by Megan Jonas

We had a great second day at WordCamp Asheville with great speakers and interesting talks. Here is just a selection of the talks from today.

Morning Talks

Freelancing VS Building an Agency with Bill Gadless

Over on the business track, Bill Gadless of emagine started the morning off with the steps of starting an agency once you’ve decided to scale up from being a freelancer. He spoke about the importance of having confidence in your business, creating a sales strategy, and making time to change your mindset from technician to business owner. While much of this talk focused on scaling up an agency and having multiple employees, the information on finances and marketing and having confidence in your agency to push both of these things was extremely valuable.

User Experience with Cliff Seal

Also this morning, the design track had a last minute schedule addition, Cliff Seal talking about Meaningful UX That Scales. Seal discussed how to talk to non-designers about the importance of good design. A well-designed application or website, he said, can make people’s lives a little bit easier, but explaining this to the parts of your company that are not design-focused can be challenging. “Focus on making people awesome instead of making the tools we sell them awesome,” said Seal. You can do this by reverse engineering your product from the expected outcome, rather than building from assumptions of persona and actions.

Social Media and Podcasting Learning at Lightning Speed

Wrapping up this morning with a series of lightning talks on the business track, Sarah Benoit talked about best practices and good plugins for integrating social media with WordPress, Alicia Murray dove deeper into Pinterest with 15 tips in 15 minutes, and Tony Zeoli explained how he uses WordPress to podcast and live stream.

Afternoon Talks

WordPress Admin Tips for Developers with Cliff Seal

After lunch, Cliff Seal was back for a talk on the Developer Track on creating friendlier, safer WordPress Admin areas. He has created a plugin that developers can use to pull code that will allow them to remove unnecessary admin menu links, adjust what user roles have access to features, remove the notices that some plugins automatically generate, and hide certain plugins or plugin metadata. If you do all of these things correctly, you can empower your users to love WordPress.

Email Best Practices, Tips on How to Stop Being Lazy, and How the Internet Works with Emoji’s

In the final session of this year’s WordCamp, a series of lightning talks on the all users track included Lydia Roberts on the best tools and tricks for email marketing, Russell Fair on 10 (actually 13) lazy mistakes we all make and how to stop, and Julien Melissas on the very simple, easy to fit in 15-minutes topic of how the Internet works, explained with emojis. If you didn’t catch the last one, definitely look for it on wordpress.tv soon.

Final Celebration Tonight at The Wedge

Join us right now at The Wedge to continue the conversation and celebrate a successful WordCamp Asheville 2016! Come make new friends, introduce yourself to the organizers, speakers and sponsors and let us know how you plan to spark, create, and collaborate over the next year. See you in 2017!

About the Author

Megan Jonas is currently working as a freelance front-end web developer and digital marketing strategist in Asheville, N.C. Her areas of expertise include WordPress, Social Media strategy and implementation, content strategy and creation, and email marketing. In her free time, Megan enjoys reading, hiking, whitewater rafting, and rock climbing. She lives in Fletcher, N.C. in a barn… no seriously… there are pigs and cows and a donkey and everything. Learn more about her work at www.meganmjonas.com.