All sessions are open to WordPress users of all levels and all ages. We encourage that you seek out new worlds by sitting in on topics you are not familiar with – because what is learning without a little exploration?
Sessions are 35-40 minutes with time for Q&A after the talk and a break to move between rooms or grab more coffee. We will strive to record all sessions and post them to WordPress.tv so you don’t miss a thing!
Design: From Zero to Prototype on a Budget
This is a workshop that will cover many steps of the Design Thinking Methodology, taking a problem, ideating solutions, then prototyping those solutions.
No technical or design experience is required. The processes shown here can be worked into your own strengths and skills whatever those might be.
By the end of the workshop we will:
- Participate in an Ideation Session
- Create a paper prototype
- Test our Solution
Workshop Schedule
- Identify, Empathize and understand a problem we want to solve
- Learn how to interview users
- Validate assumptions
- Value Testing
- Interview 3-5 users during session
- Break into teams to perform ideation sessions
- Learn how to host, participate and use different methods for Ideation Sessions
- Conduct Ideation Session during session
- Refine ideas generated in sessions
- Learn about dot voting
- Refining ideas with Storyboarding
- Refine ideas from Ideation sessions
- Paper Prototype and iterate on winning ideas
- Learn about Wireframing
- Learn about Iteration
- Learn about Low vs High Fidelity
- Create paper prototypes from ideas generated
- Making digital Prototypes using Invision or Marvel
- Learn how to put paper prototypes in Invision or Marvel
- Learn how to make these prototypes clickable
- Sharing digital prototypes
- Make paper prototypes interactive
- Validating digital prototypes
- Testing these prototypes to make sure value and usability are aligned
- Usability and User Testing 101
- Script Template given
- Conduct 3-5 tests during session
- Show me what you got!
- Present work
WordPress 101
Before you spend the weekend getting deep into designing, developing, marketing, and otherwise improving your WordPress sites and skills, you’ll want to have a firm understanding of what WordPress is and why it has become the dominant web publishing platform.
If you have no experience with WordPress and want to learn about it as well as start setting up your first website, this workshop is for you.
The schedule will be fluid throughout the day, spending time where all attendees are finding the most value rather than adhering to a strict schedule. As a general guide, the topics that will be covered are:
- What is WordPress?
- The difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org
- How to find a web host and setup a site
- How to build and test sites on your computer
- What themes and plugins are
- How to choose a theme
- How to choose plugins
- Using the Customizer and Gutenberg
- When to pay for themes, plugins, and services
- Ways to make money with your site
- How to troubleshoot your site
WordPress Development
The schedule will be fluid throughout the day, spending time where all attendees are finding the most value rather than adhering to a strict schedule. As a general guide, the topics that will be covered are:
- Setting up a local development environment
- Getting started with the Command Line
- Using Git in your workflow
- Creating a child theme
- Creating a plugin
- WP-CLI
Design: From Zero to Prototype on a Budget
- Participate in an Ideation Session
- Create a paper prototype
- Test our Solution
Workshop Schedule
- Identify, Empathize and understand a problem we want to solve
- Learn how to interview users
- Validate assumptions
- Value Testing
- Interview 3-5 users during session
- Break into teams to perform ideation sessions
- Learn how to host, participate and use different methods for Ideation Sessions
- Conduct Ideation Session during session
- Refine ideas generated in sessions
- Learn about dot voting
- Refining ideas with Storyboarding
- Refine ideas from Ideation sessions
- Paper Prototype and iterate on winning ideas
- Learn about Wireframing
- Learn about Iteration
- Learn about Low vs High Fidelity
- Create paper prototypes from ideas generated
- Making digital Prototypes using Invision or Marvel
- Learn how to put paper prototypes in Invision or Marvel
- Learn how to make these prototypes clickable
- Sharing digital prototypes
- Make paper prototypes interactive
- Validating digital prototypes
- Testing these prototypes to make sure value and usability are aligned
- Usability and User Testing 101
- Script Template given
- Conduct 3-5 tests during session
- Show me what you got!
- Present work
WordPress 101
- What is WordPress?
