Fall 2019 Mega Meetup

Join us for our first mega meetup on Saturday, October 19, 2019 from 2PM – 7PM at Code & Supply in East Liberty.

We’re looking for YOU — the DIY WordPresser who wants to learn more and connect with others in the WordPress Pittsburgh community — and we hope you can attend.

This isn’t our normal meetup — we’re jam-packing the evening with TONS of great content and networking opportunities. We’re planning on three speakers, a happiness bar, pizza and lightning talks.

RSVP on meetup.com.

Schedule

South Presentation Area

2:00 – 2:15: Introductions

2:15 – 3:00: Lee Drozak, Maintaining Your WordPress Website for Growth and Happiness
3:00 – 3:15: Break
3:15 – 4:00: Miranda Knee, Personalize your WordPress styles by using a child theme
4:00 – 4:15: Break
4:15 – 5:00: Josh Gellock, Going Beyond Basic SEO with WordPress

5:00 – 5:45: Pizza

5:45 – 7:00: Lightning talks

Hacklab

2:15 – 5:00: Happiness bar

Sessions

Lee Drozak, Maintaining your WordPress website for growth and happiness

You have a beautiful site, and it functions great too. Like your home, your site needs love and attention so it doesn’t turn into a fixer-upper or be featured on the WordPress equivalent of HGTV’s Flip or Flop. Maintenance for your WordPress website is more than running updates and scheduling backups. In this session, we’ll talk about creating an easy to follow maintenance plan that factors in growth and usability.

View Lee’s checklist at leedrozak.online/pgh and her slides at leedrozak.online/pghslides.

Lee is a WordPress Teacher, Doer, and Fixer at LeeDrozak Biz, founded with tenacity and grit in 2008. She’s what some call a unicorn – designer, developer, and strategist who thinks user-friendliness and planning are where design starts. When she’s not working on WordPress websites, you can find Lee in her RV touring the back roads and countrysides somewhere in the US.

Miranda Knee, Personalize your WordPress styles by using a child theme

You’ve finally found the right theme for your WordPress site. It’s 90% of what you were looking for, but there are a few things missing. Applying a child theme could take your theme from “good enough” to “this is perfect!”

A child theme allows you to make a number of changes to your site’s appearance while still preserving your theme’s original look and functionality. This means you don’t have to worry about theme updates overriding your customizations.

This conversation will cover what a child theme is, when to use it, and why it’s useful. We will also dive into setting up a child theme and how to apply custom styles using CSS.

View Miranda’s notes at childthemes.mirandaknee.com.

Miranda is an Interactive Developer at Garrison and Hughes. Although she is new to the GH team she has been working with WordPress for several years and is familiar with creating customized themes. She enjoys coding, problem-solving, debugging, a good podcast, and true crime.

Josh Gellock, Going beyond basic SEO with WordPress

Join Josh Gellock for a talk on deeper SEO tactics that can help your website stand out. In this talk, we’ll cover how to build great content, controlling crawling and indexing, deploying structured data, and improving website performance. We’ll also have a Q&A session, so bring your SEO questions! This is an intermediate talk, perfect for those who already feel comfortable with SEO basics and are looking to level up their efforts.

View Josh’s slides at expanderdigital.com/slides (look for the Pittsburgh remix).

Josh is the SEO Strategist at Expander Digital, an SEO studio he founded in 2014. He’s been in the SEO space for over seven years and helps businesses drive website traffic from organic search. When he’s not meeting with clients, you can find Josh spending time with his children or on a bike.