Michele is a full time blogger, designer, and all around awesome person. She works for WP Security Lock as their WordPress Security and Plugin Specialist and Speaker/Trainer. Michele started her love for WordPress in 2010 and has never looked back.  She is the Lead Organizer for the Southern Illinois WordPress Meetup.  When not in front of a screen, Michele enjoys life with her family standing behind the camera.

WCSD 2015 Session – Your Site Has Been Hacked, Now What?

One morning you look at your website and it does not look like it should. You have been hacked. Now what do you do? You never thought to update anything because all of the reviews says that the themes and plugins are awesome when you uploaded them 2 years ago. There is this myth that websites are make it and forget it. That is one of the biggest ways the hacker attackers get in. This session will take you through some of the steps to get your site clean and ways to keep it that way. No one wants to be the next hacked site.

William Bay is the Chief Flauntreprener at Flaunt Your Site. He’s studied all kinds of SEO goodness, and what makes great web site design. On a typical day, he’ll be immersed in code, or dissecting rankings, or sneaking in a quick yoga session between client calls. When he’s not photographing, SEO’ing, or designing, he’s dreaming about surfing the perfect peeling reef breaks in the Mentawai Islands.

Flaunt Your Site was born out of William’s passion for both photography, website design and SEO. After a few years of doing it solely for his own wedding photography business in San Diego, he began having other photographers request custom sites and SEO done for them. The demand was such that William formed Flaunt Your Site.

While photographers still make up a large portion of Flaunt Your Site’s clientele, Flaunt also works with other small to medium businesses for custom websites and local SEO.

WCSD 2015 Session – What You Need to Know About Local SEO

If you’re a local business, or work with local businesses, you know how critical it is to rise above the noise of other businesses.

Local businesses aren’t just competing with each other, local search in general has become one of the most popular forms to find solutions for needs… dining, entertainment, and other services. People no longer have to ask humans for recommendations, when they have an all-knowing device in their pocket. If your business isn’t showing up on that “all-knowing device” you got to get cracking.

A recent study by comScore, Neustar Localeze and 15 Miles suggested that up to 78% of mobile searches lead to some form of offline purchase. So people are discovering your business online, then coming to your store to purchase, or eat.

In William Bay’s WordCamp San Diego panel, we’ll be looking at the factors Google uses to rank local your sites in the “7-Pack”, we’ll also discuss what you need to know in regards to the changes made with Google Local Pages, and finally how you should set up your websites for mobile to gain an additional advantage over the non-optimized crowd.

After covering these areas and along with some resources William will share, you should have a solid grasp on what you need to do with yours or your client’s sites to get them moving in the direction of better local rankings.

Mika Ariela Epstein is better known as Ipstenu, the Half-Elf Support Rogue. Working for DreamHost as a WordPress Support Specialist and Manager (aka ‘WordPress Guru’), she solves any WordPress problem that comes up, trains everyone from support to marketing in why WordPress makes your life better, and still finds time to slash unanswered WordPress.org forum threads by night and wrangle plugins by day. A self-taught guru on Multisite and .htaccess, she has a passion for writing and technology and blogs about them whenever possible.

The rumor that she has dice in her purse and tinfoil in her hats is in a constant state of Schrödinger proofs.

WCSD 2015 Panelist – HELP ME! How to Help Others Help You

This panel-style discussion will cover the following topics and is an open forum through which we encourage our attendees to ask questions.

We will cover:

• The basics of letting people know what info they need to provide in order to get the best support possible – whether in the WP.org forums or from their designer/developer.
• How to get your “Helper” the details they need related to your hosting environment, WordPress version, browser, etc.
• Tips on what to try on your own, before even asking for help.