 So welcome to using your WordPress powers for good. I have to tell you, so I'm from Rochester, New York now. I've lived in Rochester for 40 years, but I actually did my elementary school years right outside of Boston here in Easton, Massachusetts. So it's kind of like coming home, but it's a home that you've never been to before because you don't recognize anything that's been 40 years since I've been there. So it's good to be back. I lost the accent a long time ago, but I actually haven't heard a lot of accent today, so I think you guys are pretty much a melting pot around here now. Everybody's got their own little voice, which I think is wonderful. So today, we're gonna talk about using your WordPress powers for good. I am a Wonder Woman fan. I have everything in my office, Wonder Woman. I have the Wonder Woman shades, which I would wear for the whole talk if I could see, but I told you I moved around here 40 years ago. I've been 50 years old this year, so I actually need the readers to be able to see a little bit better. But what I love is if after worries you wanna come up, take a picture with the glasses and tweet it out and tag my business, that would be awesome because I would love to see you all on Twitter with my glasses on. So we're gonna put those right there, and I hope to see something to do right after the talk. The powers were good. So my name is Michelle Ames. I was sent out from Rochester, New York, flew in yesterday morning. It was awesome. It's only six hours drive, so knowing that and seeing how beautiful the city is, I would probably be back again. This has been lovely, and it's been nice to meet you all here today. All the slides will be available on Slideshare that later too, so if there's anything that you want to, I'll see you all at the last slide, we'll give you a little bit more information about that. So what's the wonderful thing to me over the five years that I've been using WordPress, maybe six years I've been using WordPress, is watching it grow from about 21, 22% of the internet to almost 30% of the internet that we know we can tell what they're using is actually powered by WordPress. That's huge. That is humongous. We take a minute and just kind of appreciate how big a number that is. It's a tremendously powerful resource. I see people at WordCrafts all over the United States and Canada, I've meeting people constantly in my own meetup in my own hometown and see the impact that WordPress is having on the world, and I think it's a wonderful thing. We're using it to build businesses, we're using it to build nonprofits, we're using it to power really good things. It's great. It was a gift to us. WordPress itself is great. It's a huge gift. But what do we do with the gift like that? Well, the first thing we do is we don't re-gift it, but we kind of do re-gift it, right? Because it's the gift that keeps on giving. It's like when you light a candle and then you light somebody else's candle, your candle doesn't go out. So you can use WordPress and give WordPress and everybody gets to keep using it. How do you hear built-up website? Raise your hand if you built-up website, is it WordPress? Fantastic. Raise your hand if this is your first time and you're still learning. That's fantastic. I love that too because it's a great resource. I was a newbie one time. I bought a URL. I had used WordPress. I said to a friend of mine, I said, so how do I get from owning a domain name to having WordPress on the site? And his response was, you install it. Let's go back and explain it. What does you install at me? And so he and his wife had five kids. He said she was working then. I said if you come over and cook dinner for the kids, I'll teach you how to install WordPress on a website. I said golden. I'm making spaghetti for everybody. So I went over, I made spaghetti for everybody. He showed me the download, change your config file, re-upload, he showed me the long hard way to do it so that I could have a good understanding and appreciation of what that WP config file looked like. And then I would have an understanding. He says you can use the one button install once you understand how this works. And as a result of that day, I have a much better understanding of how WordPress works and why it works that way. So we build websites with WordPress. And as you can see there, sometimes they're really, this is one of the first websites I did. I had decided I was gonna quit my job working in higher education and I was gonna put my MBA in marketing to use. And I was gonna build a marketing company and I was gonna build websites for people and I was gonna make lots of money doing it. So I get a phone for my first phone call, like, oh, this is exciting. It's a new potential client. She says, how much do you charge for a website? And I thought, I'm $10. Because I thought I could build three websites a week and I could be rolling them down. Okay, so let's take a step back from that, too. Because number one, $300 was not enough money to build a website. And number two, I can't build three websites a week and I