December 17, 2015 — On average images comprise over 2/3rds of the size of a page request. This gives us a wide birth in order to look at different ways in order to optimise images and potentially reduce this proportion and decrease the total page size.

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December 17, 2015 — Ben Usher Smith looks at three adapted techniques used by web professionals to help projects run smoothly and successfully:
1. Finding a common language to talk about design that involves everyone.
2. Understanding how using stories can help you manage your project.
3. Adapting modern project management techniques (Agile-ish).

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December 17, 2015 — If you’ve ever wanted to customize a theme, you’ve probably been tempted to go change the theme’s code directly. But, as Admiral Ackbar once said, “It’s a trap!” Come learn this web developer’s one weird trick to customizing your themes properly with Child Themes and see why cowboy coders hate him!

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December 17, 2015 — On average images comprise over 2/3rds of the size of a page request. This gives us a wide berth in order to look at different ways in order to optimise images and potentially reduce this proportion and decrease the total page size.

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December 17, 2015 — I’ve been looking into using a more modern approaching to deploying and managing WordPress. Composer, dependency management, has taken the PHP world by storm and is a fantastic way to quickly set up a site and lock down versions of plugins as well as opening up an entire world of code repositories for use in your own plugins. Once you’ve tasted the power of Composer you can never go back.

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December 17, 2015 — This WordCamp Manchester 2015 presentation by Dave Green covers the fundamentals of creating WordPress themes using the customizer including the fundamentals of getting your theme ready, adding controls, sections, settings and panels.

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December 17, 2015 — Business relationships are like lifts. You don’t notice them when they’re working, but when they break down, your life becomes very difficult very fast. You need a contract to protect you when it happens.

In this talk we’ll walk through the basic elements of a good project contract. Using wisdom gleaned from eight years of full time professional work – as well as a few lessons learned the hard way from difficult clients – you’ll learn how to build your client relationships on a solid and safe footing. We’ll also cover pain points such as IR35, copyright, and abandonment of project.

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December 17, 2015 — Do you want to improve your search ranking, conversions, page views, revenue, bounce rate, and reader satisfaction? If you answered yes to any of those (I’m guessing you said yes to all of them), then you need to pay attention to your website’s speed.
Consider these 12 simple suggestions for speeding up your website, before trying to implement the technical and sometimes expensive suggestions of a website speed test. You may be surprised at how much it helps!

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December 17, 2015 — Getting the graphics and content into your website are just the beginning. There are a lot of other things to set up and configure for your site to really get found and work as it should. Get an overview of what else you need to do: *Accessibility *Measuring your traffic *What is schema code or rich snippets? Why and how can you implement it? *Determining how links to your site look and work when previewed on social media sites *Does your site look good on mobile? Do your links help your mobile visitors? *Performance, Speed, Backup, & Security

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December 16, 2015 — I will detail setting up a secure, performant, VPS using modern up to date techniques. Covering WordPress, Nginx, caching, DNS, email, and security.

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