- The difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org
- How to find a web host and setup a site
- How to build and test sites on your computer
- What themes and plugins are
- How to choose a theme
- How to choose plugins
- Using the Customizer and Gutenberg
- When to pay for themes, plugins, and services
- Ways to make money with your site
- How to troubleshoot your site
WordPress Development
- Setting up a local development environment
- Getting started with the Command Line
- Using Git in your workflow
- Creating a child theme
- Creating a plugin
- WP-CLI
Opening Remarks – (Auditorium)
Blogging to Build Your Community (And Revealing Yourself in the Process) – (Auditorium)
Some of the world’s most powerful communities have been built with WordPress, and these communities have created change both big and small. As a blogger, though, how do you make sure your voice doesn’t get lost as your community grows?
Ethics on the Web: A Discussion – (Auditorium)
Join us for a panel discussion on the ethical frameworks that currently rule the web. We’ll touch upon the duties of platforms, publishers, developers, designers, marketers, business owners, and end users when it comes to how they use the web.
KidsCamp (10am – 3pm)
WordCamp parents can now usher in the next generation of WordPress explorers at our fourth annual KidsCamp! Parents attending WordCamp can bring their little explorers along and enjoy a day of parent-child learning under the tutelage of some of our WordPress Captains!
These special kid-friendly lessons will introduce your child to the wonderful world of WordPress and help them learn or improve upon WordPress development, design, and use skills! After the day is complete, your child will leave with their very own WordPress.com site up and running!
Interested WordPress parents or guardians will need to have a ticket for Saturday attendance purchased before signing up their little explorers. Parents will be responsible for staying with their child during KidsCamp, but may switch guardians during the course of the day if you are both attending. Each child will need his or her own laptop or tablet to work on.
Each KidsCamp ticket provides your explorer with lunch, an afternoon snack, and full access to the day’s lessons. We are accepting explorers from ages 7 to 14 to participate in these special lessons and spots are limited to only 20 children (not including their parents/guardians).
Ready to start your child out on their own WordPress journey? KidsCamp tickets are on sale now!. Also, if you have an older explorer ready to launch into some advanced topics, they are welcome to join us for the full sessions and workshops with a regular ticket!
How to Effectively Manage the Editorial Process in a Multi-Author Blog
Some years ago, I was lucky enough to be part of an inspiring and vibrant group of Italian female entrepreneurs sharing their stories in an online chat group. In 2013, we decided to add some structure to our exchanges and launch a blog.
Five years later, the blog is still going strong and quite popular in Italy. It grew from a few friends contributing to 10 regular authors and 50 guest contributors.
I’ll share the challenges we encountered over the years trying to create a smooth process for the growing number of authors and my experience in keeping the quality consistent while maintaining a schedule relevant to the audience’s expectations.
I’ll recommend best practices including how to manage user permissions, how to assign editing and curation, deciding who has the final editorial say, and delegating the task of actually getting the content online.
I will share practical solutions, based on what worked for us, that many different types of teams can use to coordinate their efforts and keep things in check.
Web Accessibility for WordPress
We show you some easy steps to help make your WordPress website become ADA Section 508 compliant.
In this talk we touch on WCAG 2.0 and how important web accessibility is for the hearing impaired and the blind.
You’ve been hacked! Now what?
WordPress sites are one of the most attractive targets for cybercriminals, and every day millions of attacks take place against websites large and small. A lot has been said about how to protect WordPress from malicious users, but few people understand what to do when hackers get in.
When your website gets hacked, PANIC is a natural first response. Then comes a wave of questions: Why me? Why my site? How did they get in? Should I try to fix this myself, or hire an expert? Whether I hire someone or go the DIY route, what does the process involve? Do I need to notify my customers…or the police? What could I have done to prevent this, or at least be better prepared for it? Yes, handling a hacked website can be stressful and confusing, but this talk will help you navigate the sea of questions and get your site back online. And if you haven’t been hacked (yet!), this talk will give you guidance for developing an incident response plan.
A/B Testing with Google Optimize
Most website owners focus on getting more visitors to their website(s). This can be very time and resource intensive.
A/B testing can help you convert more visitors to customers. In other words: it can help you make more money with the same amount of visitors.
In this talk Wouter will show you how to do A/B testing using free tools like Google Analytics and Google Optimize. You will find that simple adjustments to your website can make a huge difference in terms of conversion.
Building a Successful Code Review Culture
A code review process has lots of benefits. In addition to the many technical and organizational benefits, there are also invaluable opportunities to set team members up to grow and succeed when an effective code review culture is adopted by everyone.
