From left to right: Aaron Frerichs, Mike Irvine, Seth Adam, Aaron Van Noy, Nate Houstman, Donna Conn and Donna's daughter Kathline Kay Conn at Oyama Sushi & Steakhouse.

Cedar Rapids WordPress meetup group at Oyama Sushi & Steakhouse

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Our meetup group (Cedar Rapids WordPress Meetup Group) usually takes place at the Linn Area Community Credit Union/Business Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, but maybe I was supposed to reserve the room? Don White I let you down. My first co-hosting of the wordpress meetup didn’t go as well as I had planned. But like I was trained to do, adapt, overcome, and conquer. And that is exactly what we did. So we all headed to Oyama Sushi & Steakhouse in Cedar Rapids and had the meeting there.

We ended up working on http://simplestrokesmassage.com owned by one of our unexpected guests tonight, Donna Conn, L.M.T. She is a new business owner and needed help with her WordPress website. Let’s just say I think her head was swimming with the pages of notes and information that were jotted down: SEO tips, Plugins to download, Widget help in the footer and Google Analytics was installed by me on that site. Plus much much more!

We always have a blast at these meetups no matter if we have a set plan or we just wing it (like we ended up doing tonight). I originally planned that we would go over the REST API and even posted a video of the REST api & a webinar on angular js andwp REST api on the meetup page. Often when someone comes in needing help we all help out and give them a crash course in what we know.

Side note: If you are looking for a WordPress Meetup in Des Moines, Iowa area be sure to check out the that slack channel. I’m also a member of that group but not a Co-Organizer of that group.

Linn Area Community Credit Union - Business Center in Cedar Rapids
Linn Area Community Credit Union - Business Center in Cedar Rapids
From left to right: Aaron Frerichs, Mike Irvine, Seth Adam, Aaron Van Noy, Nate Houstman, Donna Conn and Donna's daughter Kathline Kay Conn at Oyama Sushi & Steakhouse.
From left to right: Aaron Frerichs, Mike Irvine, Seth Adam, Aaron Van Noy, Nate Houstman, Donna Conn and Donna's daughter Kathline Kay Conn at Oyama Sushi & Steakhouse.
Aaron Frerichs, Mike Irvine and Seth Adam at Oyama Sushi & Steakhouse
Aaron Frerichs, Mike Irvine and Seth Adam at Oyama Sushi & Steakhouse
Cedar Rapids Wordpress meetup members from left to right: Aaron Frerichs, Mike Irvine, Seth Adam, Aaron Van Noy, Nate Houstman, Donna Conn and Kathline Kay Conn having dinner at Oyama Sushi & Steakhouse
Cedar Rapids Wordpress meetup members from left to right: Aaron Frerichs, Mike Irvine, Seth Adam, Aaron Van Noy, Nate Houstman, Donna Conn and Kathline Kay Conn having dinner at Oyama Sushi & Steakhouse
WordPress meetup dinner Cedar Rapids, Iowa

WordPress meetup group in Cedar Rapids, Iowa | Creative Corridor

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wordpress logoTuesday night at the Creative Corridor Meetup. I love these meetups! You get such a unique mashup of professionals and amateurs who all have the same common root of learning WordPress even better. At a glanceWordPress is pitched as “blogging software” but the advanced users know the extreme power that can be released! I was personally able to help out Clayton Gill a self-proclaimed “rookie” who uses WordPress for blogging and for a nonprofit website. He was having an “odd thing happen” each time he tried to back up his site to do an upgrade to the most recent version of WordPress. It would progress to about 60% each time on GoDaddy’s cPanel hosted servers then fail. It looks like Big Ten Web Design has had the most clients that still like GoDaddy’s legacy hosting and who haven’t made the switch to managed WordPress (2018 update: GoDaddy is still using slow PHP 5.6 for managed WP hosting, and is not recommended overall, most of our clients websites now use PHP 7.1 or better). I run into this very same problem myself years ago and also from time to time if I forget to increase the max_input_vars in the .user.ini file.  See references on linked pages:

We also discussed alternatives to GoDaddy hosting and it is the overwhelming decision that there are a bunch of better hosting companies out there.
digitalocean.com, siteground.com, kinsta.com (Runs on Google Cloud Platform)

Alternative DNS options:

Learn more about Premium DNS and why it’s so important to have one to mitigate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

Then somehow I hijacked the entire meeting with a long discussion about the best methods of moving multiple websites to a new hosting company. I’ve been eyeing a migration over to Digital Ocean with its strong community of support.

Entrance to Linn Area Community Credit Union - Business Center

Entrance to Linn Area Community Credit Union – Business Center

WordPress geeks around the table at Linn Area Community Credit Union - Business Center

WordPress geeks around the table at Linn Area Community Credit Union – Business Center

WordPress meetup dinner Cedar Rapids, Iowa

WordPress meetup dinner Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Wordpress geeks having dinner after Linn Area Community Credit Union - Business Center

WordPress geeks having dinner after Linn Area Community Credit Union – Business Center

From left to right: Mike Irvine, Don White, Nate Houstman, Aaron Van Noy and Andrew Miller

Cedar Rapids WordPress Continuing Education meetup group

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wordpress logoFantastic evening of sharing, learning and hanging out with fellow friends at the January 20th 2015 WordPress Meetup at Creative Corridor in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Tracking billable hours:

https://toggl.com

~50 pages worth of plugin recommendations:
http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/298401/Documents_for_download/Ultimate_guide_to_plugins_07.pdf

Great web firewall service: Sucuri.net

Concatenate JS and files:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/autoptimize/

SEO blueprint that I use:
https://bigtenwebdesign.com/our-program/seo-process/

Scrum boards:
https://trello.com
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
https://www.17hats.com
Video Blog at:
http://www.wpwatercooler.com
http://wordpress.tv

All in one events calendar:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-event-calendar/
Here’s a list of some theme creators that have good support. These themes are built on the Genesis Framework. You would need the base Genesis Framework from StudioPress to use these themes. ($60)
http://www.studiopress.com/
https://www.web-savvy-marketing.com/
https://prettydarncute.com/

Our favorite forms:
http://www.gravityforms.com

Business directory form:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/geodirectory/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/business-directory-plugin/

eCommerce:
https://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/

Themes:
http://my.studiopress.com/themes/genesis/
http://themeforest.net/item/avada-responsive-multipurpose-theme/2833226

 

From left to right: Mike Irvine, Don White, Nate Houstman, Aaron Van Noy and Andrew Miller

From left to right: Mike Irvine, Don White, Nate Houstman, Aaron Van Noy and Andrew Miller