June 13, 2017 — When I started using WordPress in 2008, there was no WordPress community in Slovakia. Our first translations were downloaded by 300 people. Now we have more than two hundreds contributors in our community and more than a fifty thousand WordPress websites. Not bad for a small country like Slovakia. I would like to share my story about our WordPress community in Slovakia (translations, first WordCamps and meetups) and about how WordCamp Europe changes the community from national to one big european community.

June 12, 2017 — Catalina Alvarez in an Occupational Psychologist and resides in Spain. She is involved in the WordPress Community through her husband’s work. She has volunteered at several WordCamps in Spain and will be doing the same at WordCamp Europe 2017.

Catalina is pursuing her Master’s Degree by performing a survey about the Motivation and Burnout in the WordPress Community. She did an internship at HumanMade and found out that there is very little data available concerning a distributed workforce.

June 7, 2017 — Michelle is a writer, photographer and clinical social worker who has worked in the fields of mental health, addictions and research. She has a passion for writing and encouraging the practice with others as a means to achieving a fulfilling quality of life.

According to her writing can be an inspiring practice that has a variety of personal and health benefits. This presentation will cover these benefits, as well as identify ways to make a regular practice of writing. Michelle will discuss ways to find inspiration, offer some writing prompts and discuss her journey with her blog clunkyshoe.

June 6, 2017 — So you can build a technically wonderful website, but does it appeal to your audience? Does it have finesse? Who is it designed for: the owner, the designer/developer, or the customer/user? Are forms user-friendly? This talk will show you the things that make a website more complete, user-friendly, and user-appealing. Topics will include favicons, custom 404 pages, form buttons, footers, colors, SSL certificates, and more.

Presentation Slides »

June 6, 2017 — Jesse Friedman has been building websites for 18 years, and exclusively with WordPress since 2006. Since then he has written several books, taught hundreds of students as a professor, and organized dozens of local meetups (and even a few WordCamps along the way).
In his talk he explain how to build an MVP (minimal viable product). We’ll start by stripping out all the bloat, get rid of all those widgets and start with naked content. Then and only then we’ll start to methodically add features, as they are needed. You will be amazed how much your visitors enjoy just reading your content and engaging with you through simple solutions.

You’ll walk away with practical strategies around:
– Building content driven websites
– Gaining traction and increasing engagement
– Elegantly monetizing your blog
– Plus 5 experience tips that will make your website 1 of a kind

June 6, 2017 — Meg Fenn and Rachael Dines, Directors of Shake It Up Creative Ltd talk about the pain points that clients face when setting up their business website and how to help them through it. For example, one common pain point is content. Where to start? How much? Does it need to optimised? Another common pain point is deciding whether to manage their own website or pay a web designer or marketing company to do this for them. Do all business owners need to be techy?

June 6, 2017 — We can all pretend that we’re helping others by making web sites and software accessible, but we are really making them better for our future selves. Learn some fundamentals of accessibility and how it can benefit you (whether future you from aging or you after something else limits your abilities). We’ll review simple testing techniques, basic features and enhancements, coming trends, and where to get help. This isn’t intended to be a deep dive, but more of an overall primer for those who aren’t sure where to start nor how it helps them.

Presentation Slides »

June 6, 2017 — The most important factor for people in web design is, that it makes it easy for them to find what they want. Yet, so many websites are so poorly structured, that it’s impossible to do so. If you want to learn what content should be on your site or how your menu should be structured: this talk is for you.

Information architecture is something serious, however, the majority of businesses have structured their sites in an bad way, using the ITTIR-method – “I think this is right”. While common sense is a useful tool and a lot of sites are very simple (e.g. 5 pages total), there’s a better way to go about it. If you already have tens of pages on your site, you should do proper information architecture analysis. Guiding people through the vast amount of information on offer is something that requires thought and research. Intuitive navigation doesn’t happen by chance. So don’t jump the visual part of of your webdesign too quick, but take plenty of time to think about the architecture of the information you offer on your site.

This helps you answer user’s four most important questions when they arrive at a website:

Am I in the right place?
Do they have what I am looking for?
Do they have anything better (if this isn’t what I want)?
What do I do now?
After this talk you’ve learned what content should be on your website and how you should structure it.

Presentation Slides »

June 6, 2017 — Alain is a freelance software engineer and WordPress consultant.

In his talk he presents a case study of wrapping a legacy WordPress site into a scalable architecture, using a combination of existing and custom packages, that provides the following benefits:
– services architecture that lets plugins define their dependencies, with automatically resolved loading order
– auto-wiring dependency injection that allows coding against interfaces instead of implementations
– configuration management that can account for differences in environments
– centralized logging throughout the entire site that can be sent to logging servers
– bus system that handles events and commands without blocking the frontend
– all of this without any noticeable impact on content editors

Presentation Slides »

June 6, 2017 — Nela Dunato is a brand and web designer with over a decade of professional experience. She’s worked in several web development agencies before becoming a full-time freelancer in 2013.

She said design is easy to see, and this makes it an easy target to shoot down by anyone and everyone. Bad design process leads to many problems, such as matters of personal taste-determining the outcome of the project, and endless revisions that postpone the website launch date. In this presentation, you’ll learn the two biggest mistakes designers and other professionals make in their process, and how to fix them so your design concepts get accepted faster.

Presentation Slides »