Is it fall in Texas yet? We’re gonna find out! WordCamp DFW 2016 is this Saturday, September 24th, and we are GONNA BE THERE! Heck yeah! Brian will be in attendance, so grab him and say hello.
Although I find it hard to believe that any of our regular readers are unfamiliar with WordCamp (come on, now!), for those of you that are completely green: WordCamps are events held all over the world where WordPress nerds unite to share their skills, insights, and learn a whole lot from a bunch of other smarties.
We’ve picked out a few presentations that caught our eye. Check them out, and we hope we’ll see you there!
Saturday, September 24th
11:30 AM – Tightening Up Your Process for Shorter Timelines and Happier Clients – Torre Kean
Numerous ways you can remove blockers from your website creation processes and reduce timelines while creating quality product and happy clients. Topics to discuss include:
1. Combining the design and development phase into one efficient process, starting with a discussion and a sketch.
2. Presenting ONE design to the client, and how to get it in front of the client quickly.
3. Which meetings you need, why you need to present your designs (actually, design) in person, and how to schedule them ahead of time and include those dates and times in your Scope of Work / contract.
4. Holding yourself accountable and not taking on too many projects at once.
5. How having a good, WordPress specific hosting company (we use WPEngine) can save you time and stress.
6. Picking a well supported, constantly updated, super-powered theme (we use Divi, I know many use Genesis) that you use as a base for all client sites to save time with a) a learning curve, and b) unexpected issues like incompatibility with WooCommerce or limitations in design.
7. Do what’s best for your client in all cases – for us this often means allowing them more time to gather their content and even work with a copywriter before we begin charging them. At the same time we do offer the option to help them with that process, but it will cost them money. It is entirely up to them. Another way we do this is to give them 100% ownership of their site including domain name and hosting, as opposed to reselling that to them. This is something we’re considering changing but only for clients that opt into the service as part of a payment plan.
Other advice to be inserted throughout the talk includes: Holding your clients accountable just like you do yourself, never starting ‘immediately’ even if you technically can, and thoughts on billing (not to underprice, to consider weekly billing to avoid the damaging effects of scope creep to your income, and the idea of a long term payment plan which we are ourselves toying with).
1:15 PM – Customer Information Security in eCommerce – Andrew Wikel
How to present and maintain a secure E-Commerce site. We will go over some details on PCI compliance, as well as privacy policy, and general web security.
3:15 PM – How to Build a Product in a Crowded Marketplace – AJ Morris
Come learn how a large company with $90+ million in revenue approaches ways to build a hosting platform for a CMS that powers over 25% of the web, WordPress. We’ll deep dive into how we approached multiple iterations into building a Managed WordPress offering and how we are continuing to position against our rivals.
4:15 PM – Preparing For and Dealing With Websites Imploding – Patrick Garman
The lessons learned with dealing with the constant growth and high traffic situations of ColourPop. We have seen extreme growth and extreme traffic, not only traffic, but traffic that is converting and placing orders on a site with an already massive (100GB) database and struggles to stay online with multiple orders per second being placed.
Success in emergency situations does not happen by accident, we’ve failed many times before we succeeded and still fail sometimes even with preparation. This talk will cover how to handle yourself, the site, and the overall situation of when your site is experiencing high traffic and is failing. As well as how to prepare in advance for these situations, and how to de-compress afterwards.
While the talk will be general on how to handle things, it will use a real world examples such as my WordCamp Chicago 2016 experience. ColourPop decides to do an unannounced, unplanned, more importantly un-hyped flash sale that weekend, when I am attending the conference. We experience more traffic in that sale than we have. From that moment the rest of my conference visit was spent ensuring we kept ColourPop online – which first failed, and then we found creative solutions to maintain stability.
Session descriptions pulled from the WCDFW website.
Will we see you in Texas?
If you can’t make it this round, but would like to live vicariously, you can follow @WordCampDFW or keep tabs on #WCDFW.
Have a great weekend, folks! Happy WordCamping!