March 15, 2017 — As a site owner, I wanted to have more flexibility and control over my content so looked towards custom post types and custom meta fields. This is the journey of how a non-developer learnt to structure post types, custom meta fields, the plugins and libraries I’ve used to create my sites with and some tips for making the editor more user friendly so all the extra fields don’t feel overwhelming.

Presentation Slides »

March 15, 2017 — Four months after the UK voted to leave the EU, where are we in terms of its impact on the web profession? How is our work going to change? What new rules might we have to follow? In fact, whose rules might we have to follow? Learn what’s ahead for the next few years, Brexit or not.

Presentation Slides »

March 15, 2017 — More often than not, support requests aren’t actually requests for support, but an attempt to get a website on the cheap. So what can you do to manage our customer’s expectations and ensure your business remains profitable?

The answer? Stop selling support and start selling updates.

March 15, 2017 — Recruiting new supporters and encouraging them to take part in campaigns and make donations is crucial for charities and non-profits. In this talk I will talk about how a few charities I have worked with recently, ShareAction, Positive Money and Refugee Action, have managed to achieve that using their WordPress websites. Through a mixture of strategic use of plugins and optimising the sites to encourage people to sign up or donate at the right time, I will go through a range of case studies and practical tips to show how other people can get similar results.

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.

Presentation Slides »

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!

Presentation Slides »