December 19, 2016 — How much money and credibility would you lose if your website went down for a week? A day? An hour? Let’s take a look at some of the most common things that can go wrong with a WordPress site. This short talk will outline easy plans and steps you can take to prevent website disaster. Kate will share a downloadable action plan to help you get started.

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December 19, 2016 — It was the Greek Philosopher Heraclitus who said “There is nothing permanent except change” and another, perhaps more well known American philosopher, Billy Crystal who, said “Change is such hard work.” Both of them though millennia apart recognise two existential certainties, change happens and navigating change can be difficult.

We as WordPress users and developers are navigating an ecosystem that’s rife with change, Matt Mullenweg counselled us in the last State of the Word to Learn Javascript deeply, the REST API is changing the game in terms of what’s possible with WordPress… Furthermore, it’s almost as if every day there’s some new framework, toolkit or productivity hack that could ‘totally change your workflow’. Quite frankly, it’s overwhelming.

Such looming changes may fill you with either excitement, or dread, so in this talk Dee will be discussing the kinds of ways you can adjust your trajectory, and your mindset to confidently navigate large scale change as it approaches.

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December 18, 2016 — In an ever-growing WordPress ecosystem, both the number and scale of companies using WordPress for their online operations are expanding rapidly. Providing your client’s visitors with a usable, accessible and good-looking frontend to their website is usually concern number 1. But should it be? Often, the usability of the WordPress backend is overlooked by developers, and choices pondered on by core developers for months are negated by developers overloading the admin panel with useless menu items, options and data — resulting in a complete lack of insight.

In this talk, I will discuss with you the need of building WordPress websites and web applications that are not only usable to its visitors, but also to its users — be it administrators, content editors or developers. I will walk you through the why and how of improving your WordPress backend experience using plugins and custom code (specifically, the menu API and the columns API), lead by my experience as a developer for clients and as a former co-author of the Admin Columns plugin.

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December 16, 2016 — Let’s talk about design in a different way: is the purpose of your site clear to those who visit it? How does their experience differ when they visit on a small phone versus a laptop? Is it clear how you want people to engage with your content, or do you assume they know what to do? In this presentation, designer Alison Knott will help you evaluate your site’s purpose from a design and usability perspective. If you have trouble getting readers to engage with your content, or want to be more objective with the look of your site, this talk is for you!

December 16, 2016 — It’s known that WordPress is open-source and community-built, but how exactly one can get started contributing can be a bit of a mystery. In fact, many people aren’t aware that one can contribute to WordPress without being a master of code! Documentation, translation, teaching, infrastructure, design, and yes, Core – there are many different ways to contribute to the WordPress.org Project. My presentation will enlighten audience members to the world of open-source contributing and make it easier for them to connect with the Make.WordPress.org community.

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December 16, 2016 — Learn how to customize the look of your website with nothing more than your brand identity. I’ll show you how to integrate all the elements of your branding (logo, favicon, colors, fonts, typography, design elements, etc.) in WordPress to create a custom-looking site without having to know a lot of code. Using a child theme, some custom CSS and a few tried-and-true plugins, you’ll have a custom-looking website in no time!

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December 16, 2016 — Independent bloggers have become multi-platform influencers with success being much more broadly defined. Getting people to pay attention, being influential on social media networks, obtaining financial rewards and non-monetary incentives, and acquiring self-branding skills are being tied to the creation of valuable content. All of these are associated with a more recent, evolved view of blogging and success. In this session, attendees will learn what it means to be a successful blogger, discover some of the latest trends in blogging, gain insight into becoming an influencer, get advice on how to view success, get tips for finding success-generating topics to write about (e.g., products, services, people, events,…), learn about maintaining a balanced work-life lifestyle as an independent blogger, and find out about emerging trends in generating revenue from their blog and social network.

December 16, 2016 — Are you trying to get users to DO something on your site? Whether it’s sign-up, buy, download, donate: if you have a goal you NEED landing pages! This talk covers important basics like what landing pages are and why/when to use them, attention ratio, message match and key persuasive elements. Includes a walk-through of examples of our premium interactive landing page templates and case studies to see what converts best and why. Run better, more efficient, and just plain cooler campaigns, plus get the most out of your marketing time and dollars!

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December 16, 2016 — By mimicking user flow and interactions, acceptance testing plays a key role in catching any kind regressions in someone’s plugin or theme. In this presentation, I will show how to write acceptance tests using a very simple little framework called Codeception and how someone can automate those tests using a continuous integration server such as Travis CI.

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December 16, 2016 — You’ll love being a WordPress theme developer even more than you already do by learning to apply time- and sanity-saving practices to your WordPress development workflow. If you’ve heard about web developers using technologies like CSS preprocessors (e.g. Sass), task runners (e.g. Grunt, Gulp), and version control (e.g. Git) and wondered how to apply them to developing WordPress themes, I’ll show you how!

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