The phrase, “Set it and forget it”, when it comes to cooking rice in a rice cooker, can be great, but when applied to a website, it can prove to be catastrophic. This short sighted approach can set your business and/or your clients’ businesses up for failure. In order for a website to be more than just a temporary digital ornament, and to make the investment worthwhile, it must be: Stable, User Friendly, Flexible, and Sustainable. Lets explore what each of these means, on a practical level, and discuss how refining our approach to new and existing projects not only improves our immediate situation, but also contributes to the overall reputation and market demand for more WordPress solutions.

As freelancers, developers and project managers working on a project, it’s easy to get blinded by outcomes. Tasks on a project are often defined by the specific thing that we expect to build or present to the client or customer. But what if our assumptions are wrong? Or the scope changes along the way? What if there was an easier way to produce a desirable, user-friendly end-product without specifically defining what that end-product is? (Spoiler: There is!) This talk will discuss how to shift your focus from outputs to outcomes and how that little mental shift, changes everything. Really!

This is a hands-on talk, so bring your laptops or tablets! Bring your photos! Bring your content and ideas! And be sure you have access to the accounts you need, because our goal here is to get some work done. Velda will map out the process of creating a blog, business site, or portfolio — or all three if that’s what you need. Then she’ll share the next steps and help you figure out where to find support going forward. If you don’t have a site yet, or if you’ve started and got stuck, this is a talk for you.

WordPress is an easy to install and use Content Management System, but should you? There are lots of options for running WordPress from installing on a Raspberry Pi to setting up an account at WordPress.com. This presentation will give a list of some of things to consider when starting out and growing such as: * What are some of the pros and cons of self hosting? * What are some of the pros and cons of self hosting using a hosted instance? * What are some of the pros and cons of fully hosted providers?

Every website needs images, but without proper optimization for the web, images can be a terrible detriment to website performance and SEO rankings. Learn some simple tricks you can do to reduce the size of your images while still maintaining great quality. Learn more about image resolution, image dimensions, and file size. And as a bonus, learn how to resize your images online without Photoshop.

One of the most underrated skills in website ownership is problem solving and rapid troubleshooting. As I’ve talked to, interviewed, and hired support technicians over the years, I’ve found that great developers aren’t always great troubleshooters, and lots of phenomenal troubleshooters can’t necessarily write code. WordPress has a huge number of moving parts. It’s a complex software. Being able to track down and diagnose bugs and the source of issues is a highly valuable skill and becomes even more valuable as new functionality is introduced into the stack. Having the right framework for troubleshooting and resolving issues will help manage frustration, maintain momentum on web development projects, and give WordPress users the confidence to dive headfirst into solving issues they haven’t encountered ever before. My goal is for all attendees to walk away with a system they can use to create a calmer workplace environment, troubleshoot their own website issues, and deliver faster resolutions and better quality results to their clients.