Sessions

WordCamp Santa Clarita

Best Practices for Payments Services

One of the most exciting aspects of starting your own online business is accepting that first payment on the product or service you are selling. However, before your business can take off, you really need to understand Payment processing, after all, that’s how your store makes money.

We admit it‚ payment processing can be confusing. Sure, the initial transaction part when your customer first presents his or her credit card number for purchase seems easy enough. After all, it happens in mere seconds. But what exactly goes on in those mere seconds? And what should you really need to know/do before you accept that first transaction?

Jon Gilbert’s presentation will explore the considerations and options to help merchants and developers select the best path to optimize both revenue and customer experience. With the right choices, you can be assured that your payments engine will support and grow with your business.

The audience will learn about:

  • The history of payment processing and how the industry has evolved
  • What is the difference between a merchant account, payment gateway, and a payment aggregator?
  • What does it take to open a merchant account?
  • What is the right pricing methodology for your type of business?
  • How do you select the right payment processor?
  • How to bundle payments in with your core offering and earn recurring revenue

Building your subscription commerce business on WooCommerce

Amit Ojha will go over the topic of “How to set up a successful subscription commerce business on Woo” along with the challenges and success stories.

Chasing Waterfalls

When troubleshooting a slow site, it can often be hard to know where to start. Fortunately, every modern browser includes helpful tools that can indicate where you need to focus. In this session, Jason Cosper will help you get familiar with these tools, show you some other favorites, and offer practical tips on how you can make your WordPress or WooCommerce site faster.

Discover How To Make More Time and Money with Proven Outsourcing

Are you at the point in your web business where you can use some help, or know you will be soon, yet think you can’t afford it? Think again! At some point, if you want to get a part of your life back, and actually be able to relax, sleep, and not worry so much about your business, you’ll need to delegate your work to someone else. So why not build a capable but affordable virtual team to help? Dave Braun’s presentation shows you how to get started with one or more virtual assistant as well as some great tips for making them, and yourself, as productive as possible.



Drip, Drip, Drip to Convert Website Leads to Sales

You have a WordPress product or service to offer and you have a signup form. But now what? Collecting email addresses is great for vanity metrics but even better if you bring them into your sales cycle.

In this talk, Amy Hall, a certified MailChimp expert and partner, will help you define your sales cycle, drip campaign, and how to nurture your subscribers. Sales is the goal of any good nurture campaign and, when done right, will help convert your website visitors into sales.

How to Grow Your Freelance Career or Agency

Tania Mulry will share her insights as an agency owner who has leveraged WordPress to create local and national impact, and will introduce her unique decision making framework.

How to make more money with a WooCommerce store

Whether you’re a current WooCommerce user or a WordPress user interested in adding eCommerce to your site, Kat Christofer will show you different ways to increase your bottom line:

  • Add WooCommerce to your WordPress site
  • Add features and functionality to an existing WooCommerce site
  • Choose the right payment gatewayReassure shoppers – SSL/security

Bring your imagination and questions!

How to use a data-driven approach to optimize your eCommerce store for incredible results

Join Chris Lema as he talks about ways to use data to drive different incredible results for your store or the next store project you work on.

Humanizing Storytelling – Drama & Authenticity Connect Audiences to Brands

Jen Miller presents Humanizing Storytelling focusing on how marketers, influencers, copywriting professionals, and everyday WordPress users can better engage customers by incorporating authenticity, drama, emotion, and transparency in content generation.

  • Increased audience conversation, interactive posting, and real-world examples create audience conversion, website traffic, and community on and offline.
  • Using client examples, personal stories, and case studies experienced through — decades of community journalism, localized website copywriting and blogging will be shared.

A deeper understanding of how to augment existing storytelling efforts through strategic community involvement over multiple websites and social network platforms will be discussed, as well as email and text messaging campaign advantages.

MacGyver plays with blocks: Using the Gutenberg editor in new and surprising ways

The new editor experience has been introduced into WordPress and folks have been able to use it to create beautiful and media rich posts. However, most don’t realize that blocks can do much more than that.

In this talk, we’ll go over just how powerful Gutenberg blocks are and how to use them to power experiences in native apps, games and video generation.

Making Content Part of Company Culture

The need for content production goes deeper than having something to post on your blog, Facebook, or Twitter. It’s about strategizing with your entire team to make sure the content you produce supports your product or service and provides real value to your online audience.

In order to work with a team, you need a solid content process in place. Moreso, you need to create company culture that includes content creation. Learn from Taylor Waldon how to create content as a team and provide value to both your users and your search engine optimization strategy.

Micropub and WordPress: Custom Posting Applications

The W3C recommended Micropub specification (2017) allows developers to create custom posting applications for a wide variety of data targeting any content management system that supports the spec.

Chris Aldrich provide an overview of the available plugin and endpoint for WordPress and a variety of client applications like Quill, Teacup, OwnYourGram, OwnYour Swarm, Omnibear, that allow one to post status updates, bookmarks, likes, check-ins/location data, photos, and more directly to WordPress sites.

We’ll also talk about how developers can create custom posting interfaces to drastically simplify content creation and posting for clients in ways that can be even simpler than working with Gutenberg.

