December 21, 2015 — The focus of my presentation will be on WordPress and website accessibility; from a front-end perspective. First, I will explain what web accessibility is and why it is important. To continue, I will discuss AODA and Section 508 regulations for Canada and the United States. Then, I will go over some key WCAG 2.0 compliancy requirements a developer will need to ensure the websites they develop are fully accessible. From there, I will showcase a few web accessibility tools, then some WordPress accessibility plugins; followed by a quick demonstration on how to evaluate a website’s accessibility.

December 21, 2015 — Is it easy to build a website with WordPress? The answer to that question depends on what you have to compare it to.
Fortunately, it’s not difficult to learn. There are steps you can take to make sure your clients feel confident managing the content on their sites and appreciate the power and flexibility they don’t get with hosted solutions. If we put in a little extra effort when building sites, we will turn our clients into WordPress fans—and fans of our products and services.

December 20, 2015 — Let’s talk type! We’ll take a look at the importance of typography in design, as well as some basic best practices. You’ll learn about a few of the top font services as well as methods and tools for implementing the right font for your WordPress site. Whether you prefer to work with a plugin, change your theme options, or manually edit your theme, you’ll walk away knowing a few ways to add shiny new fonts to your site. This talk will be useful for anyone wanting to learn how typography can improve their site, and designers who are unsure how to implement custom web fonts.

December 20, 2015 — The Enterprise market still sees (in large part) WordPress as a “blogging platform” or only sees WP as an option for “simple” use cases.
This talk focuses on how we can better address that market and show the true power of WordPress’ focus on simplicity (of experience) even in contexts where complexity (of implementation) is required.

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December 20, 2015 — Your added functionality usually means additional Settings, Post Types, Taxonomies, Custom Fields and overall Workflow. Don’t make users struggle to look for your settings page, or become confused and frustrated when trying to fill in fields for a custom post type. Provide them with inline help, where and when they need it
In this session you will learn how to limit support tickets, emails and general user frustration, by creating

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December 20, 2015 — Awesome happens when we take great tools and services and bring them together in new creative ways. We’ll dive into a mash up of the Polldaddy API and Fieldmanager (custom fields) to create a tournament-style bracket system. We’ll look at creating an interactive experience that’ll keep users coming back for weeks through voting, round procession and dynamic match-ups. Under the hood we’ll get into custom fields, data storage, scalability and leveraging the power of existing services/functionality to make our projects better.

December 20, 2015 — Everyone’s goals are different. Maybe you want bigger, better clients. Maybe we want a new job or a promotion. Maybe you want to work less and focus more on traveling, family, or your hobbies and interests. Aaron walks through his experience building and leveraging his reputation in the WordPress community to do all these things, and shows how you can, too.

December 20, 2015 — Data architecture. The key to a smoother development process and a happier relationship with your clients. In this talk I will define “data architecture”, talk about what you need to know about WordPress before entering it’s realm, questions you need the answers to before jumping in to it, and how to use this information to properly plan your data before programming.

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December 20, 2015 — 4.4 is going to be an exciting release. This talk will give a first-hand account of the development process, changes and future changes planned for core, and a preview of all of the exciting things in the release.

December 20, 2015 — In this talk, I share how our work-from-home team overcomes technical and social hurdles, to mirror natural, in-person creative ideation (sketching, wireframing, etc.) with a mashup of hardware and cloud tools. This talk is best for teams allowing or considering telework, as well as freelancers who want to impress their clients.

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