March 29, 2020 — Some general thoughts on how to secure your WordPress installation and demoing some mitigation by the example of iThemes Security. Recording of the online meetup via Zoom

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March 26, 2020 — Spend time talking with a group of web business owners and the conversation will inevitably include someone’s unfortunate experience with a terrible client. Most web pros have a story or two (or eight). While bad clients can’t be completely avoided, there are strategic steps any business owner can take to contain the impact of a bad client.

In this session, Nathan will explain the how to create a system that preserves workflow and keeps problem clients in check.

Take aways: (1) four fences that will keep problem clients in check, (2) the friendly monsters you should know and how to contain them, and (3) the payoff of protecting your business by building good fences.

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March 23, 2020 — Take a walk through the main stages of a website project. Understand the tasks to be completed and the decisions to be made.

Learn who does what, and how to ensure everyone communicates well, for a successful project that launches on time and on budget.

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March 23, 2020 — I will be discussing the use of Divi and WooCommerce after version 4 of Divi is released. We will look at the options and how to use the new features so we don’t need to use third-party plugins to format items, carts and account features etc.

Divi 4.0 and new features
Setup of global settings on Header, Body, Footers
Setup of Blog Posts
Setup of Products
Setup of 404 Page
Discussion about the inbuilt ‘Divi Help and Support Center’ – System Status, Safe Mode and Elegant theme support

March 23, 2020 — Several months ago we got REALLY EXCITED when we discovered that some industrious individuals had started implementing Gutenberg for other CMS & frameworks.

Gutenberg for Laravel? Gutenberg for Drupal? Amazing!

Then we tried it ourselves. And failed, miserably.

Back to the drawing board – we needed a different way to integrate the shiny new block editor we’d already promised our favourite client with the mother of all websites.

We’re talking a custom PHP website built on a highly complex custom enterprise CMS/ERP system developed over a 15 year period. No sweat.

Fortunately for us, the latest craze in the WordPress development world – headless WordPress – came to the rescue!

Find out about our journey as we share what we tried before landing on our final solution, what we ended up with, what we’d do differently next time and what our key takeaways from this wild adventure were!

March 23, 2020 — It’s been over a year since Gutenberg was released with WordPress 5.0 and we have seen some great improvements.
While Gutenberg continues to outshine on the content creation experience, there have been so many updates and changes in Gutenberg that it’s hard to keep up. Many developers also find block development challenging because there is a learning curve to React and JavaScript

Whether you are someone who always thought of digging into it, but never started, the one who is left behind, or even just want to get your questions answered, this online meetup is for you.

It’s time to challenge those challenges.
This meetup helps you build those core concepts and have your questions answered, by diving deep into Gutenberg

Topics that will be covered:

– Touch on basics of Gutenberg
– Understand how things work in Gutenberg behind the scenes.
– Understanding the Gutenberg core.
– Build tools like @wordpress/wp-scripts and @wordpress/create-block
– WordPress Data Module.
– Current State and Future of Gutenberg.
– Contributing to Gutenberg

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March 20, 2020 — Working from home, or living at work? How to stay productive while your own psychology is working against you — and how disconnecting is the key to work/life balance.

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March 20, 2020 — With enough experience, everyone has had clients who start off well before going rogue. They might go silent, ignore your requests for information, become unreasonable in their requests, or even refuse to pay your final invoice.

With a little preparation, you can drastically reduce these incidences while improving your professionalism, reducing your financial risk and minimising your stress to boot.

In this talk I’ll cover:

Warning signs and red flags to watch for
Designing an awesome client onboarding process to minimise the risk that clients go rogue
Specific words and phrases to use when you’re in the thick of a client crisis
How to write your own policy (even if your company consists of me, myself and I) for dealing with these situations.
Regardless of the particulars of what you do, everyone in business needs to be an awesome communicator, not just over email, but face-to-face, through video and other copy.

Communication is not just what you say, it’s what people hear. So we’re going to look at why people act the way they do, how we react to difficult or confusing clients, and how to better communicate so that you can reduce client friction as well as your own stress.

This is not a technical or complex talk.

The target audience is for website designers who have struggled with managing clients’ expectations and want to do a better job of client communications while also reducing their risk.

March 19, 2020 — I’m the director of ChillyBin Web Design, a Singapore-based web design & development agency creating delightfully-designed, mobile-optimised, super-fast, and ultra-reliable solutions for businesses across Asia-Pacific.

March 19, 2020 — A great website shouldn’t be measured on how trendy the design is or how fast it loads. A great website needs to do the heavy lifting to generate leads or sales.

In this session, we’ll dive into your website’s call to action—How to identify your target market’s needs, present the solution, and determine the next best step they need to take to buy from you.

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