knew I could kind of build the infrastructure or something. It takes a lot more to build a really good website, right? I can't power out three in a week. I'm not a machine. So sometimes they're banned. So she says to me, oh, but it's gonna be a e-commerce website. I said, oh, well, that changes it. $500. And she said I wanted to look just like this other website, which was a site I managed but hadn't built. And I thought, oh, that's easy. I know the theme. I know how the content is built. So I used that theme and I built her website. And she said, well, that's not exactly what I want. Let me tell you that what she ended up with was a 180-degree turn from what she told me she wanted. Because as we worked through the process together, it morphed and it morphed and it morphed and the smoke creep on that project got huge. I commonly put it into that site over the course of a year, over 100 hours for $500. That's not enough. I mean, minimum wage was more than that at the time and I was building websites for less than minimum wage. So, and as much as I put in, I paid for that website in my education but I learned so much. And yes, she got an absolutely horrible website. I didn't know how to build. I was using a paid theme and but she needed this tweet and that tweet and so it still exists, believe it or not. Somebody else said to me, she wanted me to do some more things and I said, well, actually, I work for a full-time job now so I have this other person that I can recommend to you and I called the other person, I said, do you want the most difficult client in the world? And she said, I'll take anything. I said, you can have her. And so this is actually, the site I built managed by somebody else and I will be 100% honest and say this is a really, really bad website. Guess what? I still make a little bit of money but I still make a little bit of money because even the bad websites we build can still make us a little bit of money, right? And let me tell you that five years later, I'm building much better websites. I just want you to know that I'm charging more than $300 that I do. So I have grown as a designer. What do we do? We have fun. I don't know about you, but you have that website and I turn it on public and I feel like I just earned my wings. Like little bells go off and angels sing and whatever because it's exciting. It's fun, it's exciting to show the world, post it on Facebook, realize that I forgot to set a featured image, go back and repost it on Facebook 10 minutes later because that's how it works, right? It's three o'clock in the morning and I forgot to do that one last little bit. Nobody else has ever done that, right? Please raise your hand and tell me that you've made the little mistakes too. So yes, we have fun with it. Even working alone, as I did for years, I had fun with it because I was talking to people. I was out in the community, I was doing things that were fun. Now maybe we should do more than just make money and have a little bit of fun with it. There's more that we can do with WordPress. So let's talk about paying it for it a little bit. We can mentor people. So somebody mentored me. I made spaghetti dinner. He taught me how to tell a WordPress site. He mentored me into it. He showed me what it was like to build a WordPress website. When I have questions, I still call him and he will give me answers. He doesn't charge me for that because he mentored me. I have mentored other people. This is Amanda in this picture. Amanda graduated high school with my daughter. Amanda called me up with me. She said, you know the websites, can you give me a little advice? I said, sure, what kind of website are you building? She said, HTML. I said, well, my first advice is change to WordPress. And she said, what's WordPress? And I said, oh honey, let's get together. And so we spent a couple hours in my office and I showed her WordPress and opened up her world. She was on fire that night about how much she could do with WordPress, similar to how I was once I figured out how to get it on my URL. It was exciting. She was excited. That was eight years ago. She and I are still such good friends that I married her to her husband last fall. And we have grown and become much better friends. I hired her. She works for me now at the company that I work for, which I'm gonna talk a little later how I got the job where I am. So I've been mentoring her. I mentor other people. I take on one person a year, take them under my wing. Sometimes it's for an internship at their college. Sometimes it's because they want to learn more about WordPress or about web design or marketing. I mentor people because people did that for me. I'm gonna pay it forward and I'm gonna help them. I teach classes. So maybe you don't want to mentor somebody. Maybe you don't want somebody under foot. Maybe you don't have that kind of time. But I bet you can find one day, a year, a quarter, whatever it is, where if you have enough WordPress knowledge, you can share that with other people. So now I teach classes. I have a class coming up a week from