Sessions

This session will focus on how you can use Macaw, The Code-Savvy Web Editor to create responsive WordPress Themes. This session is geared towards designers with front end development skills and developers who want to understand the design tool to make more visually appealing WordPress Themes.

Somebody built you a WordPress site and then left you in the lurch to fend for yourself. This session will help you figure out what you think you can’t.  Get past the fear of breaking the internet.  You CAN do this!

If you love piecing together gems from different WordPress themes but hate those “drag n drop” frameworks that handicap more than help, try Genesis. The Genesis Framework is a theme by StudioPress that lays a secure, flexible foundation for your design. Add a Genesis child theme on top, and customize to your heart’s content using built-in hooks and functions. You’ll get better at HTML5, CSS, and PHP all the while having fun! In this session, learn what actions and filters are available with Genesis and resources you need to start using them.

Finding your voice is the key to creating successful content, and this session will give you practical advice on how to find your voice and use it effectively. Once you find your voice, you will become more efficient, you will enjoy your work more thoroughly, and you will experience more success. This session will give you proven strategies to find your voice, keep it consistent, and make it work for you.

You’ve got podcasts that you want to make available. You’re going to need a website to go with that, right? Are podcast websites different from others? Can you just tack them onto an existing site? If so, where? How? Join us for a discussion of how to create a WordPress site with rich multi-media offerings. We will cover finding a podcast hosting service, the post-production process, what to put in your show notes, embedding your audio/video on your WordPress site, and what listeners are looking for when they come to your site. Please note, with only 30 minutes we will not be covering initial WordPress site set-up, recording podcasts, or topic choice.

What is all that technology hosts advertise? And what can you, the WordPress developer/designer, look for to get the best speed for your sites? Speed is of paramount importance when choosing a host. Research shows that a 1 second delay in page-loading time can cost a site 7% of conversions. (That’s $375,000/year for a site with 100,000 hits per month and an average sale of $75.) Our tests show that even some of the world’s top WordPress hosts do not have optimal speed on their home pages. In this presentation, we will give you the knowledge to do better. We will take you through the vast array of technologies used by web hosting providers to give you better performance and stability (as well as a brief review of other criteria every shared hosting customer should know about). Attendees will leave with a more nuanced understanding of hosting technologies and better able to make decisions. The discussion will be geared towards users of shared/reseller hosting, though much of it is also applicable to building your own VPS/dedicated solution. We will cover: A quick glance at the data that shows, yes, speed is of paramount importance Benchmarks for the world’s top WordPress hosts Hardware SSDs (What are they good for? When will they help?) Cloud/cluster setup SAN Resources Disk space (How much do you need?) CPU/RAM (When listed) What does unlimited mean? (Nothing.) Software Control panels (cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, proprietary panels) CloudLinux (and similar setups) Web Servers: Apache vs. LiteSpeed vs. NGINX Page caching (Varnish, NGINX, SuperCacher) Backups (R1Soft, Bacula, Acronis) One-click installers (Fantastico, Softaculous) Services CDNs Anti-spam (Spam Experts, Postini) Anti-malware (StopTheHacker, SiteLock) Website builders Support Where to look for hosting deals

Whether you’re a budding developer, a pixel-perfect designer, or just like helping out, we’re always looking for people to help make WordPress even better. We will help you know how you can contribute to the WordPress community, even if you aren’t highly skilled.

This user-focused session revolves around helping people make educated decisions when it comes to plugins and themes. It seems there is an endless supply of free and premium WordPress themes and plugins available, how do you select reputable ones and avoid those that will give you a headache or worse yet, leave you open to security risks? We’ll cover all that so you can feel a bit more confident when managing WordPress sites.

I’ll speak about online collaboration, and youth involvement. How these intertwine in a project I’m currently involved in and why it’s important to get young people involved in today’s issues and how Millennials are making an effort to get more involved through technology and how WordPress is a platform commonly used. In my session, I’ll discuss management tactics for online based organizations, and how I remain professional online.

Learn how to leverage psychology in boosting conversion rates on your WordPress website. What makes a site visitor click? What makes a site visitor frustrated and leave? In this session, you’ll uncover key insights into the intersection of human psychology, user experience (UX) and websites, and you’ll learn to tap into your site visitors’ subconscious to spur them into action.

You’ve got the basics of CSS down, but you are ready to kick it up a notch and add a bit more pizazz and interactivity to your websites. In this session we’ll explore the fundamentals of CSS transforms, transitions, and animation. What are the basic building blocks that make up these capabilities? What is the difference between a transition and a transform? What does browser support look like? Most importantly, how can you put these tools to use in your next project and where can you find good resources to learn more? We’ll answer these questions and more as we explore the basics of how to add some of the more truly dynamic elements of CSS to our websites.

You’re a designer. Maybe a freelancer. Maybe part of a small team. You now believe that version control is a good idea. You may have even played around with using it yourself. But you’re a bit scared about how to integrate it into your workflow — and how to get it to work with your small team. Let me help. I’ve been there and can share my thoughts on how to approach version controls for freelancers and small design teams.

Backbone in the Admin: Backbone is bundled with WordPress Core – discover how we can utilize Backbone’s basic architecture to deliver an easy-to-use admin publishing experience. We will look into a sample Backbone meta box project and discover how simple to maintain and update a complex feature can be. Focusing on clean code structure and a clear admin experience, we will understand how to create meta boxes that utilize Backbone/Ajax applications to keep the publishing experience simple.

This is a ‘sequel’ to the talk Joe gave at WordCamp Lancaster last year; taking the principles he spoke about and putting them into practice, he will talk about how in Parsec, he made images responsive, lightened load time, and introduced Sass into the original theme from his book.

Many times when we develop something new, documentation is the last thing we think about. In this talk, Jeff Matson discusses techniques to write better documentation to increase user experience and decrease support tickets.