Allie is a self-taught freelance web designer and internet marketer. In 2013, she started teaching herself web design and coding out of books. Her first job as a junior designer introduced her to WordPress. She also learned about SEO, social media marketing, website security, and just how to run a business well. She struck out and started her own business (Allie Nimmons Creative) in 2016 and rebranded as Pixel Glow Web Design in 2018.

Talk: “How To Improve Your Client’s Experience”: The main takeaways are tips taken directly from Allie’s own process that have been used in order to make client workflows more fun and easy to understand. Designers and developers struggle sometimes with educating their clients and making the process overall seem less daunting. Allie will share a link to download a customizable Welcome Packet template that she has created.

Nathan is the Host at iThemes Training where he teaches WordPress and freelance business development topics via live webinar.He is also the creator of >ADVANCE Coaching, working with WordPress business owners individually and in groups to help them become more successful in their businesses.

Nathan has been a freelance web developer since 1995, and is based in Birmingham, Alabama where he is an organizer for WordCamp Birmingham. You can learn more about Nathan at https://nathaningram.com.

Talk: “What I Wish I’d Known About Freelancing”: Our success as freelancers is built upon the lessons we’ve learned from our biggest mistakes. In this talk, Nathan draws on more than 20 years experience in the web business to share 10 important lessons he had to learn the hard way and common mistakes we all can avoid. Each lesson is summarized in a succinct, proverbial statement and then unpacked with examples that will make you laugh, cringe and think.

Gayle Williams, owner of Vision Marketing in Sarasota, FL, has spent the majority of her career as a marketing professional directing marketing operations for not-for-profits and small businesses. Gayle moved over to agency account management in 2002 and founded her own agency in 2008. From directing strategy and client relations she moved into hands-on design and development—growing in the opposite direction than most designers has had its strategic advantages. Today she runs a thriving digital marketing and WordPress design business from her home office, and enjoys the work-family balance it provides.

Talk: “Be Your Clients’ Hero”: Do you feel that part of your mission as a WordPress website designer is to enlighten and empower your clients? Sure, our bottom line is to build excellent websites that serve business goals, but we can build a better partnership and trust with our clients if we educate them along the way. How can we do this without wasting hours explaining basic concepts over and over? In this session we will discuss the website owner’s bill of rights and ways to bake the education into your client onboarding process.

We will cover types of content to leverage, email workflows, and recommended wording in contracts and project emails.

Michelle is an independent graphic designer and frontend developer in Minneapolis. Prior to beginning her career, she studied Visual Communications, with minors in Psychology and Sociology. As her work progressed, she also branched into front-end development and user experience design to round our her skillset. This combination of disciplines led her to adopt a strategy-based approach to design, focused on solving tangible problems and achieving real goals based on how people think.

She loves the open source community, and when she is not working on projects she speaks/volunteers/organizes at events and workshops around the country. Her passions are communication and empowerment, and she believes in the power of “Why?”

Talk: “Fitness And Freelance”.

Rian Kinney is a Florida attorney, legal consultant, published author, and founder of eCommLegal and the Kinney Firm which represents and advises founders and businesses of every size, from freelancers to enterprise; across industries in the areas of: tech, e-commerce, privacy, intellectual property and corporate law, as well as business and marketing strategy. She is also a member of the International Association of Privacy Professionals and maintains their Certified Information Privacy Manager and Certified Privacy Professional/Europe designations.

Talk: “Freelancer’s Guide To Contracts”: Tired of Contracts talks that start with “I’m not an attorney, but…”… Rian Kinney IS a Florida attorney here to answer your entrepreneurial questions such as: “Can I use a Template? If so, what should I look for?”

In this talk you will discover what clauses are “boilerplate” and you should have in your contracts which will also help you better discern which templates are well drafted. Other legal questions and issues that will be addressed are e-signatures, credit card processing fees, privacy policies and terms of use

Adam Soucie is the founder and CEO of Impossibly Creative, a small business agency focusing on WordPress. He is also a member of the WordPress Orlando organizing team.

Talk: “How Freelancers Can Apply The Disney Basics When Dealing With Clients”: In this talk, Adam will discuss his time working at Walt Disney World in multiple roles, and apply the famed “Disney Basics” to working with web clients as a freelancer or customer-facing team member.

Jessi’s love for website development started back in 1993, when at the age of 12 she learned HTML and secured her first dot-com. She has been working with WordPress since 2005, and today runs a WordPress website development company in Minneapolis, MN. Jessi lives in Anoka MN, and loves traveling for both business, and with her two young boys. She enjoys organic gardening and vegan cooking.

Talk: “Project Management”. Whether you are working as a freelancer, or as part of a team, chances are that communicating with customers falls somewhere in your job description. As a website developer, you love the part of your job where you get to develop – but you also need to develop communication and project management skills to help you stay on top of projects, interact with your customers, and make sure that projects don’t spiral out of control or take more money or time than you budgeted.

In this talk, we will discuss the basics of project management. You’ll learn techniques for getting a project started on the right foot – things like making sure that your customer contracts are crystal clear, and setting up clear timelines and project milestones. You’ll also learn how to handle scope creep, and how to deal with projects that have fallen off course.

Joe Casabona is a college course developer and professor. He also has his Master’s Degree in Software Engineering, is a Front End Developer, and hosts multiple podcasts.

Joe started freelancing in 2002, and has been a teacher at the college level for over 10 years. His passion in both areas has driven him to build Creator Courses, a school for those who want to create online businesses.

As a big proponent of learning by doing, he loves creating focused, task-driven courses to help students build something. When he’s not teaching, he’s interviewing people for his podcast, How I Built It.

Talk: “How Freelancers Can Diversify Their Income”: We’ve all experienced the feast and famine of running a business. There will be times where we are swamped with work, and times where there’s no work coming in at all. What if there were a way to ease the pain of both? In this talk, you will learn how you can prepare for the famine without breaking your back from the feast. All by diversifying your income streams.

We plan to have a Q&A session at the end of the workshop to cover as many questions as possible.