tomorrow. I'm teaching a bunch of people. One day class. We start in the morning. They have no idea what they're doing. By the end of the day, they have a WordPress site built in a sandbox so we can migrate over to a URL when they purchase it. So in eight hours, they go from having nothing to have like a really bad website. After eight hours, right? So eight hours, you don't have a good website. But they have something on which to build. And they're excited and they're powered up and they're fired up. And the people that I, the first time I did this was last December. I had five people pay a hundred bucks to sit in a class for a full day class. I supply the pizza. They supplied the I don't know. I supplied the I might know. And they showed up. At the end of the day, they had websites that they are now continuing to build. And those same people still come back. They could come back to our media because they have got the idea of what WordPress can do for them. And they continue. So teach them classes. Show people what it is that you're excited about. Now I have people say to me, why would you teach other people how to build websites? Cause they're just creating competition. And I say, do you see how many bad websites there are around the world? Those people need web designers. And I can't possibly do it all for $300 a site. I can't do it all for $5,000, $10,000 a site. There's so much need that we're, I don't think of all the people I know that do websites and WordPress websites. And I'm talking hundreds of people because I've been in this a while now. I have never gone up against the person I know for a site. People come to me. They either hire me or they don't. They go on to somebody else when they don't. I have never been in the same room or the same field with a close friend where we're trying to outbid each other. There's enough clients to go around. So why not teach other people how to build good websites and charge more than $300? Maybe you don't want to teach a whole class. Maybe you can hold a clinic. So once or twice a year I hold a WordPress clinic. I rent a room for half a day. I get people to come in and we talk about what's right and what's wrong with their websites. We answer questions. We look at each other's websites and we see what could be better. And when they say I don't know how to do XYZ, we say, can you never use the inspect element? Let me show you how to implement CSS and how to do that. And by the time they leave, they've empowered themselves to do more with their websites and have better web design. And most of them are just doing web design in their own companies, right? So they started a blog or they started a company. They're doing something that they need to show their, they're selling whatever vision that they create and so they need a website to do that. By the end of that day, they feel better. They know how to do more with their website because we hold a clinic. I don't charge people to come to those clinics. It's a half day. It's my way to give back and pay forward to show that people can really just do a little bit more. I can donate a half a day of my time to make other people feel better. That's why they're not my customers. They're really narrowing websites. I haven't done anything to decrease how I make money. If anything, everyone's in a while and one of those people says, can I pay you to do it? And now I am making money out of it because when they feel like they're right over their head and they really just want to make widgets, it's time for somebody else to manage the website that helps them do that. And so I'm able to help them do that. If I don't have the capacity, I find them somebody else who can. Because there's plenty of us to go around and I don't need all the business. I can certainly share that with my other WordPressers. We also in Rochester have once a month co-working. So what is co-working? I'm so glad to ask. Co-working is we get together from nine to four once a month and we just all work on our own stuff in the same room. So you're working on your website and building a website for clients. They're starting to figure out how to build their blog and we're all in the same space. Because most of us in WordPress work alone. How many of you work alone? More than half in the room have indicated for those of you watching on WordPress to meet them. That you work alone. It gets lonely, doesn't it? Working alone? You know, I work alone. I work alone for a company, but we're on Slack all day. So I'm not really alone. Because I get to talk to people on Slack all day long. But even then, it's still like just me in my pajamas or whatever. Working at home, myself. So when I've had these co-working days and I've had a room with 10 people, it's awesome because I feed on that. The energy in that room and the creativity in that room is awesome. And guess what? It kind of turns into a little bit of a clinic. Hey Michelle, do you know how to do this? Hey Michelle, do you have a plugin that will do that? Do you know anything that can do XYZ or anybody who has done ABC? And so