July 17, 2014 — Fast, simple, SMART. Mobile devices have forever changed the way we interact with content. Now we have to consider many things such as HiDPI graphics, responsive design, speed, UI/UX patterns, touch target sizes, gestures, and more. All while not losing track of what’s important: Content.

In this presentation Sara discusses the influence of mobile on design trends and demonstrates implementation techniques of smart design such as icon fonts, svg, and other helpful tips.

Presentation Slides »

July 16, 2014 — “The weakest link in the security of anything you do online is your password. It’s the key to your site, your email, your social networking accounts or any other online service you use. If your password is easy to guess, your online identity is vulnerable.” – The WordPress Security team (http://vip.wordpress.com/security)

Most WordPress sites are hacked because bad habits — and, more specifically, bad passwords. It’s easy to recommend better passwords, but this talk covers the technology that is changing how the password battle is being waged. Background on botnets, two-factor authentication, SSL, and password rot will accompany actionable advice any user can follow to secure their WordPress site.

Presentation Slides »

July 16, 2014 — Designing for first impressions is no easy task. 50 milliseconds isn’t enough time to read a single line of copy or even fully comprehend what you’re looking at. So how can you design for good first impressions? The key is understanding human psychology and emotional reactions. Despite our highly evolved state, all humans have a subconscious “lizard brain” that makes lightening fast assessments about what feels good or bad. If you understand the lizard brain, you can use design to illicit positive first impressions. This talk discusses the lizard brain and how it secrets influences our actions and thought. It then covers the framework for emotional reactions and how you can use design to illicit positive reactions to visual stimuli.

Presentation Slides »

July 15, 2014 — Touch, gestures and voice control are quickly becoming more important for designers (and developers) to think about and design-for. Interaction can enrich a user’s experience of a product or service, and express character and feeling within those interactions. During this talk I will assist in equipping you with the skills you need to design for interactive experiences on WordPress and on the web. How can we achieve clean, easy and scalable interactions that are optimized for every device? This talk focus’ on current solutions from various experts in the field, as well as our best practices, and will reveal what the future might have in store.

Presentation Slides »

July 14, 2014 — We’re long past the days where a few lines of JavaScript in a single .js file cut the mustard—modern web applications can involve thousands of lines over hundreds of files, and WordPress themes and plugins are heading in that direction fast. You can make your codebase much easier to maintain and expand by breaking your scripts up into modules, encapsulating different logical units in their own files. Learn several ways to modularize your code, with a focus on AMD and Require.js. And take a quick peek into the future to discover the native module syntax coming in the next version of JavaScript!

Presentation Slides »

July 13, 2014 — This talk examines some common mistakes and pitfalls clients, designers, and developers make throughout a projects life time. Starting with discovery / scope and going through delivery it shows what not to do and (hopefully) ways to avoid these common mistakes.

Presentation Slides »

July 12, 2014 — From core installation and updates to plugins and themes, work is in progress to improve every area of the international WordPress experience.

Presentation Slides »

July 11, 2014 — To setup and configure many of the popular and powerful WordPress themes today can often require a solid grasp of working with custom post types and fields, design customization options, custom templates, shortcodes, admin settings and various other nuances of working with and tweaking WordPress. Different themes also take wildly different approaches to building admin settings areas and providing access to custom content, so it means you likely have to do something different to setup each theme you work with.
This talk covers the essential skills and common scenarios you will come across when getting into the niche field of setting up and customizing awesome WordPress themes for yourself and others.

Presentation Slides »

July 11, 2014 — Not your mother’s Loop talk! This session is an examination of the Loop from an advanced developer perspective. As WordPress continues to grow as an enterprise solution, we as developers need to make sure the queries we’re writing within the loop are fast, safe, and hardy enough to withstand the bombardment of traffic many top sites encounter. Walk through how a query is set up in WordPress, and how that query builds the MySQL query.

Presentation Slides »

July 11, 2014 — Are you confused on how to structure content beyond posts and pages? Do you want to use custom post types, taxonomies and custom fields but don’t know how to architect this custom content? What will be the custom post types? How can I use taxonomies to sort my custom post types for a unique use case? How many custom post types do I need? Should it be a taxonomy or a custom field? Each project maybe unique and bring different challenges. Preplanning the relationships of custom post types, taxonomies and custom fields using Information Architecture best practices helps to ensures this content is organized effectively by taking the time to conduct analysis and planning, before implementation. This session focus’ only on conducting a strategy session using sticky notes, sketching and card sorting not on coding. No review of plugins or code will be included as you can find this everywhere on the web.

Presentation Slides »