April 3, 2019 — Attendees asked the panel about questions related to WordPress. Topics ranged from Programming, SEO, Page Builders and Gutenberg to Design, Social Media, and Marketing.

April 3, 2019 — WordPress can be used to start a blog, make a site for a club, or power a business, large or small. WordPress can also be used as a way to document your life, and save important things for later. You can bridge WordPress to other parts of the web that you use to store all of your data in one place, without having to worry about an app, hardware maker, or social media site going out of business and taking all of your content with it. I considered myself an interloper into the IndieWeb movement, until I realized that the movement — just like the technology that powers it — is decentralized. My habit of copying data created on other sites, as well as creating a website for my lifelogging, is part of what this community is about. Come learn about how you can use WordPress to power and amplify your voice online, and reclaim the web from the walled gardens for the user!

April 3, 2019 — Participants will walk away from this workshop feeling that social media mastery is within their grasp. They will learn how to build a high quality social media campaign.

April 3, 2019 — Trying to break out of the hourly trap? Love the idea of supplementing your client work with steady, reoccurring revenue? I was in your shoes three years ago when I launched my first successful product. Now we maintain around ten premium WordPress products.

In this talk I’ll discuss how to launch your first product including coming up with ideas, putting together a team, marketing strategy and what to expect.

April 3, 2019 — Starting with discovery exercises like empathy mapping and user-journeys, learn how to bring together the UX and design phases to create a user-centric website. Get tips and best practices that push your site design to the fullest, yet keep your developers from hating you at the end of the day.

April 3, 2019 — WordPress is known for its extensibility – the ability to change the behaviour of the software without breaking the core code. This is added through plugins and themes.

Understanding how to extend WordPress is essential if you want to develop solutions using WordPress. This talk will teach you how actions and filters work, with some practical and theoretical examples to illustrate their functionality.

Attendees should hopefully come away from this talk with a greater understanding on how actions and filters, or hooks as they are collectively known, can unlock the door to building greater things with WordPress, and as I worked out being able to say “Wow, you can do (almost) anything with WordPress!”.

April 3, 2019 — The ease of WordPress has catered to quick learners and do-it-yourselfers. It’s what makes WordPress so great and universal. However, many questions come with the DYI approach: What should I look for when selecting a theme? How I find good plugins to extend my site’s functionality? When is it better to hire someone else to develop my website? How can I prequalify a developer? Knowing the answers to these question can save you from a few headaches.

April 3, 2019 — Everyone loves some handy tips and tricks, right? How about a huge list of all the ways I have personally improved my workflows, processes, production quality, and even lifestyle? I’ve been building WordPress sites, writing code, working remotely, and generally doing all things WordPress for years now and I’ve discovered a whole lot of cool stuff in that time. Come see the curtain get pulled back and learn which tools I value the most and the good habits I’ve developed which have made the biggest impact on my life.

April 3, 2019 — My topic will delve into the depths of psychological principals, such as the Von Restorff effect, Occam’s Razor, the Serial Position effect, and how they relate to UI design and user experience.

This won’t be a hands-on talk, but more of a philosophical look into why we make some of the decisions we do on the web, and how these psychological principals backup a lot of the common sense design techniques we typically already know as designers.

Come ready to think, learn, and apply these cognitive psychology principles and how they relate to your UI/UX work.

Presentation Slides »

April 3, 2019 — You can’t just install a couple of security plugins and call it a day when it comes to safeguarding your WordPress website. Plugins are a great start. The door to your website now has a lock on it. But how about adding a dead bolt? A door chain? A peep hole? Titanium reinforcement? A pet dragon hiding inside? Plugins help with the 5th layer of security. Did you know there are 4 more layers that you are most likely not protecting? Huh? Did he say 4 more? Come learn how to safeguard the other 4 layers so that even with the best of plugins, you drastically reduce your (and your client’s) chances of getting hacked. Just as you would add layers of security to protect your home and family, your WordPress security needs a multi layered approach. Come learn how to build a wall, a moat, and some additional lookout towers to keep the bad guys away from your castle. Oh, and dragons? We’ll talk about them too, if we have time.