January 7, 2019 — Whether it’s form or order notifications, marketing emails or newsletters, websites send email to us and our visitors. These messages are important for conducting any kind of business online. You don’t have to be a server admin to make sure your websites’ emails get delivered! Understanding a few basics will give you the tools to setup and troubleshoot all manner of email communication from your WordPress website.

Takeaways:

How email and the WordPress email function work in non-technical terms.
Correct settings for outgoing email messages.
Email escalation – when and how to use SMTP services and plugins.

Presentation Slides »

January 7, 2019 — HeX Productions are working on their way to become a fully accredited accessible agency with every project being tested internally and externally for accessibility issues, it’s not been an easy road and we would like to share our experiences with you.

By providing live demonstrations and real world experiences James will talk through quick wins to help make your sites accessibility and help you agency move forward to only producing accessible websites without interfering with workflow.

James has a background of university work with sites such as Longwood and Queen Mary.

January 7, 2019 — The forthcoming block editor in WordPress has forced us to reimagine how users build content with our plugins—plugins like The Events Calendar, which have more than half a million active users. Join Zach Tirrell, Modern Tribe’s Director of Product, as he recaps our experiments in design, strategy, and development that have helped us ensure our plugins take full advantage of the new editor while gracefully supporting content from the old one.

January 6, 2019 — Possibilities, tools, networking, discipline and mindset.

January 6, 2019 — How I regained strength and confidence after having to deal with the consequences of my biggest fear: REJECTION.

If you struggle with imposter syndrome and are afraid of being rejected, this talk is for you! Also, I might mention ‘borrels’ 😉 #shareyourrejections

January 6, 2019 — In the WordPress Community, we talk about community frequently. We know how to build community with WordPress, but what about with our own clients? Retaining clients and parting ways with clients requires grace. This type of relationship maintenance is an important thing to learn for introverts and applies to new businesses to veterans. It’s an art and a science — soft skills for the win! In this talk, I’ll discuss how I went from an employee to a business owner — with half of the clients I need in the first four months — because of soft skills. We’ll talk about relationship building tips for organic and sustainable growth — online and off.

January 6, 2019 — “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen” – Do you know the spiritual song? This talk will cover a personal journey how working with WordPress saved my life. My very first touch with the thing internet I had at the end of the year 2000. My third daughter was a five-month-old baby girl when we went online. My first child was born when I was at the age of 18. Now I am a mom of five children and a grandmother of a cute baby. Today I am a successful working mum and happy with my outcome. But I struggled with some issues over several years. Mostly health issues caused by stress during and after the divorce, as well as some deaths in the vicinity. Nothing severe, but not ignorable. Hey, I survived a burnout after the hard times of divorce fights. I thought… But at the end of summer 2016, I got seriously ill. Not the right place for details here, but let me tell you what happened to me to stay alive. WordPress is part of my life since its beginning. Shortly after the first release, I played a lot with this piece of Software which let us enjoy great WordCamps and making friends. Being a part of such helpful and friendly community can help to survive and overcome real-life rock bottom events. Let me share with you the lessons I’ve learned.

January 6, 2019 — In this session, we’ll be looking at bleeding edge CSS techniques and some of the cool properties that are available today or just around the corner.

Our Speaker, Keith is the co-founder of Highrise Digital – a specialist WordPress development team.

As a serial community starter, he is the founder of the WordPress London meetup group, co-founder of codeHarbour – a web meetup in Kent – and started Folkestone Cycling Club. Keith has been building WordPress sites for over eight years and has worked with agencies and clients of all size.

January 6, 2019 — WordPress draws a lot of its success from the fact that it jumps through hoops to maintain backward compatibility. Most WordPress sites can be smoothly updated to the latest version of WordPress Core with the click of a button. However, this compatibility comes at a steep price: through this absolute priority on backward compatibility, the project sets itself up to continuously accumulate technical debt in the process. The effects of this are an increasing effort to maintain the codebase and an increasing difficulty to add new features. Let’s examine how these two factors interrelate and what this means for WordPress’ current state and future evolution.

Presentation Slides »

January 6, 2019 — I will talk about a study we did comparing mouse tracking to eye tracking showing that mouse tracking is not the best way to go to base design decisions on. Furthermore, I’ll talk a bit about new online analytics approaches as eye tracking and emotion tracking as well as heart rate tracking and how they can be used to actually test UX and not just usability.