Choosing between WordPress.com and WordPress.org is a pivotal decision point and it can be confusing to figure out which one is right for you. Join Josepha for a quick look at the differences between WordPress.org and WordPress.com, as well as suggestions for how to choose between them.

Businesses and nonprofit organizations would all benefit from having a blog but often either don’t realize how important it is, or how to go about starting a blog. Jamie explains the value of a blog and how to get a business blog started. Topics will include the reasons to have a blog, choosing topics, writing the blog, and choosing who writes the blog.

The Community Support Lounge is part of the event where speakers and volunteer experts hang around and help attendees with any questions they have. Get your WordPress questions answered, one-on-one, by some of the best experts around. Tricky configuration question? Plugins issues? Wanting to bring WordPress in your enterprise but wondering if it’ll fit in? Whatever the question, our friendly volunteers will make sure you leave the chat with solutions.

Find out how to make the most of your WordCamp with a few helpful tips from Marc Benzakein.

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Join Mike Hansen to learn more about Google Analytics and how it works with WordPress

Contributor Day is an opportunity for you to make your own, well, contribution to WordPress. Whether you’re a designer, developer, systems/support specialist, or writer, there’s a way for you to contribute. Read More >

Your company’s WordPress website can be more than just a pretty face. With the right plugins, it can be a champion for collaboration among site owner, writers, and the marketing team.

There is no doubt that the popularity of podcasting is on the rise and you may be wondering if you should take the leap into this medium . In this session, we’ll cover: The Power of Podcasting to Build Your Business or Brand, A Podcasting Primer to show what it takes to get up and running in this medium. We’ll finish with how you can integrate a podcast into your website to help you build your reputation as an expert in your field.

In this session we’ll walk through the basics of setting up meta tags using Facebook Open Graph or HTML tags with Schema.org to create Rich Pins, Twitter Cards and optimal Google Plus and Facebook sharing for posts from your WordPress blog.

We’ll also review how to use WordPress SEO by Yoast or other plugins to define these tags, show before and after screenshots of Pinterest and Twitter posts with and without tags, and go over how to apply for Rich Pin and Twitter Card validation for your site.

Google came down hard on some sites for some unknown violation of the rules for mobile-friendliness. Some other mobile and responsive late adopters are probably concerned about design or budget limitations that could work against the user experience.

And there’s this old trope: “I can spot a WP site at five miles off – they all look alike. Making them responsive just makes them boring.”

Phone view is now a requirement for every site, like it or not. Let’s take a look at some great ones, some bare-minimum ones and more.

Hear about experiences with successful as well as “challenging” WordPress workflows implementing WordPress theme builders vs. WordPress page builders for content dev. This session will cover best practices for flexibility and creating non-destructive and flexible content that is not dependent on a single site framework.

Imagine an employee who doesn’t take vacations, doesn’t need a weekend off, doesn’t require overtime, and who works 24/7/365 for no pay whatsoever!

If you’re WordPress website isn’t sharing your story, enhancing your brand, and generating leads that have a higher chance of converting to sales, then you need to attend this talk.

Your WordPress website isn’t like the robots of the apocalypse awaiting to enslave humanity. They are waiting to achieve sentience to create new algorithms and plugins for you and your business!

Come learn about psychology, design, plugins and strategy so you can help stop the robot apocalypse…but really, hot to get more business from your WordPress website.

Take charge of your mobile web experience. Dave will demonstrate several plugins to help webmasters create better mobile sites. Including mobile menus and custom content for mobile users.

Timber cleans up your theme code so your PHP files can focus on supplying the data and logic, while your twig files can focus 100% on the display and HTML. Timber is for both WordPress pros and rookies. People new to WordPress will like how it reduces the WordPress-specific knowledge required to theme a website while pros can take advantage of object-oriented patterns that adhere to DRY and MVC principles.

It’s easy to talk about designing for conversion until you decide you’re really going to do it.

What design considerations really do matter for conversion? What’s the role of copy, given these two prevailing (and conflicting!) attitudes:

1. Just make the BUY button big and add a picture of a baby. Nobody reads the copy anyway.

Versus:

2. Copy is everything! If someone really is in the market for your thing, they’ll read everything you have to say! (Just add a video of someone saying the exact same thing at the top, and use LOTS of subheads.)

We’ll take a look at these points of view and more, on the road to converting your lookers to buyers, one press of that blue button* at a time.

*Not that the button should always be blue. But there’s a family story behind that phrase.

So much of programming is actually just problem solving and not the actual syntax of the code. This session will dive into how we become better developers by actually avoiding the code and, instead, identifying the problem that is to be solved and looking at methods of addressing it.

This session is about the importance of building websites responsibly. It will cover the overall framework of responsibility, a model process with techniques for research, content strategy, leveraging native WP functionality and quality assurance. This session will include tons of supporting documents and resources to help the WP community in building sites that work not just for clients, but for everyone who lends their time and attention to the sites you build.