it turns into this awesome ability for us to exchange ideas and help one another out. And somebody will say, hey Michelle, I don't know why I'm the authority of the room, but it's always hey Michelle. Probably because I run the local or manage the local WordPress community in Rochester as far as our meetups. But it's like, hey Michelle, do you have a plugin that will do XYZ? And I'm like, no I don't, but guess what? Sarah, I did that room with, hey, I don't know how to do that. And so at the end of the day, we've all been working on our own projects and helping each other too. Co-working is an amazing way to do that. So we usually find a space at a college or a library. Sometimes we just meet for a couple of hours at a comp shop and help each other out. So we do organized co-working, we do just kind of like drop everything at co-work. I haven't actually turned that into a URL yet, so drop everything at co-work.com is available. It's mine. You can have it, I've had enough. Who else just collects URLs? I've done my names. It's like, I used to collect symbols. I think I own more domain names now than I ever own symbols in my whole life. And they're exciting. Do you want to tell meetups? I've actually never been to a meetup before. Okay, cool. So there's a bunch of you who need to find your local meetups. Meetups are an amazing way to be a part of local community. Some local community, local work-class meetups meet sporadically, some meet very regularly, some meet very frequently. Our meetup is once a month for our regular meetup and every other month for an advanced work-class meetup. Because we discovered we had people that really wanted to go a little bit deeper into code, but when we would do that in a regular meetup, we would lose people and they drop off and knock them back. So now we have two levels of meetup to meet people where they need to meet. So we have regular meetup, kind of run on the middle of the line, and then we have them more advanced. Guess what? You have something to say. You have learned something. I don't care who you are in this room, you have learned something that other people couldn't learn from too. Whether it was something that was a success for you or something that was a failure for you. And I'll tell you my biggest failure. And it's not easy to tell people this when you're supposed to be an expert at what you're doing. But last year, I spoke at work at Montreal. And it was a seven-hour drive from my house in Rochester, out to Montreal. And halfway there, I started getting texts and phone calls from customers at their sites with them. And I had them all on shared server and they got hacked. There were 23 sites on that shared server space and 22 of them went down. So I'm texting them back going, well, I'm in the car in the way of Montreal but I'll look at it tonight. So went to the speaker dinner, went back to my hotel room. Sure enough, I have a list from SiteGround telling me 900 infected files. You can't just delete infected files because some of them are header files. Some of them are footed files, the thing that you can't just get rid of. So you have to go for each number, one of them determine if it's a real file or not, replace it if it needs to be replaced, clean it up if you have to, clean it up. I finished cleaning up those hacked sites at 6.30 in the morning and had to leave by 7.15 to get to work at camp. So I slept for 45 minutes and got to work at camp that day. I went and took shots. And I spoke at 1.30 in the afternoon. I'm told it was wonderful, I don't remember on the day. But by, and the whole reason that I bring that up is that I'm even the speaker at the next session to talk about how to fix a hacked website. And I asked if anybody had any experience or knowledge of who would be willing to speak. And nobody raised their hand, nobody came forward, nobody commented. And I thought, well, I'm gonna have to do some research. I'm not really sure how to research that. Guess what? I got some real firsthand research, real darn quick. And because I didn't know how to fix a hacked website at the time. But I wasn't sure what to do. I didn't do it right. So guess what happened two days later? 930 infected files and I got to do it again. And so I did it the exact same way. And guess what? A week later, 960 infected files. Until I did a little more research of figuring out what was going on. Found the culprit. Did you know that they will create their own admin names? So you can't just complete up the infected files. You have to make sure that they create an admin name that they're logging back into your site with. Silly me, I had no idea. So I started looking for different things. And discovered different ways to fix that. And I since then had no problem because I've learned my lesson, not that good. However, any site is vulnerable at any time. No matter how many gates you put up, somebody has a way to hack it. So just do your good diligence. But understand that learning from people who have made mistakes is just as valuable, if not more so, people who have had successes. I say