June 2, 2017 — With the rapid popularization of web fonts over the past few years, type on the web has never been more exciting! We’ll learn a bit about basic typographic principles, review techniques and services for integrating web fonts into your WordPress sites, and finally conclude with a bit of speculation on where type on the web is heading.

June 1, 2017 — He started using WordPress when running a charity 7 years ago. He was the client, partnering with the agency, now work for, so his experience using WordPress on both sides of the fence. At his agency, I’m an Account Manager and Team Leader, working with hundreds of clients, and many team members, to deliver a wide range of WordPress sites. Prior to WordPress, He ran mass engagement, behaviour change campaigns relating to climate change and environmental conservation.

His session explored the psychology and methods behind a loving client relationship.

Presentation Slides »

May 31, 2017 — It’s 2017 and many clients would rather pay for short-term paid advertising to attract leads than invest in the long game of search engine optimized content marketing. However, if you’ve been paying attention, you know that Siri, Alexa, Cortana and others have changed the way clients reach for products, creating increased demand for local search. Evolution in semantic search has broadened related keyword terms, giving more value to alternate phrases in search and resulting in more emphasis being place on area keywords. Website developers must adjust their workflow to assist clients in creating local, relevant content to deliver findability results to their clients. As businesses use advertising and organic search in audience targeting, more closely-matched real audiences and, more importantly, real revenue increases. Customers who are local tend to refer more often and become repeat buyers. While locality is not all that matters when curating content, it places a large role in whether the content will be seen by a large regional audience. In this talk I will share how website creators can change client results by recognizing the impact consistency, social promotion, relevancy, area-sensitive keywords and quality writing play in converting generalized text into content that matters. Further, I will explain how local blog posts and page content rise to fit that need and can extend as podcasts, videos and more to appeal to alternate search tools, such as YouTube, iTunes and Yelp.

May 30, 2017 — Protecting diversity, empowering oneself and ones colleagues are difficult are challenging career questions that we all face at some point during our professional lives. As WordPress professionals, we are lucky that, in addition to our communities as freelancers, agencies or publishers, the larger WordPress community serves as a support network when we face these challenges. The goal of this panel is to bring together professionals from different sectors of the WordPress community to share their experiences facing questions of diversity and empowerment in the WP community.

May 30, 2017 — Taking that first step from working as a freelancer to making your first hire and becoming an agency is an exciting but daunting step. In this talk I will explain how I accidentally started an agency and strategically grew my WordPress specialist agency from myself to over 40 people over the course of 5 years with minimum staff turnover.
I will cover:

How and when to make hires
Where to find new employees (from developers to operations)
How to create a company culture
How you can ensure your employees are on board for the long run

May 30, 2017 — Your website’s tone of voice affects the way your users feel and how they act. So could the language on your site be causing people to feel uncomfortable or excluded?

We’re going to explore how changing even a few words can make for a much more inclusive website. If time permits, I’ll also present user testing results to illustrate the difference these small changes can have on user diversity.

This workshop includes:

• Why and how to create an inclusive tone of voice
• Tips on improving the UX and accessibility of your writing
• Examples of subtle changes you can make to your own site(s) and your other marketing channels
• How online inclusiveness can improve offline diversity

May 30, 2017 — VVV 1 is a popular local developer environment, but VVV 2 is now available with significant improvements to site setup.

This session will walk through the new features, and how to migrate to VVV 2

May 30, 2017 — The accessibility of a website is significantly affected by the underlying HTML, CSS and javascript that developers use to create it. But it is also possible to impact upon the accessibility of a site at the design stage – both the visual design, and the interactive design or UX. And it’s not just about colour schemes either.

In this presentation I will outline a few key points to keep in mind when you are designing your next beautiful website or theme. I will illustrate the points with some good (and bad) examples.

Good design and web accessibility can go hand in hand – come and find out how.

Presentation Slides »

May 30, 2017 — Rocio Valdivia is a Community Wrangler at Automattic. Mathieu Viet builds plugins, has a WordPress French podcast and is a founding member of @wpparis. They are the lead organizers for the WordCamp Europe Contributor day.

Contributor Day will take place on Thursday June 15th at Business Centre of “Les Docks de Paris”. Registration starts at 08:30 am, and opening remarks at 09:15.

To find out what to expect at Contributor Day go to: https://2017.europe.wordcamp.org/2017/05/17/everything-you-need-to-know-about-wceu-contributor-day/

You can find out about the talk and schedule at: https://2017.europe.wordcamp.org/schedule/contributor-day-schedule/

May 29, 2017 — Is your site suddenly spammy? Features stopped working the way they should? Once-speedy pages taking forever to load?

To keep your WordPress website secure and working well, you must maintain it properly.

The code should be updated regularly to increase security, fix bugs, and add features and functionality.
Regular backups are crucial to restoring your site if necessary—things go wrong, even with the best of sites and servers.
Security scanning makes sure that nothing hacky has happened.
Optimizing for speed keeps site users engaged.
In this session, Andi will teach you the basics of WordPress website maintenance. She’ll suggest automatic steps you can set up with your host as well as manual tasks you (or a professional) can complete to boost security and performance.