Our General Track has a great line up of topics and speakers for this year’s WordCamp Portland! Our speakers are bringing their experiences and knowledge to share with our attendees to learn about a variety of topics that you might be interested in. Many of these talks address ways to build more sustainable websites, development processes, and businesses, making them more efficient.
Machielle Thomas – Content for the Modern World
On the internet, content is king. Whether you are writing content for your business or a large corporation, you must know and respect your target audience. Targeted content is one of the best ways to grow your brand and the old tricks of the trade will no longer cut it. Content for the Modern World takes a deep dive into the new and emerging content marketing trends. Since content patterns are ever-changing, we’ll discover new ways to keep up-to-date with channels to follow and helpful and efficient tools. Have you been struggling to create viral and click-worthy blog titles and email subject lines? We’ll talk about what trends to look out for in 2018, how to create content that resonates and converts, and current SEO tips and tricks to be found on the web.
Erin Olmon – Making A11y Official
Whether you’re writing a client proposal or documenting the success criteria of your web presence, explicitly accounting for accessibility provides benchmarks to measure the success of your project against and establishes important expectations. This talk will discuss when, where, and why to account for accessibility in projects or an organization.
Chris Lema – Why WooCommerce Should Be the Basis of your Next eCommerce Project
In this talk, we’ll consider what makes WooCommerce a great platform for eCommerce sites of all kinds. We’ll compare it to other platforms and dig into why it is so flexible.
Lightning Talks
The following are the 3 lightning talk topics for the general track:
Jocelyn Mozak – Clone Yourself Through Automation
Ever catch yourself repeating the same task over and over again? If you can document the steps you can automate it! From high-level concepts like the development of systems and processes to detailed examples of how to harness the power of forms and Zapier to save hours of tedious work this talk will inspire you to look at every task in your business and ask … can this be automated?
Beth Ball – Take a Chill Pill
Humor is incredibly effective in marketing. With this presentation, a fast one at that, I’m going to give some wicked awesome stats on just HOW effective humor is and WHY it’s important, and WHY it will help convert website visitors to lifelong customers/buyers. LOL’ing not required. It’s OK if you’re a LOTI’er (laugh on the inside…er).
Erika Saracco – 3 Design Trends Worth Ditching in the Name of SEO
You’ve designed a beautiful website. Every detail is perfect; every angle considered. But does Google like it? If you can’t get the website to rank, your gorgeous design is never going to be seen or used. We’ll cover five of the most common design practices that could be tanking your SEO.
Zachary Brown – Speed Up Your Site (and Make Google Happy) Without Writing a Line of Code
You’ve no doubt heard a fast loading website is critical to success. With Google’s recent algorithm updates, this is more true now than ever. Many plugins and services claim to speed up WordPress, but which are most effective? Should you spend money on a service or find something free? How can site owners improve performance without writing code? This beginner-friendly talk covers the basics of site performance and recommends simple strategies and tools to boost performance. Sprinkled throughout will be pro tips for power users who want to take these concepts to the next level.
Nick Halsey – 7 Keys to Sustainable WordPress Projects, Inspired by Buildings
Sustainability is critical as WordPress matures. Efficient implementations will thrive for years to come, while older WordPress projects are already obsolete. The building design and construction industry now embraces sustainability as a vital aspect of any successful project. In Portland, seismic resiliency is an increasing priority given greater awareness of our local earthquake hazards. Drawing experience from the built environment informs an efficient, sustainable, and resilient approach to creating WordPress sites and products. Through stories of both digital and physical projects, I’ll present a framework for maximizing the longevity of your work in the ever-evolving digital space.
Matthew Eppelsheimer – The Life and Death of a WordPress Agency
This the story of Rocket Lift, a Portland-based WordPress founded in 2011 and shut down in 2017: How and why it closed — what we did well, lessons learned along the way, and our process of deciding to shut down — shared so other WordPress businesses and freelancers can learn from our experience.
That’s our general track! Check out the full schedule to plan out your day for beginner, general, and developer tracks.