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!

Presentation Slides »

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

Presentation Slides »

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.

Presentation Slides »

December 16, 2015 — This is a ‘sequel’ to the talk I gave at WordCamps last year; taking the principles I spoke about and putting them into practice, I will talk about how in Parsec, I made images responsive, lightened load time, and introduced Sass. While earlier talks focused more on design decisions and planning, I will talk about coding, implementing, and testing!

Presentation Slides »

December 16, 2015 — Whenever a post is saved, a page is loaded, a comment is created or a template is loaded, WordPress fires off events that, as developers, we have loved and cherished. These events are hooks. While hooks have been the quintessential building blocks of WordPress for over a decade, they come with a cost. Often times, developers will hook functionality into the save_post event, for instance, to fire off a notification to an external service or perform some sort of background task. The more of these tasks are hooked into WordPress, the slower WordPress becomes.

In this talk, I will show you how to alleviate these bottlenecks with asynchronous hooks – hooks that can be used to perform the exact same tasks, but not block the rest of WordPress from running. Through a library created by 10up’s Eric Mann and John Bloch for TechCrunch on WordPress VIP, the overhead of running actions can be reduced to a negligible amount.

Presentation Slides »

December 16, 2015 — This talk will give a view of how blogging with WordPress fits well with Scottish education’s ‘Curriculum for excellence’. Some loose linkage of Community, Connections & Openness in software and education. How Glow blogs, a set of 32 multi-sites with a total of >160,000 blogs are used and are developing. Some notes of the ‘Product Owner’ role and working at large scale to fit the needs of stake holders from a wide range of ages and needs.

Presentation Slides »

December 16, 2015 — Having a website that loads fast is important and we all know that. It can have a major impact on user engagement, conversion, retention and even SEO but for some reason, websites on the web continue to get bigger and slower. Why is this the case and what can we do about it?

This talk will primarily focus on the tools and techniques that can be used to create faster websites. Some topics that will be covered during this talk include performance testing, automations, mobile, design decisions and dealing with clients.

Presentation Slides »

December 16, 2015 — Design is everywhere: including in the films of Baltimore’s filthiest person alive, John Waters. Chris Ford explains what Divine, Domino Sugar and dog poo can teach you about becoming a more confident, creative and effective designer. Let your freak flag fly!

December 14, 2015 — I’ll start by showing you how to set up a contact form in under five minutes. In fact, you can time me! Then, I’ll show you all the options for making much more complicated, multiple-page forms. I’ll talk about using Gravity Forms as a simple shopping cart solution or a way to register users on your site. I’ll show just how flexible it can be by integrating it with Paypal, Stripe, Mailchimp, Zapier and many more services. Even if you’ve been using Gravity Forms for a long time, I’m betting that you will learn something new during my presentation.

Presentation Slides »

December 14, 2015 — You can stand in line at the store or stand in line online to get your hands on this “hot” New York pastry. This session will discuss the lessons learned in building an ecommerce site for James Beard Award-winning Chef Dominique Ansel’s Cronut. Learn how WordPress stands up to the crowds when we sell out of hundreds of pastries within 15 minutes every Monday morning. We’ll discuss things to consider when planning an ecommerce site and things we failed to consider until we were faced with overwhelming demand.

Presentation Slides »