from Twitter or Facebook but do you know which post or tweet refers the most people who actually convert to customers? Or, how do you know how many signed up to receive your lead magnet? This is where analytics comes in.

In this talk, we will discuss:

* How to see where your users are coming from

* What pages/posts your users most spend time on

* What actions your users do on your website

* What UTM codes are and how to use them

* How to see exactly which links in your marketing drives the most traffic and conversions

*And much more!

Presented by Anthony Burchell in Shubert Track.

In this talk I will outline the story and learnings from building the Playlist block for the Gutenberg editor. We will explore the epic wins as well as epic failures in the pursuit of building a block. If you are learning Gutenberg or React and have hit road blocks in understanding the flow or data or tools available, this talk will clear the air on many of those issues. We’ll explore local development tools as well as design patterns used in block creation. If there is one takeaway I want from this talk, it is that Gutenberg is not scary.

Presented by Andrea Zoellner in Beginner, Shubert Track.

Andrea will share a few copywriting and communication tips that will immediately improve your user interface microcopy, such as error messages and interface instructions, so your users experience less frustration and more delight.

When we think about UX we’re often too focused on fonts, colors, and flow to think about microcopy‚ those small bits of text that guide users through almost every part of a web interface. These words may be tiny, but they can make a significant difference in the usability of your design and even affect your site’s conversion rates.

Presented by John Eckman in Winter Garden Track.

At the start, the web was purely stateless Рevery request was the beginning (and every response the end) of a new conversation. Then we got cookies, so that servers could remember clients, and SSL so we could share information with servers that wasn’t seen by all the servers it passed through en route. These two technologies enabled e-commerce and are so foundational now it is hard to imagine the web without them. The problem is the way we’ve evolved the web has been down a path of increasingly aggressive data collection and reduced transparency for users.

We should have always been doing privacy by design, data portability, data transparency, and the right to be forgotten. We should not have become dependent on invasive ad tech and aggregated third-party data; we should not have handed over ownership of our own social graphs and connections so cheaply to private commercial interests.

While many (particularly in the US) may be uncomfortable with the legalistic and regulatory approach, preferring a more laissez-faire, self-governing model for virtually everything, the GDPR can be seen as an opportunity to start doing things right – applying the core principles of privacy by design not just where mandated by regulation but as a standard business practice.

Presented by Michael Posso in Minskoff Track.

Virtual reality technology is becoming more accessible every day. Platforms such as Oculus and Google Daydream have brought VR experiences to our mobile devices, offering very performant and advanced VR interactions. JavasScript based libraries such as A-frame lets developers build VR experiences for the web as well as view 360 videos using common mobile web browsers.

Using these libraries, a WordPress user or developer can include immersive content to enhance their digital content strategy.

This presentation explores a technical overview of webVR and how to convert conventional site content into Immersive experiences using WordPress.

Presented by Rick Viscomi in Minskoff Track.

There are many tools that help us understand and improve the state of web performance on our WordPress sites. But it’s not always obvious which tool is right for the job and how to use it. When would I use “field” data from real users? What is my “lab” testing tool trying to tell me? In this workshop, we will examine the landscape of tools at our disposal: WebPageTest, HTTP Archive, Google Analytics, and the Chrome User Experience Report. We will use these tools and real world examples to better understand how slow a website is, what is causing it, and how to fix it.

Presented by Scott Wyden Kivowitz in Shubert Track.

In this session, you will learn how to set up a podcast with WordPress in the easiest possible way. You will also learn some actionable steps to attract an audience, recording, equipment and even how to do well in Apple Podcast quickly.

You’ll learn about all of these items related to your new podcast:

– Plugins

– Hosting

– Equipment

– Tracking

– Calls to Action

– List Building

– Optimizing

– Transcribing

– Marketing

Presented by Greg Taylor in Winter Garden Track.

No one wakes up in the morning and says, ‚ÄúToday is a great day for a new WordPress site’s (Well, other than us!) Most people need and/or want a new website because something is inherently broken. When you learn that the business of WordPress is not about WordPress you will be light years ahead of competition. (Almost) Anyone can build a Website that looks great, but does it work and will it solve the business challenges at hand.

Presented by Maxwell Ivey in Beginner, Winter Garden Track.

My goal is to free the audience from their fear of failure so they can either start posting content or so they can increase the amount and quality of content they are posting. I will do this by sharing past experiences that outline the value of taking the risk, facing your fears, and putting yourself out in the world. I will teach them to focus on what they can change and ignore the things they can’t change or that they can’t change right now. I will use the example of my first website at the midway marketplace, my first post as the blind blogger, and my successful Amtrak Writers In Residence Application. In the end I wil challenge them and remind them that if a guy like me can do it with all he has going against him, then what is their excuse.

Presented by Daniel Olson in Shubert Track.

Building a better WordPress is more than refactoring code. It’s a 10,000-foot view of what we can learn from the tech community at large, affecting everything from how we build our applications to laying the foundation for what comes next.

WordPress is more than just a CMS. For some, it’s the backbone of their business, it’s their real-estate, it’s their voice, and channel for communicating online.

What can we do to make that experience better?

Let’s explore what Gutenberg could mean for the future of service providers and freelancers. Let’s also explore what the future of SaaS.

I would like to share my research on what I what I believe to be the greatest opportunities for WordPress and the community that supports it.

Presented by Timothy Jacobs in Developer, Minskoff Track.

When building JavaScript based interfaces, it can be difficult to keep validation, permissions, extensibility and language in-sync between the JS front-end and the PHP back-end. In this talk, we’ll explore using JSON Schema and HATEOAS concepts to build a configuration driven interface.

Presented in Minskoff Track.

Everyone knows WordPress is free and open source. That’s because thousands of people contribute all year to the community through lots of ways–not just coding into the Core of WordPress. We have teams that manage documentation, support forums, translation, and theme reviews.

Join us at this year’s WordCamp NYC Contributor Day on Sunday, and give back to the community we know and love. All skill levels welcome.

Visit the Contributor Day Sign-Up Page here.

Presented by Sam Hotchkiss in Shubert Track.

When it comes to leading a technical team, there are a number of challenges. In this talk, I’ll draw on my experience in building and leading teams of all sizes both within my own agency and at Automattic, and share the lessons I’ve learned over the last 15 years.

Things we’ll talk about:

* Building a culture

* Hiring

* One-on-ones

* Handling personality clashes on your team

* Handling under-performers on your team

* The value of off-sites

And, on the product side:

* Aligning the vision of your team

* Defining projects and shipping code

* The power of process

* Quality control

* Shipping schedules

Presented by Carole Olinger in Beginner, Winter Garden Track.

Since the moment I attended my first WordCamp two years ago I have been wondering: “How can I find my place in an IT community as a non-technical person?”

Despite all the support and goodwill I get, I am often insecure about my skills and my performance. I sometimes feel like a fraud and I keep wondering if I truly deserve what I have achieved so far.

What has been my biggest fear has come upon me recently – rejection: My application to contribute to a project that I thought was particularly important to me got rejected. After struggling with a mental breakdown, I managed to quickly regain confidence and strength and to focus on new goals.

I want to share what happened to me and to show ways to better deal with rejection and to turn it into an opportunity for personal growth. If you struggle with imposter syndrome and are afraid of rejection, this talk is for you!