that to let you know that you have the power to share at your local media. Yes, you have something that other people might want to hear. You can leave a discussion. You know, speak, but you have a really great organizational skills, so organize the meetup. You never have to open your mouth if you're willing to make sure there's cookies and there's always a place to go. So organize your meetup. So I recognize the meetups in Rochester, New York. I have a great time with that. I get people to speak. I set my topics a whole year at a time and work to get people to do that because the behind the scenes stuff is just as important. So you can pay it forward by giving back to your community of those guys to work by stand. Believe it or not, I know it's free. Doesn't make sense, but there are a lot of ways you can pay back this community. You can participate in the forums. There are people asking questions that you know the answer to. So log in. Take a look and see what questions are being asked. There are ways for you to help other people solve their problems. But I don't have to stand up in front of a room full of people. Maybe that's not your thing. Maybe you'd like to be behind the keyboard and behind the screen. The forums are a great way to do that as you can just have a gravitar out there. Nobody has to know your real name even. It's whatever you make it be and you can help other people out. You can participate in the forums. And I like being in front of you guys. I like seeing your faces. But I have to become a questioner for them and I feel very empowered with taking that. You can contribute to the forum. Now I will be the first person to tell you I design using themes and plugins that already exist. I can do a little CSS magic here and there but I am not a coder and I don't know if it's HP, JavaScript. I think they sound like wonderful things. It's on my bucket list to learn them. It's not gonna happen any time soon. I am probably not the kind of person that's gonna contribute to core code. But maybe you are. Maybe you could be the person who logs in and says I know how to do that. I can suggest this idea. I can code it. I can count it. But I can be on that team. So contributing to core is just another wonderful way that you can be involved and pay back. Maybe you can't do that either. Like me, maybe that's not your forte. Well guess what? They need videos edited and uploaded to WordPress.tv all the time. So maybe you have the ability, following word camp Boston, to say hey, I'm going to edit some of those videos and upload those to WordPress.tv. Maybe they need to close caption that. Maybe you can add that and type up what it said. I don't want you to have to type up mine but then I talk really fast. But other people might be better and it's a little bit slow than I am. But it's a wonderful thing to be able to contribute that way. WordPress.tv, if you're not familiar with it, WordPress.tv. Almost every talk, every word camp, as long as the equipment works like it's supposed to, gets uploaded to WordPress.tv. Very first word camp Rochester we ever had. I was so excited. We were going to have a great keynote speaker coming in and word camp Orlando I think is, Orlando or Miami had the equipment that was supposed to come to word camp Rochester and then they got hit with a humongous hurricane. It was Orlando, wasn't it? It was working for a second. And we didn't get any video cameras. So the only video we had was from people's cell phones. And that's not good enough for WordPress.tv but they could post it in some of the different forums and things like that and share with the speakers anyway what they had. Maybe you have the skills to be able to help that. There isn't always going to be WordPress.tv for every single talk, but maybe there is. And if you don't know this about WordPress.tv you can search by topic and you can search by speaker. So if you want to learn how to build a membership website you go to WordPress.tv and Google, or Google site, you can search for membership sites and you will find just a plethora of different topics related to building membership sites. Maybe your favorite speaker is, let's say, Matt Malloway. And you want to see how many times he's spoken and you start from Matt Malloway down there. You're going to see every keynote address he's done. You're going to see his statement of word address. So you're going to see other talks he's been involved with. So you'll be able to pull up by person too. And it's just a wonderful way to be included and to see and to participate in. But you can also help in those videos and pay back that way. You can help organize WordCamp. So this WordCamp did not just happen automatically. It does not happen because of WordCamp Central. It happens because there are people here in Boston who said, I want to help make this happen. And those people are all volunteers. If you're a volunteer at WordCamp, Boston today is great. So we've got one, people more than two. So we've got some volunteers here. Those people deserve a lot of applause. First of all, thank you