While working at Boston University’s Interactive Design department, Jonathan helped create a code review process that not only met the organization’s technical needs, but also established a culture that encouraged collaboration between designers, developers, and other departments throughout the University through code reviews.
This talk is a guided tour through that new process. We’ll discuss the technical aspects (such as the tools and integrations used), the organizational and workflow aspects, as well as the human factors, which are often ignored but are the most important to establishing a sustainable code review culture that will help your organization flourish.
Can I use a Template? – An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Contracts
Have you ever wondered if you can use a contract template for your business? Tired of Contracts talks that start with “I’m not an attorney, but…”
Rian Kinney IS a Florida attorney here to answer your entrepreneurial questions., such as: Can I use a Template? If so, what should I look for? In this talk you will discover what clauses are “boilerplate” and you should have in your contracts which will also help you better discern which templates are well drafted.
Other legal questions and issues that will be addressed are e-signatures, credit card processing fees, privacy policies and terms of use.
Building Blocks: Atomic Design in a Gutenberg World
Gutenberg may be the latest and greatest in WordPress content building, but the concept of modular design isn’t new. WordPress templates and themes are robust and feature filled, but building truly dynamic web pages is limited by the old concept of static pages and posts. Modern web content needs to be flexible and evolving, but not everyone is a developer who can build custom layouts to fit each use case. Page builders, custom fields, drag and drop interfaces, and bespoke solutions have all tried their hand at solving the problem of separating the technical/design components from the content itself. But what is modular design, and what does it have to do with WordPress? In this talk, we’ll discuss the principles of Atomic Design, how to stop thinking of your content as “pages” and “posts” in favor of the concept of “building blocks,” and how to extend this mindset to utilize the potential of Gutenberg and other similar tools as a web designer.
Dealing with Problem Clients – Fencing in the Friendly Monsters
Spend time talking with a group of web business owners and the conversation will inevitably include someone’s unfortunate experience with a terrible client. Most web pros have a story or two (or eight). While bad clients can’t be completely avoided, there are strategic steps any business owner can take to contain the impact of a bad client. In this session, Nathan will explain the how to create a system that preserves workflow and keeps problem clients in check.
Take aways: (1) four strategies that will keep problem clients in check, (2) five monsters you should know and how to contain them, and (3) the payoff of protecting your business by building good fences.
Encrypt All The Things: Practical Encryption from SSL to Email and Beyond
There’s a lot of talk about website security, keeping sites updated and making sure passwords are strong, etc. These techniques might be great for your site itself but aren’t helping your privacy or your users and, in the right circumstances, can leave your fancy new passwords and other data open to anyone who might be listening. We’ll look beyond passwords and updates at ways to protect your privacy, your users’ privacy and the data that is sent to and from our own sites as well as those we use every day.
Before Design: What steps you need to take before you start designing or developing your website
This topic will be an overview to the leg work to do before you jump into the design and development stage. I will give an introductory talk on site maps, user personas, content guides, and other things to think about how your website will function before you start designing or developing your site.
The Wonderful World of Actions and Filters
The Actions and Filters API is what puts WordPress head and shoulders above its rivals.
We’ll start off the talk by touching briefly on what an action or filter is, how the WordPress core functions use them, as well as how to find obscure (and often overlooked) ones.
The meat of this talk, however, will focus on the unlimited potential for actions and filters. We’ll take a look at how plugin and theme authors use them, and cover best practices for including them in your own work. Finally, we’ll cover some extreme examples, like a completely action-driven “layout-first” theme and a template library that uses filters at the atomic level for ultimate control.
What Will The Next Generation Of WordPress Users Be Like?
WordPress has has been around 15 years, enough time for a new generation to become part of our community. In fact, we are nearing the point of ANOTHER generation soon to be introduced to the WordPress as a product and as a community. But in order for WordPress to grow and be accepting of the next generation, it needs to be able to be an accepting platform. Is the mindset of the WordPress as a solution, product, and ecosystem attractive to that younger generation? Yes and no.
To answer these questions – and more – effectively we need to know how young ones (as early as six years old) are publishing content on the web today, and see how such trends and opinons on this might effect WordPress now and in the future.
What People Will Learn:
Plugin developers, theme developers, core contributors, and community organizers should be able to walk away from this talk with key points of what THEY need to keep in mind when designing/building their products, organizing events, or creating experiences in WordPress in the short (and long) run. Teachers and parents will walk away learning how WordPress can benefit their children and students, even at an early age.
