Author: Adam Silver

Colin Lord is a Senior Front End Developer for Modea in Blacksburg, Virginia. He has spent the last three years working in the healthcare industry for the Vanderbilt University Medical System, the Duke University Health System, and Carilion Clinic. Before that, he spent time in the music industry building sites for artists like Brad Paisley, Garth Brooks, Imagine Dragons, and The Band Perry. Other clients that have crossed his path are Verizon Wireless, ADT Home Security and DirecTV.

Colin will be presenting “I Know I Should Use SVGs, But I Don’t Know How”

Using SVG images are a lot like going to the gym. We all know we *should* be using them when we write our front end code, but we end up putting it off for another project down the road. And when SVGs are used, they are often implemented in a way that doesn’t unlock their full potential.

During this presentation, we’ll discuss the best practices for SVG implementation and how they vary depending on the size and audience of your site. We will also go through what an SVG sprite is, how to create one, and why they’re awesome. According to Advanced Web Ranking.com, only 3% of sites on the internet use this technique…but 97% of browsers support it!

After this talk, you’ll be ready to work on your SVGs like you’ll be ready to work on your summer body!

Laura’s family roots run deep in North Carolina, where her mother grew up in a textile mill town and her father played basketball for Davidson College. After growing up in Pensacola, Florida, she lived in Charlotte, NC with her husband E.J. for 10 years before they moved to Nashville, TN, to pursue music. With a marketing and client services background in fields such as healthcare consulting and financial services, Laura found a niche in helping small business owners with business development through digital marketing.

She began freelancing for clients as far back as 2009, helping with everything from brochure design to book editing. Eventually, her interest in technology led to the discovery of WordPress led to an affinity for web design. The field of web design brings together Laura’s skills in communications, editing, graphic arts, and marketing all in one package.

Rabell Creative, founded by E.J. and Laura in 2012, offers WordPress website design and digital marketing services to help organizations make the most of their online presence. Rabell Creative is a Google Partner agency, and Laura is a Certified Adwords Specialist. Visit www.rabellcreative.com to see our portfolio of recent client projects.

Rabell Creative was founded with the concept of giving back in mind, striving to build intention around working with non-profit organizations that are doing meaningful work and making the world a better place. Laura is also a performing musician and songwriter (www.laurarabell.com) and enjoys staying active in the local community through various community organizations and activities, including:

• Apparo “Website for Good” Agency Partner 2017 & 2018
• Co-Chair, Great Gatsby Gala benefitting the MS Society
• Board Member, MS Movers & Shakers
• Volunteer, The Relatives of Alexander Youth Network
• Past Community Development Chair, Charlotte Junior Chamber Board of Directors
• Past Chicago Marathon Charity Runner, Hope Worldwide
• Past Classroom Mentor, Thompson Child & Family Focus
• Past Event Chairperson, Relay for Life of Mecklenburg County

Laura graduated with honors from the University of West Florida in Pensacola, earning a degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities, focused on Communication Arts, Arts and English.

Laura will be presenting “How Running a WordPress Design Agency Allowed Me to Follow My Dreams of Becoming a Musician”

In the summer of 2010, I made the mistake of reading Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, while sipping tropical drinks on a beach vacation, and it ruined my life. Or rather, it encouraged me to rearrange my life to make more time for my passion for music and achieve location-independence. My husband and I founded Rabell Creative, a WordPress web design and digital marketing agency in 2012. After six years of experience building WordPress websites for clients full time, I will share with you our top tips and tricks for building beautiful websites efficiently, making your clients happy, and having time leftover to pursue your passions. I will outline the exact procedures and plugins that help simplify this process and discuss some of our most frequent pitfalls in dealing with clients, and how we avoid them.

Since we can work from anywhere with just our laptops and the Internet, we moved to Nashville in 2016, so I could pursue my dream of becoming a musician and songwriter. Running a fully remote WordPress web design agency is allowing me to travel, play music, and live out my dreams, and I am so grateful for the awesome and supportive WordPress community that helps make it all possible.

Jamie Schmid has a particular passion for creating excellent content experiences. Originally from Milwaukee, WI, she has been working as a WordPress freelancer and consultant since 2012, regularly taking sites from conception through a well-managed build process that encourages communication, planning, and smart use of content. She has a background in Information Architecture and Content Strategy and a big ol’ enthusiasm for all things WordPress. Now living in Portland, OR, Jamie is a Community Evangelist for SiteLock, traveling the country to help build awareness of website security best practices and solutions.

Jamie will be presenting: “Making Security Make Sense to Users and Clients”

As someone who builds 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, which ensures 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 clients’ websites is often not a priority or is left till the end of a project 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

In this session, Jamie will cover simple website security best practices that you can implement immediately for your own site and those of your clients. In addition, she’ll also offer advice and examples on how to best present the importance of website security during the proposal, scope, and maintenance package stages to your clients. Not only does this ensure your maintenance plans offer what every website needs, but also presents an additional revenue stream opportunity for your business.

Peter La Fond is the Founder and CEO of My Internet Scout, LLC, a digital marketing firm serving businesses of all sizes in locations across the country.

