Joe Vangsness will give a presentation on the basics of SEO and demonstrate some of the tools and practices that are available today.  The presentation will include:

• How search engines work
• Setting SEO goals
• Determining keywords
• Optimizing the website
• Link building
• Free & paid tools to make the job easier
• SEO for WordPress and Dupal content management systems
• How Google Ranking factors have changed
• The new importance of Google My Business & other Google properties
• Google Analytics & Google Search Console

Joe Vangsness designs and builds websites for small businesses, non profits and professionals. He is an experienced Drupal site builder.  He has done SEO work on some WordPress sites. He is now learning WordPress and plans to offer WordPress as an option in the future. He also offers Internet marketing strategy, SEO, web analytics and content strategy.

Joe makes presentations on SEO and Internet Marketing Strategy and has given this presentation to the WordPress Community Meetup in Beverly last summer.

RSVP here please

Tue, Jan 14 · 6:44 PM
Wordpress has an impressive market share of 34% which makes it the single most popular framework around. Flipping this equation tells us that nearly two thirds of site owners probably have little understanding on how WordPress works.

We will cover a high level overview on the default structure of this CMS, how to extend it and how the theming system works. I will also be sharing my somewhat opinionated views on best practices from the perspective of a developer who has repaired dozens of malformed and under-performing websites built by those whose experiments and improvisations with WordPress have failed.

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Roundtable discussion on how to be a good open source citizen – how to find a niche to address, survive the inevitable politics that comes with participating in any group and how to navigate the gap between pitching in and making a living

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Asking the right questions during the discovery phase of a project can reduce the amount of roadblocks and surprises in a development cycle.

Larry Walangitan is a full stack web developer with Chromatic: https://chromatichq.com/users/larry-walangitan and has been developing custom themes, modules and plugins for open source CMS websites for over ten years. He will show us a proven methodology to quickly determine a project’s requirements, goals, data structure and visual design and will be sharing with us how he and Chromatic apply this process to efficiently define scope and focus of a project with their clients.

Larry holds a B.S. in Biology from Andrews University, is a frequent presenter at Drupal Camps and is actively involved in WordPress development and migration projects.

Download a copy of the questions

See the slides

“We Build the Internet Highway as We Travel”
What if we could solve the last mile problem, get lower cost internet, and provide neighborhoods their own private intranet at the same time? What if we owned, managed, operated, and used it as a cooperative? What do YOU think?

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“It’s the smallest businesses most at risk of cyber attack. 60 percent of hacked small and medium-sized businesses go out of business after six months.”

Vulnerability scanning with remediation, intrusion detection monitoring, WAF, core and plugin updates, and QA… You’ll disorient your clients trying to explain those terms. And good luck on getting them to pay for those services, but to be competitive in today’s market, you need to offer them. Enter ScanToFix an attempt to keep small companies secure. Timothy Neighbors, the founder at Big Orange Lab (www.bigorangelab.com), wants your feedback to make this product better.

During this meetup you’ll get:

• Product transparency – What you need to affordably build out this solution for your clients.
• Product Marketability – A vote on whether you’d want to offer this product to your clients.
• Product Improvement – A chance to give product feedback. What would you add to it?
• Early Adoption – A chance to apply for these services. The first 5 companies that are a fit, get our services at no initial cost. Know someone who is looking for a new hosting solution? We want to speak with them!

To learn more about the ScanToFix product, check out bigorangelab.com/scantofix

RSVP HERE

Sara Stoddard, product lead at Famous, will be demonstrating an early look at a new design tool called Famous which will become available in April in beta. Famous is a new designer tool that enables designers to design a progressive web experience from beginning to end all within one tool and without requiring any coding. In Famous, designers can import their artboards, add animations and interactions, view their designs live while creating them on any device, publish to the web, and see live analytics immediately.

RSVP HERE

find out more

This presentation will book-end the presentation that Joe gave last year where he described the steps involved to position an app for acquisition. This presentation will rewind the timeline back to the point where the app was initially developed describing the process of coming up with the idea, the prototyping steps and other behind the scene machinations with the development team.

Joseph Martin has worked in the creative industry for 17 years gaining experience in design, marketing, and leadership. As a seasoned entrepreneur, he is passionate about building real-world communities and improving corporate culture. He is an active voice in Chicago through Google Startup Weekend events and mentoring students through DePaul University’s entrepreneurship program. He has worked on projects for McDonald’s, Microsoft, and Anheuser-Busch among other corporations and small businesses. His ideas on experience design have been featured in the Observer, Website Magazine, and paved the way for speaking opportunities locally and internationally.

RSVP HERE

Joomla has been around since 2005 and is designed as a community platform CMS. It has core features such as built in metadata and keyword tools, user management controls, cache management, and sophisticated taxonomy and media management systems. Kendall Cabe will cover the most recent changes in the Joomla platform and what to anticipate when Joomla goes through its next major upgrade later this year.

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Learn how teaching web skills can be a great way to promote your web development services and lead to more fulfilling (and profitable) work.

Since 2010, Scott Winterroth has taught a WordPress workshop which has become a cornerstone for his business’ marketing strategy. At this meetup, Scott will share how he uses training and tutoring to qualify clients, profit from training and turn client questions into products, courses, and content to open up new revenue streams for his freelance business.

He is certified Google Partner in search advertising and provides freelance digital marketing services and business 2 business coaching.

Join us if you’re ready to learn some of Scott’s best strategies for sourcing ideas on what to teach (even if you’ve never taught before) and growing your visibility and authority online to gain more business.

RSVP HERE

ATTENTION WORDPRESS DEVELOPERS: we have a must see presentation coming up next month!

Tiny Screen Labs builds native iOS and Android mobile apps that are connected to WordPress. TSL uses WordPress as more than just a CMS, for our client’s use-cases, WordPress becomes the entire back-end to handle transaction processing, data management, credit card transactions and communications between users. We create WordPress plugins to repackage information from a variety of plugin types – directories, events, form managers, WooCommerce – plus native WordPress content in pages and posts, which we then use to configure and update our client’s mobile apps. Catering to small and medium sized business, we leverage WordPress to provide mobile app technology that fits their budgets.

RSVP HERE

Net Neutrality regulations prohibited ISPs from:
BLOCKING discrimination against any lawful content by blocking websites or apps.
THROTTLING slowwing down the transmission of data because of the nature of the content, as long as it was legal.
PAID PRIORITIZATION creating and providing an internet fast lane for companies and consumers who paid premiums, and a slow lane for those who didn’t.
Hower in July of this year these regulations were repealed.

Andrew Goczkowski a member of Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky’s staff will be speaking with us about the possible ramification of this repeal, the status of the pending lawsuits from 21 states (including Illinois) to block this repeal and what we can do to help prevent a situation where ISP blocking, throttling & paid prioritization runs rampant.