The WordCamp Omaha 2018 team will be making some opening remarks.

Time is one of the most important things that we have. It determines how much we can do; both at work and at home, and finding ways to do more in less time is a goal that we are all striving for. Join Stacy L. Carlson, self pro-claimed systems & process nerd, through 10 of her favorite tools that save her time, either through automation or shortcuts. You will be able to leave this presentation with several ideas on how to save more of YOUR time.

During this session attendees will learn basic debugging tips from beginner to power user levels, mainly focusing on using wp-debug and some common things to look out for.

The REST API is a great way to access raw data in WordPress, but it doesn’t always give you the data you need. I’ll show you how to create your own endpoints for access in a custom web app or even from another WordPress web site.

If you’re ready to launch or grow your freelance business… I’m ready to show you how! In this session, I will give you the essential information needed to launch and build a thriving freelance business. I will show you how to assess your skills and value proposition in the market and how to find (and land) clients that are perfect for you. Finally, I will also show you how to look inside yourself and ignite the passion within. I will help you find your sweet spot as a freelancer that will not only help you find great work that’s profitable, but will help you realize even greater personal fulfillment and satisfaction. So, if you’re serious about launching or building your freelance business… Join me for this session!

A writer, editor, and nearly retired home school teacher, I have worked alongside my developer husband for over 20 years. I currently focus on communication and business operations for other developers.

Local by Flywheel is an amazing, free local development tool for WordPress, with a wide array of amazing capabilities to help designers, developers and freelancers build and deploy sites.

In this talk, I’ll walk through the many advantages of local development, how to make Local a part of your workflow, and the wide range of easy tools it puts at your fingertips.

In eCommerce, speed is your most important metric. Mere milliseconds can mean the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart. I’ve spent a good portion of the last three years in pursuit of page speed, exploring caching, virtual machines, hosting platforms, SSL negotiation time, CSS preprocessing, minification, inline styles and WooCommerce optimizations with the goal of sub-one second page loads. Using real-world examples, I’ll show you the results I’ve been able to achieve and how to replicate them yourself.

Simply boosting a post or creating an ad on Facebook does not guarantee automatic success and small businesses who create their first Facebook ad with this mindset are destined to fail.

In this session, Travis Pflanz will discuss the strategies, tools and integrations required to ensure your small business website is ready to start advertising on Facebook (and other social platforms).

This session is perfect for small businesses or freelancers across all industries. If you’re a WordPress web designer, this session will spark ideas for you to be able to add more value (and profit for you) when creating websites for clients.

NOTICE: This session does not cover in-depth strategies and tactics for creating and running Facebook Ad campaigns.

WordPress does an amazing job of being secure out of the box that we sometimes take it for granted. It has smart defaults and it makes it easy for folks to keep up with those pesky updates. However, with WordPress so prevalent on the web, there are always more things we can do to make it more secure. You might say, “No one would ever want to hack into my site, I’ve got nothing of value.” Wrong! Any WordPress installation is a target of nefarious bots who scan the web for low hanging, unsecured WordPress fruit.

In this talk, we’ll go over some small, very easy things you can do to a WordPress site to make it a little bit more difficult to get compromised. This includes using different plugins to use to obscure well known attack vectors, easy-to-understand technical changes you can make to harden your site, and what to do in case your site does get maliciously attacked.

We’re excited to announce that this year, AIGA Nebraska will host a discussion panel on UX/UI (User Experience/User Interface Design) at WordCamp Omaha. A handful of professionals will discuss their experiences designing and developing rich, intuitive, and engaging web and software solutions. We will discuss the importance of prioritizing UX/UI on your teams, along with lessons learned and current trends, followed by an audience Q&A. Whether your focus is marketing, business, or development, UX/UI knowledge will take you far in an increasingly design-focused world.

 Panelists

• Moderator: Molly Misek – UI Designer at Kiewit
• Rob Ruiz – Full-stack/WordPress Developer at Orion Advisor Services
• Annemarie Weiner – UX Designer at Hayneedle
• Nicole Barnason – UX Researcher at Kiewit
• Trisha Gawley – Sr. Web Graphic Designer at WoodmenLife
• Tyson Reeder – Senior UX Designer at Mutual of Omaha

Creating and working with WordPress themes is a great way to learn more about WordPress as well as make your site look and function exactly how you want it to.

We’ll go over what goes into making a WordPress theme, as well as concepts like “the loop”, “actions and filters”, and the “template hierarchy”.

By the end of the talk, you should have a good overview of WordPress themes, as well as places to go for further learning.

Imagine how great it will feel to know that you can confidently and accurately price client websites to easily win their business and their hearts.

I’ll share my process for qualifying leads and signing-up prospects for paid consultations where you’ll discuss their business goals and what it will take for their website to bring them more leads, more customers, and more business.