for taking a tremendous amount of work and we don't get paid for it. Your speakers don't get paid. The volunteers, the organizers, nobody gets paid and you're spending time and money and you're out of your own pocket to be here. And those people are, in my opinion, the real heroes of the volunteers to make it all happen. So those are the organizers and the volunteers that do work here. So the organizers, especially, meet for months and months and months to get all of that taken care of, squared away. They call each other Wranglers. So the WordPress word is like, they're sponsor Wranglers, speaker Wranglers. Thank you Wranglers, food Wranglers. Everybody's a Wrangler. And so we need people to do those things. This, what you see here on the screen, is work camp Rochester's first ever work camp. I was the lead organizer. I chose my birthday to have work camp. 140 people come to our very first ever work camp on my birthday and it felt like I got to celebrate with 140 friends. It was awesome. At the end of the day, we had a party and work has paid for it. I got like my 48th birthday party paid for it. And I had her food, my awesome friends there. So organizing work camp can be a tremendous amount of fun. It's a lot of work, but it's really worthwhile. And you can volunteer at work camp, whether you're sitting at the registration table, whether you're taking care of social media, whether you volunteer to help make the website be what it used to be. Any of those things, following up with the sponsors and the speakers and all of the things that go into making work camp. We need volunteers at every camp. I think the minimum number of volunteers I've ever seen at a camp is a dozen and it goes way, way up from there depending on the size of the camp. So volunteer to be here. You get your ticket free too, by the way, when you volunteer at camp. So there's just a little benefit to being a volunteer. You can help out at the happiness bar. So most camps have a happiness bar. Do you know what a happiness bar is? Happiness bar is where you can sit down with other people and they help you with any questions that you have. So you wanna know how to fix X by Z and if the happiness bar, people will help you. So you don't have to officially sign up for almost anything to work at a happiness bar. You can just sit down there and help other people out. That's one way of just giving back, helping one other person when you sit there at a happiness bar. First time I ever sat down at a happiness bar as a quote-unquote expert, I was terrified. I had imposter syndrome like you would not believe. I was absolutely 100% convinced that the first question would be, I have a PHP problem and I would have been like, I'm sorry, I think it was a 12-step program for that. But it wasn't. It was, I think the changes, but I'm agreeing to this other move, can you help me? And I was like, ah, CSS, I know this. I can help this person. And I was able to help them. And then the second person sat down and said, I have a PHP problem. I said, I think that guy over there can help me. Because he could, I heard him talking, he needed a phone. So if you're able to kind of help the people you can and if you can help somebody, it's not like, ha, ha, she called herself an expert. No, of course not. Because we're just there to help one another out. So since I'm at the happiness bar, I see if you can help people that way. Speak at word camps. You would be surprised. I know there was a time in my life, I know it's hard to believe, where I was the shyest person in the room. If somebody had said, someday you're gonna stand at the podium or sit at the podium and give a talk, I would have been like, I have no idea who you think I am, but I'm not that girl. I never came that, obviously. And I love sharing. And you know what? Because I think I have something that you all can take with you when you leave the room. I have a bunch of different talks and hopefully by the time you leave, you say, do you know that? I feel empowered. Whatever it is that you leave the room today, you say, I think I can do more. I think there's something I can do to help other people. Speak at a word camp. It's great. You have something to share and promise. There's something that you do where you know that other people can benefit from. You can participate in a hackathon. Is anybody ever participating in a hackathon? Just a couple of people. That's great. So there's all kinds of different hackathons you can do. This year, we did the very first hackathon ever in Rochester. We had 17 people come together and build websites for free Rochester area nonprofits. They started with nothing at eight o'clock in the morning. At five o'clock, they were presenting to each other their WordPress websites. We had outside people come in at the end of the day, watch the presentations, and choose a winner based on a couple different criteria. And that nonprofit organization got a $100 gift card to Amazon to help their nonprofit go a little bit further. Every single one of those 17 people paid $10 to come do that. We provided