August 9, 2017 — Panel discussion on Design

July 23, 2017 — Kat Slump is a rising senior at the University of Nebraska at Omaha where she is pursuing a degree in IT Innovation.
Kat has had experiences in a variety of areas — from development to marketing to design — interning at Interface School, Flywheel and Apple. In her spare time, Kat loves playing with her kitten, Swift, who happens to be named after her favorite programming language. She also has a love for fashion and blogging. You can find Kat on Instagram & Twitter via @katslump.

July 6, 2017 — DESIGN IS DEAD!
Why does every website look the same today? Let’s take a stroll down the internet history of web design, see what went wrong, and what went right. I’ll also share some useful tools and design tricks to break free from the cliché and stand out in the world (wide web).
LONG LIVE DESIGN!

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June 29, 2017 — The way we structure our websites affects the way they can be marketed. And the way they can be marketed affects the number of sales, leads and conversions – your bottom line. So, why are we still starting website projects asking how much does this cost, instead of how much value could I bring to the customer?

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June 21, 2017 — In design, fonts and typography are essential to deliver a certain perception of the website.
And a relevant message. Moreover, it’s important to take care of disabilities.
Designing themes and websites need to follow some good practices.
What’s about using best font services, tools and methods for implementing awesome and relevant fonts in your WordPress website.

Prerequisites: no specific prerequisites to attend this talk, it would be useful for anyone who needs to learn how typography can improve his website, and a simple reminder for those (as designers) who need to implement custom web fonts.

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June 21, 2017 — Michael is a designer at Automattic working on Jetpack and WordPress.com. He contributes to the WordPress project and is the most active on the design team. Michael has also been running monthly WordPress meetups in Denver for the last three years.

What the heck can we do to improve the design process on open source projects? Designing for open source projects is difficult and comes with a unique set of challenges. The challenges include communication difficulties, tech limitations, slow implementation times, community pushback, complex developer tools, unique design considerations, and lack of design process. I’m going to address these challenges and propose ways to improve or implement an efficient design process as a community.

June 6, 2017 — Meg Fenn and Rachael Dines, Directors of Shake It Up Creative Ltd talk about the pain points that clients face when setting up their business website and how to help them through it. For example, one common pain point is content. Where to start? How much? Does it need to optimised? Another common pain point is deciding whether to manage their own website or pay a web designer or marketing company to do this for them. Do all business owners need to be techy?

June 4, 2017 — Shortcake is a “feature plugin” (under consideration for inclusion in WordPress core) that helps developers create a simple user interface for inserting shortcodes, and renders previews of those shortcodes inside the Visual Editor. At NC State, Shortcake offers solutions to some of the biggest challenges of running WordPress at a big, decentralized institution.

This presentation will discuss how to build Shortcake-powered shortcodes, how the way we think about themes has changed, and the future of the WordPress editing experience.

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June 4, 2017 — Why do so many websites look the same? As our tools have improved and we’ve been able to do more with the web, there’s been a growing trend toward websites that look exactly alike. Why did this come to be, and what can we, as designers and curators of the modern web, do to avoid it? We’ll touch briefly on the history of web design, and examine how modern tools and practises have contributed to a more homogeneous-looking internet.

In order to answer these questions, we’ll explore on the history of web design, and examine how modern tools and practises have contributed to a more homogeneous-looking internet. We’ll examine the web design process from two perspectives – the designer’s and the developer’s – and discuss how the blurring of those roles impacts the design process. Along the way, we’ll discuss the various merits of following or bucking trends. Finally, I’ll offer some constructive advice to help you – whether you’re a designer or not – add an individual touch to your work.

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May 30, 2017 — The accessibility of a website is significantly affected by the underlying HTML, CSS and javascript that developers use to create it. But it is also possible to impact upon the accessibility of a site at the design stage – both the visual design, and the interactive design or UX. And it’s not just about colour schemes either.

In this presentation I will outline a few key points to keep in mind when you are designing your next beautiful website or theme. I will illustrate the points with some good (and bad) examples.

Good design and web accessibility can go hand in hand – come and find out how.

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