When they ask, how much will it cost? I’ll show you how to walk them through a cost estimation process where you’ll arrive and agree upon the perfect price. No more guessing, no more scope creep and no more short-changing yourself! This process is so good that 90% of the time you’ll close the deal right then and there!

An intro course to navigating the command line using Bash and WP-CLI. From simple to complicated, with examples! Learning how to navigate via cli, how to improve efficiency by completing common (often time consuming tasks) via the command line and some useful code examples to understand how to write bash scripts. Nerdy goodness 🙂

It’s true: Content is still king. According to a 2017 Smart Insights survey, which asked respondents to select the single marketing activity they thought would make the largest impact on their (or their clients’) business in 2018, content was at the top of the list.

Your website has two jobs: (1) Attract visitors, and (2) Turn those visitors into leads (and eventually clients/customers.) A solid content marketing strategy will help your website do both.

During this hands-on, participation-strongly-encouraged session, we will explore all the various types of content you can create, do some brainstorming exercises to help pinpoint the right topics for your audience, and talk through how to promote the content you publish.

You’ll leave with a roadmap of the specific actions you need to take to create an effective content marketing strategy that brings visitors to your site and, more importantly, converts them into prospects and customers.

In this talk, educator Zac Gordon, talks about the migration of React into WordPress Core and what developers should know about it. We look at practical examples and things to know for using React with Gutenberg as well as in your own plugins and themes outside the editor. If you don’t know much React yet this will be a great introduction, and more experienced devs will get some ideas for interesting use cases with React and WordPress. Zac is the creator of two Gutenberg courses: Gutenberg Block Development and Theming with Gutenberg.

In this session you’ll learn the following on improving your Google Analytics:

• Learn what Google Tag Manager (GTM) is
• Why GTM is a valuable skill and tool to add to your websites along with Google Analytics (GA)
• Examples and Use Cases
• Direction on how to set up GTM with GA and free resources to help with continued improvement

ElasticPress is the only WordPress search solution that offers all the features you’d expect from a modern search engine (fuzzy matching, autosuggest, synonym matching, geo-search, etc), while remaining fully open-source across the entire stack. If your site has outgrown basic WordPress title/content search, or you need to handle complex queries that normally would take a long time on a MySQL database, ElasticPress is a great option.

We’ll cover the typical uses for ElasticPress (better, faster search) and then also dive into some of the lesser-known features, such as faceting and related content. Attendees will leave the talk with a solid understanding of how ElasticPress can help improve their site and how ElasticPress integrates with WP_Query. For the more technical attendees, we will also cover how to do local development and testing with ElasticPress and Elasticsearch.

Everyone in the WordPress community is talking about Gutenberg. If you don’t already know what it is, Gutenberg is WordPress’s new rich editing experience that is available now as a plugin, and will roll out to all WordPress sites as part of the core very soon.

This will be a relatively non-technical look at Gutenberg. We’ll talk about how it works, how to use it, how it differs from other page builders, and how to get your WordPress site(s) ready for it.

Are you having trouble growing your freelancing business into a full-blown agency? I was too! The average web design business has 1.4 employees which means the vast majority are solo-preneurs. In other words, it’s hard to grow a web design business!

But in 2013, I made a few significant changes to my strategy that paid off big and allowed me to go from struggling freelancer to 7-figure acquisition in just 3 years – starting from scratch with a completely new brand.

In this presentation you’ll learn:

– The benefits of selecting a niche (niching up has many marketing and sales advantages)
– How to position yourself in the market (decisions on what services you offer and your pricing have a huge effect)
– How to productize your service for maximum efficiency (increasing your efficiency allows you to scale)
– How to make your agency a better target for acquisition

A discussion and review of how WordPress is and can be used at an Enterprise level and what this means for corporations and developers as they navigate this ever-changing world of technology, requirements and creative visions.

In this workshop we introduce the basic tools, JavaScript and PHP needed to develop themes and plugins with the new “Gutenberg” block editor in WordPress. We will start with some basic things themes can do to make sure they are Gutenberg ready and then look at how to build your own custom block plugins. Some experience with WordPress development and JavaScript is recommended.

Please bring day of the event:

• Local running copy of WordPress
• Latest version of Gutenberg editor
• Code editor with a command line tool (Zac will use VSCode)

Come in and get hands-on assistance with your site or whatever project you are working on. If you don’t really need help, but just want some feedback or opinions on anything, this is also a good place to go. Experienced WordPress users are also welcome to come in and help others with whatever they are working on. Meet people, learn from each other, and solve problems.

Ever read a tutorial that says “Simply paste this code into functions.php” ? It’s time to stop doing that. We’ll go over how to quickly and easily make plugins for each of those little hacks. If you know how to paste into functions.php, you know how to make a plugin.

A veteran white-hat hacker shares some of his favorite stories and lessons learned. Follow along with tales of self-healing malware, cryptomining attacks, and runaway administrative tools. Then learn how not to be a victim.