May 15, 2015 — WordPress the platform is great, but it isn’t just about the software. We’re on a mission to democratize publishing and have a very real opportunity to make the web a better place. The question isn’t whether you should be involved (you should) or when you should get involved (now), but how – and there are many great ways to do so. Lets go!

May 15, 2015 — This presentation takes you through the process of building a theme from scratch with what is arguably the best starter theme available: _s (Underscores). The presentation looks at design and development decisions and principles including mobile-first, accessibility, responsive design, and information architecture, and takes a deep dive into the structure of the Underscores theme to show the audience how to build a theme from the ground up to become what you envisioned and more.

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May 14, 2015 — Could you recover your WordPress website if it was lost due to a hardware failure, hacked, or corrupted during an update or plugin install? Having reliable automated backups can make the difference between taking 10 minutes to restore your site, and needing to do a complete site rebuild that may take a week or more. This presentation will look at the many options and plugins for backing up your WordPress site including backing up to Amazon S3.

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May 14, 2015 — WordPress isn’t just a great platform for secular sites. It is a powerful and cost efficient tool for creating responsive sites for religious organizations. This session will look at some of the themes available for creating religious sites and the content and plugins that are helpful to this sector.

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May 12, 2015 — WordPress is global. Themes and plugins should be prepared for translation and there are some very basic steps you can take to make sure that is the case. But there is more to it, especially if you are doing client work. Lisa has launched several large, enterprise-level networks in multiple languages and has learned some valuable lessons along the way that she would like to pass on to you in this session.

May 12, 2015 — Child themes are a simple but powerful way to customize a pre-made theme. Learning how to use them properly means you’ll never risk losing all your modifications when the developer releases a new version and you update the theme. Using easy-to-follow language, This talk walks you through the steps to set up a child theme and we’ll get started making some tweaks – from CSS look-and-feel adjustments to more substantial changes in functionality.

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May 12, 2015 — In this talk learn how to tell a story with your content, how to engage users on their journey, and avoid the problem of the “Single Path.” We’ll also examine websites that do this well and cover practical strategies you can employ today to craft better experiences for your users.

May 11, 2015 — Approach your site design as pure typography. This may sound weird at first, but if you think about it, everything from headlines and body copy, to buttons and quotes, almost all of it… is just plain text. It’s at the core of almost every single site you design. My talk discusses adding an initial step to your design process to help you knock out design work faster, easier, and more efficient by simply writing everything out first.

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May 11, 2015 — Learn how easy it can be to start with a static HTML page and convert it into a dynamic theme. This talk covers the basic template tags and is intended for people who are comfortable with HTML, CSS.

May 11, 2015 — Cain & Obenland in the morning! – a morning show-style WordCamp talk with three segments: two that will cover any number of WordPress topics – current WP happenings, theming, design, development, best practices, worst practices, future trends, you name it – and a special guest interview with a big name from the WordPress world.