pizza. I got some sponsorships. I got the space donated by a local college. And we spent eight hours, nine hours that day creating websites for nonprofits who are so, so grateful. And now have a piece of real estate on the website on the internet where they can raise money and raise awareness for their nonprofits. There's nothing like it. And there were people at each table. So if you look at the guy in the center there, he is a self-proclaimed WordPress groupie. He comes to every single one of our meetups, every single one. He comes to all of our WordCamps. He has never logged into a WordPress site in his entire life. We have no idea how to do it. But he wants to support the community. So he comes. That day, they said we need images for this, that, and the other. He was the image guy. He was around on Slash. He was on MorgFile. He was on those places where you get free images for your WordPress website, for any website. And he was downloading and sharing those. Because somebody needed to do that job too. So we had people at every table ranging from I've never logged into a WordPress website to I'm a developer. And everybody in between. And that's how we were able to do three of those. Because it wasn't five developers, five designers, and five people who had no clue. It was evenly distributed. And we were able to accomplish a lot. Those were people. I was the 18th person, I think, in the room. And I didn't contribute in any way, except to continue to help and run things back and forth. So those were people I organized that back and forth. And I'll post somewhere about organizing Hackathodic. You want to know, I will share that with you later. I'm running out of time, so I'm going to keep going. You can build a free website and give it away for a nonprofit. Once a year, I can play a nonprofit website. I build it for a local nonprofit. And able to keep them and help sustain them. I host them. I do whatever they need. I keep them going. That's one way for me to be able to give back. Press B. You can build an app. There's an app out there for WordCamps. You can build a plug-in. You can find bugs. There's lots of different ways that you can be involved in WordCamps without necessarily knowing how to do a bunch of different things. You don't have to know everything to be a successful contributor and be able to give back to the community. But I point you, there is a side effect to being involved in the WordCamps community. First is we have fun. This is the speaker dinner last year. They were laughing their heads up. It was a great time. You had it on a brewery. We had Taco Mart set up. It wasn't anything fancy. And they were having a blast. So we have a ton of fun doing meetups, doing speaker dinners, doing everything related to WordCamps. Make great friendships. I have friends in the WordCamps community. I'm moving out Tuesday. And the local WordCamps community, three people are showing up at my house just because they know me through WordCamps with a van, and a trailer, and people power to help move my furniture from one location to the other. That blew my mind. I've actually cried when they said they were coming. It's like, I only know you through the meetup, and you said you're coming to help me. That's, to me, amazing. And that's what our WordCamps community is all about. We get clients from it, right? So I have contributed a lot of positive ways. I give back a lot, but I've got a lot too. I've got so many clients, because they Google Michelle, or they Google WordCamps Rochester, and they find me. And they hire me to build their websites. That's phenomenal. But even more than that, I got a good job out of it. So here I am on the speaking circuit last year. I meet these people from a company called Give, and I say to them, if you're ever hiring, I'm looking for a full tech job. Boom. Here I am, been working for them since January. I have a job, and guess what? I got to hire somebody else. And now, it's just growing. I'm able to spread that love. There's so much happiness involved in this community. There's so much involvement. So many ways that you can interact with one another in such a positive way. And I get the warm fuzzies. I know that's a little cheesy, but I do. I get the warm fuzzies whenever I'm able to help somebody and make their site better. Join your local meetup. If you're not part of your local meetup, find it, go to meetup.com and just type in the search bar, Wordpress. You will find your local meetup. Attend WordCamps, so you're here today. Go over some more. Come back next year. Guess what? Providence, Rhode Island has one. That's not far from here. Portland, Maine has one. Rochester, New York is only a six hour event. Come to our WordCamp. There's WordCamps everywhere. There's lots of ways you can get involved. Go to co-working. Start co-working. Participate in the forums. Help somebody else, even if it's one person with one problem, tweet about Wordpress and how awesome it is and ask other people for help. Because asking for help enables them to help you too. And so being somebody who needs