Why It’s Important:
Being aware of trends and the attitude of the younger generation is VASTLY important to the future of WordPress. The “”children are our future”” statement is a bit cliche but it holds truth. We can’t assume WordPress and it’s products will automatically appeal to those in schools and colleges just because we found it popular.
My Experience With This Topic:
I have five years experience with kid’s workshops thanks to WordCamp Miami, and this subject has been an overall theme over those FIVE years. I’m also able to speak to developers, with my work with several popular plugins in the repo. I’m also a parent of three children active in the WordPress community but have different views of WordPress itself.
How Young People Can Build Big Ideas With WordPress?
More and more WordCamps are featuring youth and young people, which is an excellent thing. But although it’s important to introduce basic concepts of WordPress to those as young as 7 or 8 years old – it’s the application of that knowledge in the later part of elementary school and through middle school that presents challenges. Especially when other avenues such as YouTube, gaming, and mobile apps are distracting the attention of those that might not see how useful CMS, open source, and WordPress can be.
Olivia Bisset (14 years old) strives to address to an audience of young ones, parents, and general adults and provide both personal case studies AND practical applications.
What People Will Learn
Young people will learn how they can use WordPress in a practical way. Going from “yeah i can make a post in WordPress” to “i did my latest school project on WordPress”.
Parents can also learn the right tools and ways to encourage their children to use WordPress to better their education and to create meaningful content.
Why It’s Important
For WordPress to stay relevant, we need to do more than simply teach the basics at meetups and WordCamps. Practical application – how to use it to the best ways possible – will give more confidence and experience to the youth and they edge closer to the “real world”.
My Experience With This Topic
Olivia has had 5 years experience with WordPress, and has used it in numerous projects. She is also a summer camp volunteer, a WordCamp volunteer for a number of years, and is currently learning JavaScript and Python as she begins a new year of homeschooling (after public school for the past eight years).
Advanced Forms Made Easy with Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a robust plugin allowing you to create forms of any kind for your WordPress site. We will walkthrough some of the most powerful features that often go unnoticed including conditional logic, dynamic population, merge tags and more.
Two Roads in the Software Forest — Which will you choose?
Poet Robert Frost famously described a fork in a yellow wood in his poem “The Road Not Taken.” He concluded “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” What makes the difference with software choices?
The truth is that the fork in your development road is proprietary or free and open source software. So, does it matter if the CMS is WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal?
In the end, what matters is that you, as a developer and website engineer, provided the right solution to meet the business goals of your client.
Mike Demopoulos has a passion for the intersection of these three well-known Open Source Communities. He currently serves on the Joomla! leadership team, is well known in the WordPress community, and is an evangelist for BoldGrid. Having the perspective of a CMS-agnostic tool has given Mike insights to make all of our communities better.
In his talk, Mike will give ideas on how to bridge and support each community through initiatives such as CMS Garden (an initiative to promote all major open source CMS projects).
Self-awareness and introspection, much like the poet Frost, helped Mike see how the combined future of an open source web is not just inevitable, but the road less traveled by all of us in Open Source. The road less traveled is the one that makes all of the difference.
Web Design Time Travel Adventure
Ever wonder what makes a design look dated? When a designer says some nonsense like, “omg this is so Web 2.0 gross” what does that mean? Was Skeuomorphic design really THAT bad? Let’s let history be our teacher and explore these trends and get perspective on design for the web.
Networking Brunch
A Heart To Heart with WordPress at 15, Going On 50: A Template As We Go Forward
There comes a time in most teenagers’ lives when they need to be sat down and have a wise non-parent wrap an arm around them and have a talk.
It’s a time to talk about goals, sacrifices, worldviews, and what got them to where they are.
It’s also a time to talk about troubles they are facing now and ones they’ll face down the road.
It’s a time to give them tools, resources, and a template to follow when the inevitable happens.
This is that talk for our 15-year-old friend, WordPress. (It’s a talk for you and for me.)
Gleaning from a life well lived and using it as a template, we’ll take a look at the challenges ahead of us as a WordPress community.
From the bumps in the road surrounding Gutenberg to the need for more diversity and inclusion to the general growing pains of a community figuring out what we want to be when we grow up, we need someone to wrap an arm around us and tell us where to go.
So if you find yourself wondering where you fit in the WordPress community, this talk is for you.
If you find yourself wondering where we need to go as a community, this talk is for you.
