If you build or sell websites and you want to take your skills to the next level then EEConf 2021 is perfect for you

Google Ads Demystified: A Conversation about Search Engine Marketing

Are you currently spending money advertising with Google Ads, but you’re worried that your dollars are not being well-spent? Or are you considering running Google Ads but daunted by the complexity of configuring a new campaign?

Join Travis Smith (Hop Studios) and Alex Brabant (eMarketing101) as they discuss how to set up and use all the various Google Ads products. They’ll discuss the current system, and share ways to improve the performance of your existing Google Ads campaigns. This interview-style presentation will examine goals and funnels, geo-targetting, keyword strategies, novel ad types, as well as the psychology behind online PPC advertising.

Bio

Alex Brabant
Senior Search Engine Marketing Expert, eMarketing 101

Since 2000, SEM evangelist Alexandre Brabant of Emarketing101 has built and implemented campaigns and broken new ground in online marketing across multiple industries. With years of research and experimentation under his belt, Alex has developed an encyclopedic understanding of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and of highly effective online media buying. He has a passion for helping non-technical folks understand and dominate their search space while still upholding core branding principles, leading to outstanding results in accrued traffic & sales conversions.

Using real-time behavior to inform a site-improvement project?

Creative Arc recently implemented Mouseflow, a user tracking and heat mapping tool, on one of our larger clients who is consistently looking to improve their site performance and UX. Since then, we have started using it for most of our redesigns as a way to focus in on the undiscovered pain points for users, and increase the clients interest and investment in a redesign/redevelopment effort. I will go through a site we have been tracking to show you how to leverage the data available into suggestions on projects.

Bio

Tim Hoppe
Project Manager

Tim serves as a project manager for Creative Arc and has worked with ExpressionEngine for over 10 years. Outside of work, he is an avid cross country skiier (a 12-time finisher in the American Birkebeiner ski marathon). Since 2000 he has been involved with AMUN, the American Model United Nations organization. He lives in the Twin Cities with his wife Katie and their son (and dog Sigyn).

ExpressionEngine Pro Launch

Learn about the new ExpressionEngine Pro and how you can get started with it today!

Bio

Tom Jaeger
ExpressionEngine

Building an E-commerce Website With ExpressionEngine

The team from Creative Arc will walk you through everything you need to build an E-commerce site with ExpressionEngine and CartThrob. They will cover planning the schema, configuring CartThrob, and building the templates that allow it all to come together. This is a great opportunity to learn what ExpressionEninge and CartThrob can do from an experienced team. 

Bio

Paul Larson
Owner/developer

Paul lives in Minneapolis, MN with his wife and four children (13, 9, 5, and 2). A graduate of Purdue University, he began his college career as a Computer Science major but ended up with a degree in Computer Graphics. The mixture of these disciplines provided the inspiration to start a web design company in 2003. Creative Arc has been a proud purveyour of ExpressionEngine-built websites since the early 1.0 version.

Nerdy enough to quote Star Wars, Waiting for Guffman, Spinal Tap, and The Princess Bride, Paul also follows nearly every pitch of his beloved Minnesota Twins. He cycles and skis the trails of Minneapolis to stay one step ahead of his kids, rarely succeeding.

The Story of MuxEE

Hear a short case-study using ExpressionEngine to build an automated live streaming and media archive in a university environment, and how that lead to a stand-alone module using the Mux service for live and on-demand streaming. Learn about the strengths this add-on brings to video workflows and if it is right for your next project.

Bio

Blair Liikala
Director of Recording Services, University of North Texas College of Music

For more than a decade Blair has managed the Recording Services department that broadcasts more than 600 classical and jazz concerts a year at the largest music college in the United States. He has 20 years of experience in classical and jazz recording with a soft spot for web development. Blair has been the primary developer for the UNT live streaming and media archive based on ExpressionEngine from the beginning, and a long-time EE user.

Opening Remarks

Opening remarks from Andy McCormick, one of the conference organizers.

Implementing ExpressionEngine Pro

ExpressionEngine Pro works pretty well out of the box. However, depending on your site’s design and functionality you may need to do a little work to make it work best for your users. Andy will walk you through the initial setup and implementation of ExpressionEngine Pro, as well as how to use template tags and tag parameters to make it work seamlessly with your site.

ExpressionEngine Team Round Table and Open Discussion

Join the ExpressionEngine team for an open discussion about ExpressionEngine!
Submit your questions via our submission form or ask live during the round table.

Bio

Andy McCormick
Project Manager, ExpressionEngine

I live in Lexington, SC (just outside Columbia). As Director of Operations and Development, I’m responsible for all of our front and back-end development as well as operations at Dubose Web Group. I love spending time with my family (my Bride, and two sons [6 & 3]).

Can Your Business Grow Without You?

How much does your business rely on you as the owner? Many agency owners and executives have built their business up to a point where their customers are continually pleased and impressed with their products or services. But the owner is attached to the process, the product, the service, or the results in a very tangible way. They can’t be absent from the business for more than a week or so, or things start to fall apart. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If you want to fix this in your own business, but aren’t sure how this is a great starting point. By the end of this session, owners will see a new possible future. And they’ll know what to do to get themselves there.