Peter graduated from California State University, Sacramento in 1994. Peter’s high technology career has spanned across two decades in Silicon Valley. He’s worked for various sized high technology firms, ranging from start-up to Fortune 500. Peter has employed the WordPress engine as the exclusive platform for the websites his firm develops. In addition, Peter is the Founder of the San Jose WordPress Meetup.

Peter will be presenting: How a Solid Backup Strategy can Save your Livelihood and Sanity

Website owners dedicate a lot of resources and time for even the most basic of websites. Unfortunately… Servers do fail. Websites get hacked. And crucial website files can accidentally be deleted. Are you and your team prepared for the worst?

Most website owners have a false sense of security in regards to how they’ll recover from a website disaster. Backups are your last line of defense when things go terribly wrong. And, a reliable backup system can be the difference between a care-free day at the park with your family and a mental breakdown.

This talk will approach the idea of ‘Backing Up’ as a strategic disaster recovery system as opposed to a mere copy of website files. We’ll cover concepts like ‘Redundancy’, ‘Single Point of Failure’ and ‘Cold Storage’. If you’re a small business owner or website administrator, then this talk is for you.

Steve Mortiboy is the COO and Service Delivery Manager for Semper Plugins. He leads the team that develops plugins such as All in One SEO Pack. He has been working with WordPress for over 8 years and devotes much of his time to helping people get the most from WordPress. He is also one of the co-organizers of WordCamp Raleigh and the Raleigh WordPress Meetup Group. When not hard at work he’s working on DIY projects at home or off traveling.

Steve will be presenting: “Optimizing Images in WordPress to Improve Performance and SEO”

This session is aimed at beginners who want to understand how to leverage images to improve their website. We’ll take a hands-on look at things you should do when adding images and common mistakes to avoid that could negatively impact your site, especially with search engines.

Corey Freeman has been building WordPress sites for over 10 years. When she’s not teaching others how to build a better online presence, she can be found doing comedy in and around the triangle. She is the owner of the world’s most ridiculous animal, Olive “The Puppy” Freeman.

Corey will be presenting “Things Your Clients Won’t Tell You”

Deep in the heart of every client lurks the same secrets: things they don’t (or can’t) say to their service providers. This session will explore the fears and insecurities one must understand to provide top-notch customer service.

Micah is an Atlanta-based, full-stack developer committed to improving his craft continuously and sharing his insights with the development community. He is currently the dev team lead at Narwhal Digital and specializes in building websites and applications on the WordPress platform for enterprise clients.

Micah is leading the Gutenberg For Developers workshop. 

Gutenberg, the new WordPress text editor, is currently under development and will be released into WordPress core soon. The goal of this workshop is to prepare you with a solid understanding of how Gutenberg works, how to write Gutenberg blocks, and considerations for theme development.

We’ll start with the technologies that Gutenberg leverages and the APIs that WordPress provides on top of those. Then, we will explore in detail how to build a simple Gutenberg block. There are a few different types of Gutenberg blocks you can create and WordPress provides different components you can leverage, so we will cover that as well. For those who are theme developers, we will make sure you are aware of best practices for integrating with Gutenberg.

In order to optimize your learning, please observe these requirements:

– Familiarity with basic HTML, CSS, and JS or PHP
– Laptop computer
– A local copy of WordPress installed (https://getflywheel.com/layout/local-wordpress-development-environment-how-to/)
– A code editor. We strongly recommend PHPStorm (https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/download/), but Atom (https://atom.io/) will work if you can’t purchase (or the 30-day free trial runs out)

Please try to have WordPress and a good code editor already installed and running on your computer before the workshop. If you are unable to do so, we will do our best to provide help before the workshop but cannot make any guarantees.

With more than 15 years of interactive work and digital media design experience, Alex has helped many national and international clients maximize their online strategies through the integration of design, development and online marketing. Through custom graphics, WordPress development, and SEO consulting, he helps AndiSites deliver the most effective websites for our clients. His skills in digital photography and video provide striking imagery that blends perfectly with written content.

Alex’s Masters of Business Administration gives him a deep understanding of clients’ goals. His passion for digital media earned him the Robert F. Lauderborn advertising scholarship from the American Advertising Federation. As a valedictorian graduate of the Living Arts College specializing in digital advertising and design and Internet site development, his work has been nominated for multiple American Advertising Awards (ADDY).

Alex was born in Costa Rica, the #1 country in the Happy Planet Index. He and his wife Ann have a sweet baby daughter named Kylie and a beautiful golden retriever named Beta.

Alex is presenting “Save 15 minutes or more on WordPress a day: Intro to the Command Line for administrators”

In the life of every WordPress administrator, saving a few seconds here and there can make a big difference at the end of the day.

We have heard of the command line before, tools like Bash, SSH and WP-CLI are considered too complex for the average administrator.

In this introduction, we will take an introductory look at these tools in a language that administrators can understand and in a way that we can start using them right away.

We will look at topics like:

1. Connecting to a remote server via SSH.
2. Executing simple WP-CLI commands to create fast database backups, export a list of users, or “search and replace” for a string on a website without the need of plugins.
2. Creating and using simple scripts in bash.