June 19, 2020 — CSS is incredibly powerful for styling, but did you know it can also dramatically affect how accessible and inclusive your website is as well? Many operating systems now have advanced settings to allow users to customise and personalise their digital experiences.
By using newly introduced standards, we can also honour these visual preferences in our web pages using CSS.
In this talk, Kirsty will show you how to honour a users visual preferences and how simple changes can affect the overall user experience for everyone, not just those with specific accessibility requirements.

June 19, 2020 — Merary will be hosting a practical session covering the most relevant considerations for developers, testers, designers and project managers in relation to accessibility best practices.
In this interactive session, attendees will be able to emulate people with disabilities in various scenarios, audit apps (Android/iOS), websites, digital documentation and design techniques using modern concepts and tools. We will cover all Web Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1), WAI-ARIA best practices and Inclusive Design methodologies.

June 19, 2020 — The New York Times release of Snowfall in 2012 took the web industry by storm. Media-rich and captivating, its design evoked wonder, fear, and desperation in the face of an avalanche. Snowfall was one of the first great art-directed digital experiences in this era of the modern web.
Art direction isn’t a new concept, though. Look at any magazine or print publication—designers have long been creating evocative media experiences. Recent web technologies have made the dream of unconstrained art-directed experiences on the web possible. In this talk, Mel will explore how we can use the new WordPress editor, Gutenberg, to create gorgeous art-directed websites.

June 19, 2020

June 19, 2020

June 19, 2020 — While WordPress does need to be more open to youths and the next generation, it’s also vital to realise that the next generation needs to embrace WordPress. Otherwise, WordPress will become another relic like MySpace, AOL, and even Facebook. Why are these platforms relics? David’s talk will explain all.
The audience will be quickly shown why it’s important to pay as much attention to the “next adopters” as it is to advancing technologies like Gutenberg, REST API, and accessibility. The talk will explore what the community can do to be more open and receptive – from organisers to developers.

June 19, 2020 — Keeping your site secure is difficult, and often times knowing where to start is the hardest step. With terms and acronyms like cross site scripting (XSS), cross site request forgery (CSRF) and others, it’s hard to know just what to do to keep your site secure.
Sometimes the best way to know how to protect a site is to hack one yourself! In this talk we’ll all join forces and become hackers for a short time to hack a live site and learn just what these various attacks are. Most importantly, we’ll also discuss how to protect your site from being exploited.

June 19, 2020 — Hristo gave his first talk about WordPress speed optimisations back in 2013 in London. Since then, a lot has changed – people have started caring more and spending more time optimising their websites.
In this talk, Hristo will go through the different parts of the WordPress loading process and share the latest must-use technologies in 2020 that will give you the best possible site performance. He will explore improvements that have been made within WordPress and how web services have evolved to allow us to achieve previously unimaginable results. Hristo will cover the latest caching mechanisms, improvements in PHP, new imaging formats, scripts, CSS optimisation and more.

June 19, 2020 — After spending enough time working with WordPress, you end up developing a sixth sense of what works and what doesn’t work. For example, experience allows us to distinguish good ideas from bad ones, or a professional web design from a poor quality one.
However, if you want to build a profitable WordPress site, why rely solely on your instincts when you could rely on objective measures implementing an A/B test? In this talk Ruth will present why A/B tests are important and the types of tests you might want to do on your own websites. She will spend some time reviewing an A/B checklist to discover what things to test and will provide some implemented test examples and their results.

June 18, 2020 — Great websites don’t just happen. Exceptional user experiences are part of a rich study of psychological principles that are more than pretty pictures. By mastering a few design concepts we can create UI patterns that make it easier for users to navigate pages, consume information, make purchases and interact with our online brand.
With the evolution of WordPress, design will play an increasingly important role as decisions move into the hands of users.
This talk will explore how the key laws of UX can be applied to every aspect of our site, plugin, app or store, providing designers, developers and product managers with a framework of terms to create well-designed interfaces for editors and end-users.