June 6, 2020 — Learn about Open Sourcing Mental Illness: a nonprofit built on a movement of changing how we talk about mental health in the tech community. This talk presents results from multiple years of OSMI’s Mental Health In Tech surveys, showing how employees feel about discussing mental health issues with employers and coworkers.

Find out more about resources, as well as where and how to get help.

June 6, 2020 — Do you want shoppers, or do you want buyers? An ecommerce store is only as valuable as the number of visitors it converts to buyers. But Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is a successful online store. Building a sustainable, cash positive storefront takes time – and a thoughtful strategy. We’ll go over some simple tips you can use to increase engagement, lower customer acquisition costs and, ultimately, improve store sales.

June 6, 2020 — Live during WCEU 2020 Online

June 6, 2020 — Education doesn’t stop at the textbook. In fact, it rarely even starts there. The best education is in life experiences. But you have to learn how to recognize them. There is a lesson in everything. This talk explores how you can grow from the most unlikely of places.

June 6, 2020 — We cover a few different things that have to do with web accessibility.
1. Why web accessibility is important for WordPress developers to understand.
2. What WCAG 2.1 and Section 508 are.
3. Then we offer our 11 easy steps that you can take immediately to help your website be more compliant.

June 5, 2020 — In this panel, we assessed the business decisions media companies face when considering migrations. We talked about the choices that our panelists have had to make, tough lessons learned, along with some practical considerations for executing a well-run migration.

June 5, 2020 — We all want fast sites, but what is fast? What is performant? We may know it when we see; yet quantifying and communicating about web performance effectively is still a challenge.

In this talk, we discussed our ever-evolving set of standards for what comprises a fast site. With special attention to the problems that ads and analytics present for publishers, we also discussed how antiquated notions of web performance are a ripe environment for abuses by 3rd party code.

Finally, we reviewed techniques for improving performance monitoring as a tool for institutional change.

Presentation Slides »

June 5, 2020 — This lightning talk was an exploration of the operational and technical journey behind editorial commerce for the Airstream Supply Company.

June 5, 2020 — Last year, Google incorporated the Lighthouse tool into its PageSpeed Insights API for mobile. This tool checks a web page to determine how optimal the mobile experience is a for a visitor. As more than half of Internet traffic comes through mobile devices, these are the visitors that need to be prioritized.

Earlier this year Mediavine began developing a WordPress theme framework built for speed. The goal was to achieve a perfect score on Lighthouse, while maintaining all of the basic WordPress content creation functionality.

This session focused on the individual aspects Lighthouse analyzes, and how Mediavine was able to optimize that framework for each of those areas during the development of a theme. The purpose of this presentation was to supply insight on how organizations can achieve a higher Lighthouse score and improve their own search engine ranking, while providing an optimal experience for their readers.

June 5, 2020 — With the introduction of the block editor, the WordPress ecosystem and editing experience has shifted, particularly for teams who were deeply familiar with the Classic Editor and had workflows and tooling designed around that. With editorial under pressure to continue producing content, it can be tough to put together a plan to move your site, especially if it’s a large site, over to the new editor.

In this talk, we explored the migration path to Gutenberg at a high level and some strategies for making the transition as seamless as possible. We also drilled down and got tactical, with tasks that development and editorial can work on together. These included an audit of existing components and workflow and making a plan for how these might be implemented in the new editor.

By the end, everyone had some strategies for helping their team transition to the new editor and take advantage of all Gutenberg has to offer.

Presentation Slides »