March 15, 2017 — Imposter Syndrome affects people across all ages, genders and vocations. A high rate of people in tech experience imposter syndrome as they progress their skillsets and have few to no coping mechanisms in which to overcome feelings of inadequacy. Rough outline: What is imposter syndrome? My own journey. Famous “imposters” Why you aren’t less than. How to overcome feeling like a fraud.

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March 15, 2017 — Fitting user focussed design methodologies into a development process needn’t be difficult. Our objectives as UX practitioners, as designers, as developers, as product owners etc are the same – to build the best possible thing in the time we have and within budget. The difficulties that surround projects are often much more to do with communication and process than they are about the differences between the disciplines. As well as adding weight and dimension to UX discovery, thinking about what we are building as separate and connected objects, and particularly the exercise that I share in this session, can be really helpful in building a foundation for better communication and collaboration across team, discipline and organisation(s).

March 15, 2017 — WordCamps are really a great place/event to get a lot of learnings, meeting new people, know more of WordPress and many more. All the attendees make the investment of their time and money to attend different WordCamps and therefore they are always very curious to know about ways they can get the most out of the WordCamp. Through all my personal experience attending different camps and interactions with other WordCamp attendees, I have compiled a checklist of things that would be very useful to all attendees of the WordCamp – for this one as well as all the future WordCamps.

March 15, 2017 — 10 Step Guide to doing your own thing (with WordPress) I’ll share the 10 most important things I’ve learned since I started to use WordPress and the experiences faced in starting a WordPress-focused web development agency. I’ll share stuff on how focusing on a single path and managing your ideas, risks, fears and failures will make you better at what you do.

I’ll also include my own personal mantra about why I chose to go 100% WordPress, quite simply: “You’re either a genius or an idiot if you build your own CMS, choose wisely”. My hope is that everyone can take something away from this talk. In the spirit of open-source and WordPress I feel that we should always be open and share our career paths if only to inspire the next generation not to make the same mistakes!

March 15, 2017 — The REST API is THE hot topic right now and almost every WordCamp in the past couple of years has featured talks aimed at developers who want to use it. But what does it mean for people who don’t have the skills to interact with it or aren’t able to ‘learn javascript. Deeply’? In this talk I’ll look at what the REST API means for the future of WordPress for non developers and beginner developers, and outline the opportunities it gives all of us and the way it might change the way non-developers work with WordPress in the future.

March 15, 2017 — I built my first large WordPress site five years ago and just completed rebuilding that very same website. In rebuilding this site I have had the unique opportunity to rethink many of the same problems that presented themselves before and also to reevaluate the work I did the first time around.

This talk will cover a range of beginner mistakes I made in the first build and the way approached solving these same problems now. We’ll also talk about how some changes I’ve made to the new site are a result of trends and technology changes over time.

Overall, this talk is for anyone who is getting started with building WordPress sites with complex data structures and requirements. My hope is that you’ll learn some of the lessons I learned the hard way the easy way!

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March 15, 2017 — Online, everything’s a competition. If your website isn’t healthy enough to compete, you lose, which can be detrimental to the profitability and viability of your business. If you want your business to win the online marketing race — or at least place in the top 10 — you have to train for it, just as you would if you were preparing for an actual, physical race.

In this session, I will provide you with a five-point training regimen that will help you whip your WordPress website into shape and make it a true contender in online marketing.

1. Learn what website architecture issues to look for and what tools will help you detect them.

2. Discover the role of keyword research in today’s online marketing landscape and how to properly optimize content.

3. Understand content’s role in online competition.

4. Learn social media’s threefold role in your website’s health and how it impacts search rankings.

5. Know what usability issues you should be testing to make using your site effortless for visitors.

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March 15, 2017 — Are you afraid to keep your WordPress site up to date? Start treating maintenance work seriously. A little time now can save you a lot of time later. Learn some tips and tricks for keeping WordPress up to date and running smoothly.

March 14, 2017 — WordPress has many moving parts that can be updated at the click of a button through its native tools. Keep your repository up to date by learning how to optimally configure your local .gitignore file. Benefits include: less merge conflicts, greater collaboration between developers and environments and of course, ease for clients and end user experience.

In a nutshell: What should you be versioning? Answer: YOUR themes or plugins you develop.
Optimizing your gitignore to version only the relevant code per your project, or directories can assist with allowing customers to update other features, such as WordPress Core and plugins that are not designed by your team. Your repository is then more streamlined and focused on code. This also excludes any configuration files that would cause issues between development environments. In the long run, you have less code to review/version and customers have the ease of use to know that only code is being updated for the theme and no potential issue with pushing anything unnecessarily.

March 14, 2017 — In this talk I’ll show how to integrate your WooCommerce store with other systems that power your business. Perhaps customer data needs to be available to a CRM system, or the order data needs to be updated by the warehouse’s inventory system. All of this functionality an more can be harnessed by using WooCommerce’s built in REST API!