April 20, 2016 — Designers and developers are both required to build world-class websites, but sometimes it can feel like a struggle for us to work together in a truly collaborative way. In this session, we’ll share a variety of strategies to bridge the gap between design and development ranging from optimizing workflow between designers and developers with unique skillsets; replacing responsive mockups with side-by-side collaboration; creating clean, grid-based, developer-friendly design files; and developing new layouts and features in a way that respects the original design. We’ll cover these approaches and more as we share the process we use to (happily!) work together as a designer/developer team.

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December 17, 2015 — One of our goals as WordPress developers should be to build user friendly websites and admin interfaces. In many cases once we’ve added custom post types, taxonomies, plugins, and other features required by a site’s design and structure, the WordPress admin panel can become unwieldy and may be confusing to site managers. In this session we’ll explore a number of strategies and techniques that will help make site administration an empowering experience for your clients. We’ll discuss modification of the admin panel, strategic use of custom fields, managing permissions, use of labels and help text, and more, all with the goal of making hand offs to non-technical website managers stress free.

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December 10, 2015 — You’ve got the basics of CSS down, but you are ready to kick it up a notch and add a bit more pizazz and interactivity to your websites. In this session we’ll explore the fundamentals of CSS transforms, transitions, and animation. What are the basic building blocks that make up these capabilities? What is the difference between a transition and a transform? What does browser support look like? Most importantly, how can you put these tools to use in your next project and where can you find good resources to learn more? We’ll answer these questions and more as we explore the basics of how to add some of the more truly dynamic elements of CSS to our websites.

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November 6, 2014 — You’ve been managing content in WordPress, maybe you’ve dabbled with modifying a file, but you’re not sure where to go from here (other than total failure). In this session we’ll cover how to transition from dabbler to budding developer, learning opportunities around the web, and issues that can impact your learning, ranging from imposter syndrome to gender and generalisms to non-computer science educational backgrounds.