April 7, 2019 — Topic description: Whether you’re nomadic and remote full time, working from home or occasionally from a coffee shop, I’ll show you 7 ways to hack your life to accomplish more. Bonus tips for staying productive on the road.

April 7, 2019 — A look at Progressive Enhancement and what it means, what it doesn’t mean, why it’s more important than ever, and how to get buy in from your clients, colleagues and team.

We’ll review how initial research and discovery can help you identify a site’s core content and functionality and how in turn you can then use progressive enhancement as a development approach.

We’ll look at the mistakes I’ve made and how you can avoid them, as well as how you can add value and improve your sites through peer review.

We’ll also discuss why one seemingly innocuous statement – ‘browser software may ignore this tag’ – was fundamental in making the web what it is today.

April 7, 2019 — This talk offers a perspective and an approach uniquely tailored to independent practitioners. It is based on lessons learned in the field over the past 3 years, and will focus on the soft-skills, strategies, and mind-set, which a new WordPress service provider might wish to adopt in order to ensure longevity, stability, and satisfaction in their role.

April 7, 2019 — In this talk I will be showing the various features of the Jetpack plugin, from its built in analytics, to form and portfolio building, and how you can use the Jetpack plugin to improve your site’s visibility. I will use real examples from my own site to show how much you can do with this one plugin.

April 7, 2019 — My talk / presentation will be a exploratory walkthrough of setting up a demo WordPress site and optimising the website’s speed.

Various optimisation techniques will be covered in the talk:
1) Image optimisation
2) Plugin(s) and code performance
3) Minification and combining scripts and styles
4) Caching – database and pages
5) Content Delivery Networks
6) CloudFlare – Minification, Polish, Mirage and Railgun
7) Google PageSpeed module for Apache

I will have set up a few different versions of the test website on a series of subdomains. Each version will contain the optimisations that I experiment. Each subdomain will be tested using Google PageSpeed and GTMetrix. Screen shots will be shown through slides. Test result links will be added to the slides.

April 7, 2019 — NO AUDIO FOR FIRST 22 SECONDS

Why do so many websites look the same? As our tools have improved and we’ve been able to do more with the web, there’s been a growing trend toward websites that look exactly alike. Join me on a magical ride through the history of web design (watch out for animated gifs and midi files!) in order to figure out how we got here—and where we can go next.

April 7, 2019 — For those who have never used the REST API but know basic PHP, this talk will cover how to make a basic endpoint, how to use it on the frontend, and how to convert AJAX calls.

Presentation Slides »

April 7, 2019 — The Verbal Remedy website has WordPress at its heart. With up to 50 blog post submissions per month on everything from feminism to sexual health, we need a theme that gives our words the impact they deserve and a dashboard that means we can create posts effectively as a remote editorial team.

As Verbal Remedy’s founder I’ve watched the platform grow over the past four years from a tiny Tumblr site to a fully integrated WordPress creation with a strong presence in the North East of England. I’d love to be able to share what I’ve learnt along the way.

I’ll talk about:
– Why we chose WordPress for our website
– How starting a blog can create social change
– How to handle tough issues when blogging
– How your blog can create a buzz offline, too

April 7, 2019 — I’ll talk about some well-known WordPress plugins and show the accessibility issues that arise when using them. Then I’ll discuss what can be done to make their front-end output more accessible. That might involve:
– asking the developer to make the next plugin version more accessible
– adding another plugin to remedy the problems
– modifying the plugin code yourself
– finding or building a more accessible plugin

Some of the plugins I’ll talk about are:
– Contact Form 7
– Gravity Forms
– Simple Share Buttons Adder
– Revolution Slider

April 4, 2019 — So we have all been to the scary WordPress security talk where Tim or someone else frightens you to death, but it’s not too dire: in those talks there is a theme beyond despair and that’s every little helps.

So this talk is low on scary tales and high on simple practical tips to improve your site’s security. On their own they might not be the silver bullet, but they all add up.

Tim will guide you through steps that anyone of any ability level can implement to improve their site security.