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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March 19, 2020 — My WordPress journey started with small projects, with total budgets under $100. Nine years later, we have grown to reach the other end of the spectrum, regularly handling Enterprise WordPress projects with budgets of over $100K per year. At this scale, the rules for “selling” WordPress to a client change.

WordPress’ traditional advantages don’t necessarily apply anymore. I will start by addressing the two largest apprehensions that enterprises have- security & scalability- and cover other pain points like:

– Integration with existing systems
– Ownership and responsibility
– Extensibility and long term viability
– “Free” and “GPL” concerns

I hope the lessons I share in this talk from our own learning will help increase the WordPress adoption in enterprises.

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March 19, 2020 — In this session we’ll explore three SEO core tactics for creating a search engine friendly websites and blogs. We’ll deep dive into setting up content silos, the pros and cons of content depth, and super powers found in internal links.

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March 19, 2020 — You know how to build a WordPress theme, you’ve written your share of plugins, you know all the secrets to transform a WordPress site into the application you need it to be. But do you like to solve problems by adding more options? Are you worried that “good enough” is not good enough?

Perhaps it’s time to work with an expert in web design, a professional who can enhance both the beauty and the usability of your creations. In this session we’ll discuss the importance of designers to WordPress development, how to decide when you need one, and how to find one worth working with.

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March 19, 2020 — Ever wondered if you could use an image you found on the web for a post or page on your WordPress site?

This class will discuss both images and fonts, licenses and fair use.