There are 38,000 free plugins available on WordPress.org. Now think about that one plugin that you absolutely love using on all your WordPress projects. You install it all the time. You don’t know how you’d live without it.

• What makes it so valuable to you?
• What makes it stand out above the rest?
• What would be your alternative if this plugin didn’t exist?

The difference between average plugins and great plugins isn’t just about the code – it’s a reflection of how well the developer understands and can anticipate the needs of their users to deliver an incredible experience.

In this session we will examine the various factors that make us fall in love with certain kinds of products, and explore how to build those same types of experiences into WordPress plugins that people will love using.

We all start our WordPress journeys as a cowboy coder – slinging code right on a production server. At some point in that journey that catches up to you… you break a website, drop a database, make code changes that you can’t revert. Learn how this developer went from a cowboy coder to a professional WordPress developer using techniques gathered from being an enterprise contractor working in .NET.

This session will cover topics like setting up local development environments, deploying to production, version control, dependency management, managing multiple sites, and more.

Setting up your WordPress website using the Google App Engine environment has become a reality. The process has even been made easy through the use of Google Developer Console.

5 Key Takeaways:
1. Getting started with Google Developer Console
2. Determining your idea WordPress environment
3. Installing WordPress using Google App Engine
4. Developing WordPress website within Google App Engine environment
5. Growing WordPress website using Google App components

Learn to master a tool that can shave tons of time off your WordPress development process and help you create websites that your clients find incredibly easy to maintain. This session will cover the different custom field types of this plug-in & demonstrate some of the powerful things you can do with ACF & ACF PRO (www.advancedcustomfields.com). For this talk, you’ll need at least a basic working knowledge of HTML, CSS and PHP to the extent that it’s used in WordPress, especially core concepts like the loop.

The Enterprise Center of Johnson County rebuilt their website on WordPress in 90 days. Making the move from a integrated CRM/CMS/email/event management/payment processing/alumni association management platform to a simple website has been a challenge, but they worked hard to find the right plugins and functions to create an alternative that looks and feels modern. Learn how they went about rebranding and rebuilding the website from the ground up on a shoestring budget, using WordPress and some great partners.

It doesn’t matter how good your website looks if no one can find it. Learn what works to make your website more findable, what doesn’t work, and why. Join Rebecca Haden to learn the ins and outs of SEO for new and the future.

You work from home. Many of us do. But Marc Benzakein has been doing it essentially, since 1996 (before the internet was a thing). In this session, learn about hits and misses that arise when working from home, balancing life, the good habits (or bad) that have developed as a result, and ways to maximize your time without going insane.

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One of the biggest reasons startups fail is because they don’t have the right teams in place. Finding the right cofounders, team members, and strategic partners will determine whether or not your business is successful. This presentation covers what to look for in a cofounder, how to begin to build your team, and what you need to look for when creating strategic alliances to help grow your business.

In order to be successful, today’s entrepreneurs need to solve problems and more than they sell products. Using the lean startup methodology and customer development calls, you can identify migraine level pain points before spending a ton of money on product development. You can then use WordPress to build your MVP. Learn the basics of lean startup and get your business running.

Many small business owners find themselves trapped with outdated websites they can’t use, in an intimidating environment completely outside their comfort zones. Instead of having a valuable tool to grow with them and their businesses, they end up feeling held hostage by their websites. In this session, you will hear true stories of real clients who escaped captivity with the help of WordPress, and paved the path to better digital marketing, even on bootstrapper budgets. Learn about the recurring pain points that entrepreneurs express about their websites, and how WordPress helped them overcome the obstacles. Entrepreneurs and WordPress professionals can use the valuable lessons my team learned from these case studies to educate clients on the value of WordPress development and design to independent business owners.

Websites are not a build it and forget it activity. Many people think security is unimportant until the bad guys get in. Know the steps to take to keep your site secure before something bad happens. We will go over best practices, security plugins, and what to do if your site gets hacked.

Slides – http://www.slideshare.net/michelebutcher/keep-your-site-secure

We’ll discuss why child themes are good, how to create a child theme, how child theme styles work, how child theme templates work, and cover some of the pitfalls.

Slides – http://www.slideshare.net/topher1kenobe/introduction-to-wordpress-child-theming-wordcamp-kansas-city-2015

The best WordPress site is an updated WordPress site. Learn about why you should update your site and how to do it without the headache. I’ll talk about ways to prevent problems when updating and share some best practices on site updates.

Slides – http://www.slideshare.net/chris-koerner/hilswlub

What questions should be answered before you build a website? Not just WordPress but any website? It’s not enough to just have an idea and build it. WordPress is a great tool but you need to know How and When to use it successfully. This session will take you through

Writing for online audiences is different than writing for print in several ways including different patterns and SEO considerations. This session will give an overview of how online audiences read content, best practices for working through WordPress to get the best SEO and reader-friendly content, and best practices for writing engaging content.

This is a very beginning WP101 talk that takes you from concept to publish. From domain choices, hosting, the difference between posts and pages and every step before you hit publish the first time.