Bio

Erik Reagan
Co-founder & COO, Focus Lab, Focus Lab

Chances are if you’ve spoken to Erik Reagan for any length of time, you’ve heard him talk about his family. His amazing wife and kids are his world and it does not take long to discover that. He is a huge proponent of being intentional with time and keeping work at work. (His wife thinks that’s pretty cool.)

Erik’s career has been an evolution from musician, to developer, to entrepreneur. He has a variety of interests these days, but what ties them all together is a hunger to learn how and why things work. What was once “How does this chord progression work?” turned into “How does a dependable website get built?” and eventually became “What does it take to build a great company?” Now, in addition to running a world-class branding agency, Erik coaches and consults with other agency owners helping them build businesses that thrive.

Testing EE and Add-ons with Cypress

We’ll be going through using Cypress IO to test the functionality of your add-ons as well as the contributions to ExpressionEngine core. I will guide you through setting up a testing environment, wring the tests for Control Panel pages and front-end templates, as well as running the tests manually and automatically. This mini-workshop will consist of a presentation and Q&A session.

Bio

Yuri Salimovskiy
ExpressionEngine

Yuri joined ExpressionEngine team to participate in work on version 6 earlier this year but it hasn’t been the beginning of his journey with the CMS.

Yuri has been pursuing web development for the better part of two decades. He began working with ExpressionEngine v1.6 back in 2007 when ExpressionEngine’s Multiple Site Manager was the perfect solution for a set of websites he needed to build for a financial company. It must have been love at first site as he quickly began to dive deeper into add-on development for EE and soon after started intoEEtive.com.

Yuri’s contribution for EE community over the years is including many recognizable addons such as Threaded Comments, Protected Links, Social Login, Social Update, and Member Categories. In total, Yuri has over 100 addons in his portfolio ranging from simple to very complex.

Yuri lives in Ukraine with his wife and two sons (9 and 3yrs old). When he’s not working on EE Core, he enjoys woodworking and relaxing in his eco-built house.

Three things agencies need to know about their client’s online privacy

Did you know that collecting as little as an email address via a website contact form may require you to comply with multiple privacy laws?

This presentation tackles three core concepts about privacy laws and why a Privacy Policy needs to make specific disclosures to comply with these laws.

1. Which websites need a Privacy Policy;
2. Why Privacy Policies are important;
3. Why you should be the one to talk to your clients about privacy.

Bio

Donata Skillrud
President, Termageddon

Donata is the President of Termageddon, an auto-updating website policies solution. She also serves as the Chair of the American Bar Association’s ePrivacy Committee and earlier this year provided guidance to US Legislators on how to write privacy laws. In her free time, Donata enjoys bee keeping, hunting for morel mushrooms and walks with her husband and two dogs.

Google Ads Demystified: A Conversation about Search Engine Marketing

Are you currently spending money advertising with Google Ads, but you’re worried that your dollars are not being well-spent? Or are you considering running Google Ads but daunted by the complexity of configuring a new campaign?

Join Travis Smith (Hop Studios) and Alex Brabant (eMarketing101) as they discuss how to set up and use all the various Google Ads products. They’ll discuss the current system, and share ways to improve the performance of your existing Google Ads campaigns. This interview-style presentation will examine goals and funnels, geo-targetting, keyword strategies, novel ad types, as well as the psychology behind online PPC advertising.

Bio

Travis Smith
President, Hop Studios

Travis F. Smith founded Hop Studios, a web design and development company that focuses on helping progressive social enterprises to have modern, robust and efficient online tools. He has been building content-rich, elegant Web sites since 1994, when he was one of the original creators of the Los Angeles Times website. He’s also been the editor of Variety.com, a lecturer at the University of Southern California, and now serves on the board of OpenMedia.ca, working to keep the Internet open, affordable, and surveillance-free. He lives in Calgary, Canada, and in his free(ish) time, he plays many flying disc sports.

Debugging ExpressionEngine

Learn more about debugging ExpressionEngine from ExpressionEngine’s chief debugger.

Bio

Robin Sowell
Development Liaison, ExpressionEngine

Robin got involved with EllisLab products in 2002, using pMachine Pro to build a personal site.  Since then, her casual interest in web development has grown into an obsession.  She’s now a fair hand at PHP and MySQL and enjoys nothing more than seeing what new tricks ExpressionEngine can be coaxed into performing.

Digital Accessibility - How to demonstrate its value and get buy-in from clients

What is digital accessibility and why is it important? How do you demonstrate the value of DA to a non-technical audience as part of a sales process and use it as part of our value proposition and as a key differentiator when pitching for project work.

Bio

Neil Williams
ZealousWeb

Neil has been working with EE for over 10 years (since the launch of EE2). Originally a developer at User Fusion, he then transitioned to focus more on the account management/business management side of things. In 2018 his team launched a joint venture with long-term development partners ZealousWeb. Neil now heads up the UK office helping other agencies in the UK and Europe to scale up their services and deliver more projects.