something is not a bad thing. That's another way to be involved in the community is to ask for help. Because together we make the WordPress community the basic place that it is. It's not me. It's not the people I work for. It's all of us. We're all part of that community. We make it the great place that it is. I'm Michelle Ains. I'm the head of customer success for GIF. You can reach me, Michelle at gfwp.com. My Twitter, my slideshow, my wordpress.org is all Michelle Ains. So you can find me there. You can find my follow me on Twitter. I love it. It's fantastic. And the last thing I'll say is I just wrote a book called A Good for a Pan Shake and Other Essential Business Tips. The first two people to tweet me amazing questions about anything WordPress related will get a copy of my book mailed to them. So if you're interested in that, tweet me later. Tweet me now as we do whatever, I love tweets. And you may have them. We do have a couple minutes for questions. We ask if you do have questions. We want to make sure that we catch everything on WordPress TV. So there's a microphone in the middle. So if you could, if you have a question, otherwise we're going to be in five minutes for questions if anybody has one. I consider myself amazing and successful and I told you anything you ever needed to know. Okay, so the question is how to fix a hacked website? Not in and of itself. But I will tell you that the really quick version is goes through every single file. They tell you it's infected and then they'll perform. Because it's not just the 930 that they sent you. There's more out there that they didn't discover either. How many of you have ever looked in the CGI bin? Right? So you set up WordPress sites in the CGI bin and it's always empty, right? Guess what? Was it empty this time? That's where the virus got. So make sure you check everything and look for those additional lots of ways that infections can happen and there's a million ways that you can clean it up. I can possibly go into all of them right now but I'll be at my table out in the main section. If you want to stop by, I'm happy to answer questions there too. Will that help you or no? I went through a file. One of the first points you made was how massively user-based is for WordPress and its potential to leverage good simply by bad. Are there examples of doing good outside of doing good within the WordPress community that you could pull the, that those of us who might be trying to leverage that one third of the internet impact potential? Not sure I understood the questions. Can you say that again? So user-based for WordPress is phenomenally large. Yes. How can people use that as an organizing base to do good beyond WordPress? Gotcha. Beyond the WordPress community? I think that building websites that reach outside of the WordPress community is a great way to start that. So nonprofit sites for WordPress is a great way to do that. Hackathon's being involved with that. Pulling in nonprofits, I think is a great way to kind of spread that for good. I participated in a hackathon once that was all about startups. So it wasn't nonprofit, but it was a WordPress hackathon by the end of the day that 10 startup companies had brand new websites. So that's another way to just pull people into the community by supplying them to something that they need to be successful. That's one idea. Any other questions? I really like the idea of the building the community. It's skills, not specifically, or, you know, building a developer, but also like somebody, a gentleman, who's downloading all the images. Do you have any other tasks that we can sort of play with in there? And would like to some of you to take a lot of the information that kids then have, say, from the game that they're part of this order. So whether or not logging into the site necessarily, but whether or not they're contributing in other ways. Sure, absolutely. So as you said, one of the ways is to find those images and things like that. Another way is to provide other content. So let's look at other, let's say we're doing a website for a startup. Let's look at some competition across the world, people that do the same thing, and start to build some content based on what we see. Not stealing content, not plagiarizing anything, but getting ideas from other people about what could be included, and then assigning the task group writing good content, thinking about those SEO keywords that we want to put in there too, and making sure that those things are all included. So that's a great way to get people to start thinking about things besides code, besides maybe what I did is what else makes a good website, images, and content is what really makes a good website, right? Absolutely. I think we have one more question, and then we're outside. Very good, we're sort of outside here on weekend. I am out at my table out in the sponsor area, so feel free to stop by if you have more questions or ideas that I can take. Thank you so much for that great audience, and I appreciate you. Real quick, before the next speaker comes in.