June 6, 2019 — How do you teach a computer to design a website?

You may have heard that robots are coming to steal our jobs. But the end isn’t nigh! I’m here to tell you why that may not be such a bad thing – and share some of my own adventures trying to automate away my own job.

We will investigate how automation isn’t that different from other technological leaps of the past – as well as ways it is vastly different. We will touch on how emerging technologies can be an equaliser and the real world application of machine learning. Along the way, we will talk about ethics, universal basic income, and how soon ‘Judgement Day’ will be upon us.

Finally, we will touch on how Gutenberg opens up new possibilities within the WordPress space, and how to take advantage of those opportunities.

June 6, 2019 — OpenStack is a free and open-source software platform for cloud computing, made up of many smaller projects, each looking after one aspect of the stack.

This talk will show how projects structure their communication to make sure everything works together as one in a final release, how decisions are made transparently, and what we might be able to learn from that.

June 6, 2019 — In my role as a UX consultant, I’m acutely aware of the impact the CMS will have on admin users.

Most CMS users just don’t see content in the way that UXers, designers or developers do. We, as digital types, understand that a page isn’t necessarily a page but is instead made up of 5 different content types. We can mentally map the content from the information architecture, to the design and then to the set of fields and posts in the CMS. Clients really struggle with this concept.

I’ll discuss some ways in which we can ensure our WordPress setup and UI makes our users feel empowered and enabled to create great content regularly.

Presentation Slides »

June 5, 2019 — Why make your site load fast when you can pre-load everything in advance? Take advantage of those SSL certificates to speed everything up, prefetch resources, preload pages, and push assets to the browser directly before the HTML arrives.

June 5, 2019 — Why you should forget about the scores if you want to speed up your website? What is TTFB and why you should care about it? Why using CDN might not help you improve the site speed? Why Twitter with all that funny GIFs loads lightning fast and your visitors have to wait for ages while one single kitten gets loaded? How do you get to know your hosting is fast enough?

During this session we will learn:

– how to measure website load times and interpret the results
– what should you do after all possible caching is already on but your website is still awfully slow
– how to define bottlenecks and fix them without making significant changes to the theme.

Let’s make websites load faster together!

June 5, 2019 — Everyone should be a little bit worried about the security of their site, and at conferences, lots of security talks focus on practical steps people can take.

In this talk, Tim will flip the norms and instead focus on several real examples of sites being hacked but from the attackers perspective. We will see the whole attacks from the bad actors view identifying targets, analysing vulnerable sites, adding payload, exploiting in doing so showing how sites are infected, how some tools do prevent certain attacks and how clever and indeed not so clever bad actors can circumvent lots of hardening done.

Each step we can analyse what could have been put in place to prevent and frustrate the attack and then look at how this can be implemented on your site.

June 5, 2019 — Growing your business is about building trust and whats more trusting then your voice? Where writing a blog post may not come easy to people, speaking is very natural, and intimate.

Podcasting is growing (once again) and it’s not that hard to do! In this session, I’ll show the workflow, best practices and ways to monetize.

Adam will be presenting this as a live workshop, actually producing a real episode of the KSWP Podcast in front of the audience.

June 5, 2019 — There are so many security plugins available for WordPress now but what do they do? Do a site really need one? In this talk we will go over what several of the major plugins for WordPress, how they work and discuss if one is better than the other. From Sucuri, Wordfence, NinjaFirewall, etc. Brute force attempts, exploits, firewalls, and more.

June 5, 2019 — We know how important social media has become in our online marketing strategy. Eyes on your social media posts can convert to site visitors which can convert to sales. Great looking social media posts capture a visitors attention and influence click-throughs.

This session will cover how to use Open Graph and other social meta tags to create great looking social media posts and how to debug common problems with your social sharing.

June 5, 2019 — Did you know that website structure is good for your visitors and for SEO? We’ll discuss why having a good site structure helps visitors find your content and inform search engines what your content is about. We’ll discuss how to configure WordPress for optimal site structure, what plugins to use, and the difference between categories and tags.

Attendees will learn about the two different types of site structure, what search engines look for, and most importantly why good site structure is good for usability. We’ll dig into designing permalink structure, slugs, and breakdown taxonomies and when to use them appropriately. This session will help both developers and users understand how to best structure their websites for both visitors and search engines.