WordPress Orlando

Official WordPress User Group of Orlando, FL

Meetups

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Getting Started with WordPress for Adults and Kids Alike!

John Hughes – My Journey as a WordPress Newbie – From Zero to Ready to Outsource in 2 Years

What began 2+ years ago as an immediate need to build a website, with zero capital, due to a loss of employment, John embarked on what became a meteoric journey to build his initial website as well as a supporting cast of landing page sites, using WordPress and its various resources. John credits WordPress and the WordPress community in building his successful golf coaching practice in Central Florida, that routinely brings clientele from around the globe.

Using the various tools and resources available through the WordPress Community, John will tell his personal story of using WordPress to go from building one basic site to now building and maintaining multiple WordPress sites, while operating a successful golf coaching practice. John will detail his failures and triumphs, as well as the items he believes are critical to his current success as he quickly educated himself in the use of themes, plugins, servers, security, SEO, using service providers, and other topics all newbie end users of WordPress experience.

John will also provide information and lessons he has learned as a WordPress user to the developers and agencies who use WordPress, specifically about how to find, service, and keep great clients. Through the best practices of his business, as well as those within the WordPress Community, there are common threads and a few overlooked details we all face as we continue on our journeys to build our businesses.

John Hughes is a PGA Master Professional, Vice President of the North Florida PGA Section, PGA National Award Winner, and avid WordPress user.

Sandy Edwards – Kids and Code: The Facts and The Future

Getting your kids involved in the WordPress world is an important step to their future. Kids are bombarded from every angle with media and created content. They should also be able to dive into the content creation world themselves.

I will be talking about why childhood content creators are necessary for our future and one specific event that will allow your child to start creating content safely online. I will also provide online resources for kids who want to dive head first into development as well.

Sandy Edwards has been working in the online marketing space for over 5 years. She started at a niche firm that utilized WordPress to create sites quickly utilizing several options frameworks. Today, she owns CESquared a WordPress focused Agency that engages in SEO, Project Management and Development. She loves to give back by teaching kids about coding, WordPress, and other technical skills. Sandy is very active in the Orlando WordPress community and is excited to see what 2016 will bring to the tech space in Florida!

http://www.meetup.com/WordPress-Orlando/events/233969716/

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Creating WP Content on the Go in Rio

Creating content on the go can be a challenge, but fortunately, tech tools and apps are making it easier to create compelling content from remote locations. Bess Auer will be sharing the tools and tactics she used in Rio de Janeiro when covering the Olympics Games. Live streaming and pre-recorded content, as well as photo apps and Facebook Instant Articles will be shared.

Bess shared quite a few tips with us on creating and sharing content in a place far from home, where you can’t bring large recording equipment, don’t have time for a full editing suite, and may not even have fast or reliable internet to upload that content. A few of the suggestions that Bess made:

  • Live Video on Facebook is king right now
  • Podcast listeners are most loyal social media people
  • Use Getty Images Embeds for free for non-commercial sites. They have near instant upload of pictures, useful for breaking stories.
  • Facebook Instant Articles – Your brand should be on it
  • Engagement rates are more valuable than sheer number counts

Additionally, Bess offered up a few tools, digital and physical, that she uses:

Finally, Bess very kindly offered our attendees 25% off at this year’s FLBlogCon! It’s a great event for bloggers and content creators of all types. It’s being held at Full Sail Live on 24 September 2016. Info and tickets are available at that link, and WordPress Orlando members get 25% off with the discount code WPORL16.

Bess Auer is the founder of the Florida Blogger & Social media Conference (FLBlogCon) and the host of the weekly television show Blog Talk TV. A graduate of Gregg Pollack’s Starter Studio, Bess is also the founder of Florida Swim Network, a website that covers competitive swimming and live streams swim meets and original shows for the SEC Network, ESPN, and Your Swim Channel.

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Analytics are Awesome!

How do you find customers and how do you tailor your offerings to the customers that you want? Our speakers discussed choosing new audience segments, listening to your existing customers and visitors, and providing the proper marketing to those visitors to help you sell the right things to the right people at this month’s meetup.

David Yarde – The Analytics of Business Decisions: Using data to build a smarter brand

Gain knowledge and understanding the fundamentals to the success of any brand strategy. Data is the key to whether a business thrives or dies. But even with its importance, how do we use it in our everyday businesses?

In this session, we’ll cover the following:

  • How do I understand all these lines and numbers?
  • How can I leverage analytics to create new products?
  • Using analytics to improve brand experiences
  • And much more.

See David’s slides and notes here

Chris Edwards – Understanding Your Conversion Funnel

Whether you’re selling items on your website or trying to catch leads, you have a conversion funnel. Understanding the path and drop off points in that path are the key to success to optimize your conversion funnel. We will talk about the easiest ways to track this funnel and how to make sense of all the data you have collected. We will even talk about methods to discover why your users are dropping off and the most effective ways to address it. This talk will also look at the different tools including Google Analytics, HotJar, Mixpanel and Kissmetrics and how each of them can help you track your conversion funnel.