Page Builder Magic

With the new Gutenberg editor, WordPress has created a new format with blocks that do a lot of what page builders have traditionally offered. So why would anyone still want to use a page builder? Jason will talk about:

  • The biggest difference between Elementor and Gutenberg and why I use Elementor for the foreseeable future;
  • The advantages and disadvantages of using my favorite page builder – Elementor (free version). Other page builders are similar;
  • How Elementor works with themes and which one should be used;
  • Using free plugins to extend Elementor;
  • A quick overview of how to use Elementor; and
  • Build a quick example of a home page (time permitting)

Playing with Child Themes

Playing with Child Themes is an entertaining introduction to child themes, showing their usefulness and importance for beginner developers and designers.

Learn the why and how of child themes. Bill Weissbard will show you how to make a simple child theme and how to switch between different versions of a child theme to easily compare styling.

Project Management for Developers

Whether you are working as a freelancer, or as part of a team, chances are that communicating with customers falls somewhere in your job description. As a website developer, you love the part of your job where you get to develop – but you also need to develop communication and project management skills to help you stay on top of projects, interact with your customers, and make sure that projects don’t spiral out of control or take more money or time than you budgeted.

In this talk, Jessi Gurr will discuss the basics of project management. You’ll learn techniques for getting a project started on the right foot – things like making sure that your customer contracts are crystal clear, and setting up clear timelines and project milestones. You’ll also learn how to handle scope creep, and how to deal with projects that have fallen off course.

Rethinking Blogging for Businesses: How You Can Get Better Results & Save Time in The Process

Why are you blogging? Most of us create content because we’re told we should, but not many of us know why. In this session, Kameron Jenkins will talk about how you can work smarter rather than harder to create content that actually makes an impact on your business.

SEO Side of WordPress Website Migrations

WordPress website migrations are so much more than just redirects, learn everything you need to know and do during pre and post-launch to make sure your website continues to retain and grow in search results with Sarah Nicklin.

Stop Guessing: Diagnosing & Fixing WordPress Performance Problems

Speed matters. People are impatient. If your website or a client’s website doesn’t load quickly – within a just a couple of seconds – many visitors will abandon it completely. A slow site means lost time & revenue. But figuring out how to speed up a slow site can be HARD. Everyone’s got a suggestion and an idea for how to fix your performance issues, but most are just guesses, and not based on real data. STOP GUESSING. If you have a performance issue, or just want a faster site, you need to KNOW exactly what is slowing things down, and how to fix it. Matt Kopala’s talk will show you how.

Supercharging WordPress: 4 Steps to Optimizing your Website

Our panel, led by Sean Conklin, discusses the basics of WordPress optimization. Speed can be the difference between conversion or abandonment and in this talk Jason Cosper of Liquid Web, Matt Kopala of Site District join in to provide you best practices that you can take away and use in your processes.

The command line is your friend: WP-CLI, the shell and what they can do for you

After this talk you will have a clear understanding of what can be done with WP-CLI and the command line. I’ll share basic commands and more advanced scripts to ease your day to day interactions with WordPress. We’ll cover things like using ‘wp search-replace’ to find and replace instances of text in your database/posts, installing/activating multiple plugings in one command, and even backing up your site to your computer…

The Ease of Web Accessibility Compliance with WordPress

Web Accessibility gives your clients and their clients full and equal enjoyment of their website for gaining information and purchasing products and services.

With the increased media attention on websites that are not compliant with Web Accessibility, and the opportunistic trolls that target small business, it is important for Web designers and developers to understand the WHO should comply, WHAT is and WHY of Web Accessibility, WHEN should you start with Accessibility plus HOW to talk to your clients about Accessibility and the VALUE it adds to your services and reputation.

In this presentation, Sumner M Davenport will cover:

  • What difference does it make to be/not be Accessible;
  • Recent cases in the news;
  • Troll activity against small businesses and how to protect yourself from being a target;
  • Ease of adding code, and/or use of Plugins;
  • Testing tools; and
  • Value added to your Web Design business

Upgrading Kubrick for Gutenberg

Unsurprisingly, last December’s release of WordPress 5.0 made us nervous. Today, some of our themes are in need of extensive upgrades.

While reviewing the oldest of such designs, 2005’s classic default theme Kubrick. We’ll rediscover why it is important to WordPress’ past and discuss new opportunities. In this session, Kubrick’s design will be applied to blocks allowing users to anticipate exactly what to expect before they hit publish.

If we can modernize Kubrick for Gutenberg in 2019, we can do anything.

WordPress Incident Response: How planning for the worst protects your site today

WordPress business owners have a lot to lose in the event of a successful cyberattack, and security awareness is at an all-time high as companies work to improve their security posture before the worst can happen. This is a good thing, of course, since an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

However, many of those same companies don’t have a solid plan of action for when the worst does happen. A lack of a plan in the wake of an attack will delay response, increase downtime, and ultimately cost more money.

In this talk, Mikey Veenstra will discuss the elements of incident response planning that many business owners fail to address. Whether your business needs a full manual of contingency plans or just a folder with some phone numbers in it, you’ll leave ready to draw up a solid guideline to follow in the event that something goes wrong.

WordPress: Freedom is a Feature

Why are you blogging? Most of us create content because we’re told we should, but not many of us know why. In this session, Glenn Zucman will talk about how you can work smarter rather than harder to create content that actually makes an impact on your business.