October 4, 2014 — Have you ever wanted to try your hand at theme design, but didn’t know where to begin? Starter themes are a great way to get your feet wet. They do all the heavy lifting programmatically and give you a blank slate to let you focus on your theme design. After this talk, you will have an understanding of what a starter theme is and a knowledge of the top starter themes available as well as the pros and cons of each.

August 29, 2014 — Simon presents some of the techniques, applications and shortcuts that he uses to help him in his WordPress workflow, generally for when he is building themes. The talk is an overview, including things such as git, bitbucket, cli, sass, ACF, local dev. environment, staging and live, apps, shortcuts, browser testing, etc.

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August 21, 2014 — Are you a front-end designer who searches the free WordPress theme directory, finds something similar to the design you’re looking for and then modifies it to suit your needs? A lot of WordPress theme designers start off this way, but soon it’ll be time to take it to the next level. This presentation gives you 6 ways to boost your WordPress theme building skills.

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July 10, 2014 — You can bring delight to users by giving thought to even the smallest part of your theme. This talk is about how to not accept the default and to consider even the smallest element of your theme. It shows that theme details matter.

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July 7, 2013 — This presentation shows fragments of code that was used to create the slider as well how I extended the tinyMCE editor to provide the boxy layout used on the hirshhorn.si.edu site.

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May 27, 2013 — This presentation shows you how you can achieve a custom look from an out of the box theme, and what’s possible with just a little imagination, basic HTML/CSS, and some image editing software. It discusses -what to look for when shopping for themes so you can keep your customizations simple but stunning—and steer clear of “the scary code”! Why reinvent the wheel when you can just make it beautiful?

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