If you find yourself deep in the woods of despair over where WordPress is, or where you are within it, this talk will be a rallying cry, a memorial, and a starting point in the conversation on the next 15 years of WordPress.
Building WordPress Themes with Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
In this session, you’ll not only discover best practices for building custom WordPress themes, but how to leverage custom fields to create complex page layouts and make content management easier for clients. Tessa will introduce you to a WordPress plugin called Advanced Custom Fields, how it works, and what it can do when used to build WordPress themes.
Everything’s Coming Up Milhouse! A Chat with Michelle and Norcross About Working on the Web
Michelle Schulp and Andrew Norcross have been professionally navigating the web for so long, they’ve probably forgotten enough stories to fill the whole schedule.
Instead, they’ll focus on the stories that they do have around working with teams and on projects both large and small. They’ll discuss some of the interesting work that they’ve done in the past, how they’ve handled project fails, and what is important to them around working on the web.
Handling Clients with Compassion, Providing White Glove Service without Selling Your Soul
Any designer that has had more than a handful of clients knows that they are not all the same. Just like in any business there are those that are well let’s just say a bit more difficult or hands on than others. So how do you handle these clients without losing yourself in the process? Compassion… that is right compassion is key in every relationship, even in business.
Say you have a client that quits responding to your emails, or perhaps they are late on their payments. Our knee jerk reaction is to cut them off and move on to the next more cooperative client. Did you take a moment and put yourself in their shoes and perhaps ask them what might be preventing them from meeting your expectations? Life happens and trust me you will hear every excuse in the book as a business owner. I cannot tell you how many “checks in the mail”, “my air conditioner went on the frits again”, “my car broke down”, “I got a divorce” and much more. I now know what teachers go through when the proverbial dog ate my homework is laid on them.
Through all these excuses and some legitimate reasons, as business owners we must continue to provide the impeccable white glove service our clients have come to expect from us. In this talk, Charles will go over ways of handling different clients with and scenarios with the same level of compassion and service his and hopefully your company has become known for. Key areas such as listening, responding with empathy, learning how to avoid the drama queens and what to do when you find yourself in business with them.
PHP 7 Goodie Bag
Let’s take a quick sprint through the new features in PHP 7.0-7.2 and a look at whats coming 7.3.
The new features – and speed improvements – in PHP 7 have made PHP the best options available for building web based applications. Make sure you know about all of the tools in your toolbox as a PHP developer so that you can make the most of them.
Defining Your Brand and the Importance of a Style Guide
Your overall brand consists of your visual identity, the voice you use, the value of your business, and your personality. This talk will explore those unique components that make up a brand and how to use them together to develop a professional style guide. This style guide will contain all of the necessary information to create the media your business needs and be ready for distribution to designers and marketers to ensure your brand stays consistent across all channels of communication.
Designing for conversion.
It’s easy to talk about designing for conversion until you decide you’re really going to do it.
What design considerations matter for conversion? What’s the role of copy, given these two prevailing (and conflicting!) attitudes:
1. Make the BUY button big and add a picture of a baby. Everyone looks at a baby face, but nobody reads copy.
Versus:
2. Copy is everything! If someone really is in the market for your thing, they’ll read everything you have to say! (Just add a video of someone saying the exact same thing at the top, and use LOTS of subheads.)
We’ll take a look at these points of view and more, on the road to converting your lookers to buyers, one press of that blue button* at a time.
*Not that the button should always be blue. But there’s a family story behind that phrase.
Developing for Gutenberg
Gutenberg is an exciting improvement to the WordPress editing experience, and yet can introduce a number of development challenges due to the heavy shift to more advanced JavaScript.
Whether you are a new developer or a seasoned WordPress engineer, we will break down Gutenberg development in a way that everyone can follow:
– Learn about UX best practices for Gutenberg
– Discover the technologies and approaches utilized by Gutenberg
– Determine which of 2 development approaches will work best for you
– Uncover the basic anatomy of a Gutenberg block
– View code examples as you learn how to create Gutenberg blocks
– Explore how to create block templates and integrate with themes
Growth Marketing: How to Increase Traffic and Generate Leads To Your WordPress Website
The attendees will walk away with an actionable game plan to increase qualified business-to-business (B2B) leads using WordPress and inside sales tools such as linkedin and marketing automation. It is a fun, fast paced, entertaining and educational session.
Bernard will teach you how to:
– