September 7, 2014 — Have you ever built a house? Imagine buying a lot, hiring a contractor, and then he shows up with a crane, bulldozer, and some ‘crete and says “I’m ready.” We often do the same thing when we build websites. We know we want a website, but don’t do the necessary planning to turn our ideas into reality. In wireframes for WordPress, I will discuss what wireframes are, my process for creating them, and how they fit into WordPress. Put on your hardhats and get ready to stop dreaming and start building!

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September 7, 2014 — An important part of any non-profit organization’s mission is getting its message out to as many people as possible. A well-designed WordPress website can help even the smallest non-profit reach a wide audiences and help activate both supporters and volunteers.

Get tips for making your website content more effective at communicating your unique story and receive an overview of easy to install plugins that will help raise funds, engage donors and volunteers, and help promote the good work that you do.

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September 6, 2014 — With WordPress powering over 20% of all known websites, one would assume that it’s used for more than just blogging. WordPress is used for corporate websites, mobile apps, social networks, e-commerce, and more. This session includes guidance on setting up, hosting, securing, theming, and customizing a WordPress e-commerce website. Criteria is shared for selecting an e-commerce plugin, while parts of the talk will focus on a particular plugin for the purpose of illustration. The session is most helpful to those who are interested in or in need of an e-commerce website, but could use some guidance in getting off the ground. The talk delves into moderately technical subjects, but not in a way that would prevent beginners from gleaning important information.

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September 5, 2014 — Don’t get into trouble with choosing the wrong theme, because you will regret it if you do!! Choosing a theme can affect how much design and coding you have to do, as well as how user-friendly the site will be to your client — basically it affects you and your client’s happy-factor and overall success!

Learn what things to test & research when choosing a theme, what needs to go in your contract to cover your ass, and how to talk your client through the process of being okay with using a template/theme.

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September 5, 2014 — Want to change hosts? Don’t be intimidated. There are differences between hosting services, but you can meet all the challenges as long as you have access to FTP/SFTP and PHPMyAdmin. Topics that will be covered:
1. Preparing your site for moving
topics: backup, maintenance, domain name registration
2. Preparing the new hosting site
topics: new installation, uploading content, overwriting the database
3. Fixing issues on the new site
topics: file permissions, fixing postmeta media paths, testing, updating DNR.

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September 5, 2014 — This talk goes over the method I’ve created for designing websites from the content outward. I’ll cover aspects of designing in code, type choices, line height and typographic scale, creating a proper base style sheet for your child theme, usability best practices, semantic structure, and more. Since the web is fundamentally a text-based, utilitarian medium, making good type choices is the most important aspect of web design. In this presentation, I’ll walk you through the things I’ve learned in my 15 years designing for the web.

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September 4, 2014 — Whether you’re starting a personal blog to share your thoughts and ideas, or blogging to promote your business, storytelling is the most effective way to engage your audience. Recitations of facts or personal journal entries might convey meaning, but stories provide your audience with a relatable entry point into your subject matter. Story inspires, teaches, and stimulates discussion. The well-told story is memorable and unique, positioning you as a trusted voice.

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September 4, 2014 — WordPress 4.0 “Benny” (named after jazz great Benny Goodman) is all about deepening the seamless experience of creating, managing, and publishing your content. You can learn more about the release here.

September 3, 2014 — Backbone.js and Underscore.js are exciting additions that allow more scalable Javascript creation, both on the front and back end of the system. Along with these great tools came some other, smaller utilities and helpers that make the life of a WordPress Javascript developer just a bit easier.

So let’s explore just some of the hidden wonders in the wp object: wp.ajax, wp.template, wp.shortcode, and wp.html.

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September 2, 2014 — Pseudo-selectors are my favorite CSS tool. They make it possible to create some amazing visual effects, while keeping your HTML semantic and minimizing the images on your site. This presentation introduces the basic concept of pseudo-selectors, and goes over the various pseudo-selectors that are available and when they are useful. It provides examples from sites I have developed of how I have used pseudo-selectors to achieve visual effects that would have been very difficult or even impossible without them.

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