Kadence Amplify: Mastering the Art of Effective Website Creation

On Thursday, March 16, 2023, the Kadence team held our first ever Kadence Amplify event. This event brought together speakers from around the Kadence community as well as the greater WordPress community to share knowledge about becoming more successful with our online presence using WordPress as well as Kadence. Altogether we had 12 speakers from around the community, with Kadence Founder Ben Ritner ending the day with a preview of the next generation of building with Kadence Blocks including artificial intelligence (AI) integration. 

At the time of this writing on the Monday following the event, over 4,000 people have watched at least part of Kadence Amplify, far exceeding our expectations. With gratitude, we thank each of the speakers for sharing their wealth of knowledge with the Kadence community. And, to those who attended the sessions, thank you for taking time out of your busy days. Your questions and interactions added so much to the event and the experience. 

If you’d like to watch the full day in its entirety, there are two tracks. You can start with Track 1 or start with Track 2. But we also wanted to give you a quick overview of each session with some highlights so you can dive in as your schedules allow. Links below all go to the timestamp close to the start of each session. 

Maestro Stevens: Freshen Up Your Sales Funnels: One Install To Rule Them All

Maestro Stevens shared his technique for building a sales funnel using Kadence, SureCart, and WP Landing Kit.  It is an interesting look at a process that can save a lot of time when building out a sales and checkout flow. Maestro’s presentation is not only informative, it was a lot of fun and very engaging. Maestro wins for having the best sound effects of any WordPress livestream presentation ever. Watch Maestro’s presentation here.

Peter Ingersoll: Build a slide presentation in Kadence 

There are a lot of benefits to using WordPress for your slide presentations, and Peter Ingersoll shows us how to do this using your Kadence website. Having your slide presentation available immediately to your audience adds additional value for speakers, allowing them to collaborate better, design more flexibly, have slides accessible to search engine bots, and more. Watch Peter’s session to make your next deck a WordPress presentation.

Spencer Forman: Launch Profitable Membership Sites In Minutes With Kadence

Spencer Forman has been around the WordPress space for quite a long time. His experience and perspective is unique, and he provides a high level strategy and framework for working with WordPress that should be considered no matter what you’re doing with WordPress. It’s often tempting to just choose a single or set of plugins to do all of the big things with WordPress, but Spencer advocates keeping things as simple as possible for long-term management and growth. Watch Spencer’s session.

Donna Botti: Using Your Website to Attract the Right Customers 

Your website can be a pretty brochure, or it can help more customers want to do business with you. Donna walks through the must have elements in creating a website that gets results. She also provided a free guide: What to Post When You Don’t Know What to Post. Donna was a favorite of some Kadence community members who noted that her presentation was “full of gold.” Watch Donna’s session.

Robert Rowley: The State of WordPress Security

Robert is Patchstack’s Security Advocate with years of experience helping to remediate hacked sites and helping developers write more secure code. Robert brings us some insights into the state of WordPress security. Is WordPress safer now than it was even 5 years ago? Robert says yes, thanks to a community of security researchers. Get the full Patchstack report.  And watch Robert’s session. With my own security background, Robert and I had some fun commiserating on some well known vulnerabilities and our experiences with them.

Jake Pfohl: How to Build Websites 10X Faster Using Wireframe Templates

Jake demonstrated how to use his Kadence blocks-based template library, StartBloggingBlocks, to quickly create pages with WordPress and Kadence. Jake also showed how to effectively use AI prompts to better produce the content to populate those pages. A great, fast paced session with one of our favorite Kadence community members, watch Jake’s session here.

Dustin Hyle: WordPress Doesn’t Have to Be Slow

If you’re in any WordPress forum or group, it won’t take long before someone starts asking about speed and performance. Dustin has extensive experience helping WordPress site owners speed up their sites. Stick around for the Q&A on this session which has even more great insights.  Watch Dustin’s session here.

Bet Hannon: Reach More People: Make Your Site Accessible

Accessibility is becoming more and more critical as lawsuits based on ADA Title 3 accommodation requirements, and Bet explains what this is, how to recognize demand letters from lawyers identifying accessibility issues, and what WordPress site owners can do to bring their websites into alignment with these laws. Being prepared is not only good for compliance with laws, it’s also just better for business. If accessibility is on your radar, this session is not to be missed. Watch Bet’s session here.

Melissa Love: Scale Your Business Using Templates & Semi Custom Design

If you’re running an agency, it’s only a matter of time before you hit the time-for-money wall, leaving you no room to scale your business. Melissa shows you how to create a completely scalable system, using Kadence templates and Kadence Cloud to open your business up to new clients, get work done faster, and bring sanity to your client services. Melissa shares her experience and advice after building these effective strategies for her own business. Watch Melissa’s session here.

Dylan Howell: Leveraging Kadence for SEO

Getting found by prospective customers is why we’re here. Dylan gives us the lowdown on why search engine optimization is so important, and some guidance for how to optimize your site to please our search engine overlords. He gives some guidance on how Kadence sets your site up for success with SEO. Watch Dylan’s presentation here.

Adrian Tobey: 5 essential funnels every agency needs to know to create quick wins for clients

Adrian is the CEO of Groundhogg, and he brings some easy to implement funnels that every business needs to implement. Not only does he provide you an exact demo using Groundhogg (though you can do this with any automation tool), but he also gives you an idea of how long it takes to set up and what kind of return you’ll get on your funnel. His review funnel strategy is brilliant to capture that social proof as well as effectively handle cranky one-star reviewers to help turn them into delighted customers. Watch Adrian’s session here.

Michelle Frechette: So You Want to Start a Podcast

Podcasting can be an amazing way to build community and connection with your audience, and Michelle is an innovator in the WordPress podcasting space, bringing so many voices to the conversation. Michelle shared how she got started podcasting and her process for managing and creating podcasts. With a list of active podcasts, Michelle has been in the trenches for a long time and has learned through experience on what works. Watch Michelle’s session here.

Ben Ritner: The Future of Building with Blocks

After a full day of sessions, we ended the day with a preview of what’s coming next for Kadence with Ben Ritner, Kadence Founder. Ben shows us a little of what the Kadence development team is working on to bring artificial intelligence (AI) to Kadence design libraries. The chat was full of 🤯 as we got a glimpse into what building websites with Kadence AI will look like. Watch Ben’s session here.

A fun and successful event

We had a great time hosting this event, and we’re immensely grateful for all of the speakers as well as everyone who came to participate in the livestream chat. Kadence Amplify was a lot of fun for us, and we’re excited for the future of building with WordPress. We’ll definitely be holding another event in the future, and we hope you can join us. Make sure you get on our mailing list for notification of upcoming livestreams as well as all of the news from the Kadence team.