Relevant Links:

 

Chris’ Slides: Conversion Funnels WPORL Meetup

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Accessibility and Security on the Web

Helena Zubkow – Including Everyone: Web Accessibility 101

If your website wouldn’t work for anyone living in the state of New York, would that be a launch-blocker? Of course! So why are we ignoring the even larger population of people with disabilities?

Designed for developers, project managers, and directors alike, the goal of this code-free session is to introduce everyone to the fundamental principals and business related factors of web accessibility.

Together we’ll explore the findings from data gathered at DrupalCon LA regarding accessibility in our very own Drupal community and examine the financial viability of a web accessibility initiative in an industry where time is money.

Based on my experience as a web accessibility specialist from both the perspective of a project manager and a front-end developer, I’ll share the knowledge I’ve gained with you to address the following important questions:

– What is web accessibility?
– Why does web accessibility matter to my users?
– Why does web accessibility matter for my company and clients?
– How will a web accessibility initiative affect my bottom line?
– How can I include web accessibility in my company’s culture and work plans?
– What tools can I use to assess and improve accessibility in my projects?
– How can I help the web accessibility community?

I am a ‘bot who loves to make the web better! I enjoy Drupal, web accessibility, and the occasional practical joke. My home is in sunny Orlando where I live with my handsome fiancé and a very mischievous Blue Heeler. The Drupal community is amazing, and I love being a part of it.

 

 

Irina Blumenfeld – Migrate WordPress from HTTP to HTTPS

As more sites transition to HTTPS and Google giving preferred ranking to secure sites, it became important to properly install a TLS/SSL Certificate.
The process of moving to HTTPS can be intimidating starting from obtaining certificate to migrating all content to HTTPS.

Recently, Let’s Encrypt started offering Free TSL/SSL Certificates. CloudFlare offers Free TLS/SSL with HTTP/2 support

We’ll discuss how you can obtain a Free TLS/SSL Certificate, make your content HTTPS friendly, and how to migrate existing content to HTTPS.

We’ll also go over the benefits of serving your pages over secure connection, common problems with transition, and how you can test your certificate configuration.

See Irina’s post about Migrating WordPress to HTTPS on her site.

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WordPress Local Development Environments

If you missed the meetup on local development environments or need links to the software that we used, we’ve compiled a list of links to download all of the tools.

Demian Seiler – XAMPP (and MAMP and WAMP)

https://www.mamp.info/en/
http://www.wampserver.com/en/

https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html

Adam Soucie – ServerPress

https://serverpress.com/
Adam’s Slidedeck

David Laietta – Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV)

https://www.vagrantup.com/
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
https://github.com/Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants/VVV
https://github.com/bradp/vv/

Setting up each of these tools is fairly straightforward with the instructions on their sites, but as always, meet us at the meetup if you’ve got questions, or post up in the Facebook group.

http://www.meetup.com/WordPress-Orlando/events/229106888/

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How to Handle Hosting and Site Migration

Do you have questions about hosting? How about moving your site from one host to another? This month’s meetup is all about hosting and migration, and we’ve got two presentations and a general QA planned. As always, we’ll be serving food and drinks, so don’t worry about missing dinner after work!

Chris Edwards – So many options for Hosting! How to choose the right one for you

Shared, dedicated, virtual private, WordPress optimized, apache, nginx, SSD, cloud and the list goes on and on. With so many options, terms and technologies, it can be difficult to navigate the world of hosting to choose the perfect host for you. Which type of hosting service should you pick? How much bandwidth and storage space do you need? What is a “WordPress optimized” host? How do you know if a web host is actually any good? What technology stack really matters to me? These are the questions that will be answered in this talk. I will not recommend any particular host, however, I will give you the knowledge you need to make an educated decision on which host fits your business or personal blog.

Get a copy of Chris’ slides on WordPress Hosting: Chris Edwards – WordPress Hosting

Roy Jossfolk – Migrating Your Site

Migrating a WordPress website can be a daunting task but in many cases a necessary one. Typically you will want to migrate a complete WordPress site if you have been building it locally on your machine or if you are moving to a new hosting provider or upgraded server. Depending on the complexity of the website this can be a very fragile process and requires you follow some key steps in making sure it all goes smoothly.

In this talk I will go over my personal checklist and steps I use when moving a WordPress website. It will include best practices, common plugins and also manual solutions depending on your specific needs.

Roy Jossfolk is a freelance Designer and Front-End Developer who has spent 8 years building websites with WordPress. Over that time, Roy has been lucky enough to work on a wide variety of WordPress projects like corporate, e-commerce, membership based and news sites.

http://www.meetup.com/WordPress-Orlando/events/229234856/