November 17, 2020 — What’s a design system, and why should you use one? In this talk, you will learn the basics of design systems and why they matter. We will walk through real world examples of design systems, discover how to create a design system that fits your needs, and learn simple ways you can use WordPress to begin implementing a design system of your own.

November 17, 2020 — Within the Delaware Department of State, the Government Information Center builds and maintains WordPress websites for state agencies and municipalities. WordPress as a CMS makes it easier for non-technical employees to add and edit content, and Delaware citizens benefit by having access to information that impacts their lives. When the pandemic hit, the Government Information Center built a WordPress website for COVID-19 information that the public could use to find the latest data, testing locations, child care, reopening guidelines, and other important information. Everything was built with non-technical users from the health and emergency management departments in mind, as they would be in charge of maintaining content that was constantly changing in an ever-evolving public health crisis. This talk is about how the team of designers and developers came together to quickly build a website that contributes to public health, reaches under-served communities, and helps keep Delawareans safe.

November 17, 2020 — What started out as a hobby and a passion grew into a successful business. Joost de Valk built the WordPress SEO plugin mainly as a hobby. In his work as an SEO consultant, he saw what big companies did in order to improve their SEO. Joost was able to translate much of that in a WordPress-plugin. For years, Joost did not make any money with the plugin. And then the tide changed! Joost founded Yoast. The company grew into one of the biggest companies in the WordPress community. The journey towards such growth was like riding a rollercoaster. In this talk, Joost and Markeke will share the view from the rollercoaster. What were the highs and lows in growing the company? How did they grow their audience? How did they set up branding and marketing? Could they grow the same company outside of the WordPress ecosystem? And why is WordPress so immensely important to the company?

November 17, 2020 — It’s been nearly two years since the block editor, Gutenberg, has been released in WordPress Core. What have you been building with the block editor? This session will cover the evolution of the block editor since the launch in Core, what’s coming in the block editor in 2020, and how you can use the block editor to scale your design and development innovation to build better sites faster. If you’ve been staring at the block editor and wondering how it can help your design & development workflows or how you operate your freelance or agency business, don’t miss this session.

November 17, 2020 — As Google continues to change and adjust the search results page, structured data has become a key way to influence these changes for your listing. Markup like FAQ, Q&A, How To, and other formats can be a great way to draw attention to your website, provide more information to the user, and push your competition further down the page.

November 17, 2020 — Join Josh Gellock of Expander Digital for a step-by-step walkthrough of how to add Google Analytics to your WordPress website using Google Tag Manager. Learn about the benefits of this setup and how it can help your digital marketing efforts and website performance.

November 17, 2020 — We often talk about websites the way we talk about cars. Are you driving a flashy sports car or a stable hatchback? And is yours a lemon, no matter how pretty the paint job? And if you just got one used, what’s going on under the hood? There’s a way to address these questions about your website, and it’s called a technical audit. The vast majority of site owners live in fear of the day their site breaks down. Performing a site audit can ensure you understand the current state of your site, from the back end code level to the front end performance. It can also help you see potential problems when it comes time to add features (like that sweet audio system). People attending this session will learn the basic building blocks of performing a technical audit, including approaches for auditing different aspects of your site including custom code, theme and front-end functionality, back-end configuration and plugins, and accessibility. The session will also cover tools that can be used to run these tests and tips on what to watch for when managing a website over time.

November 17, 2020 — Users’ minds take shortcuts to get through the day. Usually they’re harmless. Even helpful. But what happens when they’re not? In this talk, David Dylan Thomas will use real-world examples to identify some particularly nasty biases that frequently lead users to make bad decisions. He’ll then talk about some content strategy and design choices you can use in apps, designs, and platforms to redirect or eliminate the impact of those biases. Finally, he’ll explore our own biases as designers and some methods to prevent our own blind spots from hurting users.

November 17, 2020 — Improve you website’s speed by eliminating some of your plugins. In this session you will learn how to test your website’s speed with a few free options (Lighthouse and GTMetrix, for example) and then you will learn how to track down the causes of slowdowns and fix issues.

November 17, 2020 — Many WordCamp attendees are remote employees and, thanks to COVID-19, many more have now tried it. Most will tell you how great remote working is and that it works incredibly well for a lot of businesses. But let’s be honest, it’s not for everyone. While several large companies have tried it and failed, in this talk, we’ll reveal what often gets forgotten: what a business needs to do to make it work. Further, how individuals can decide if remote work really is the future of working for them.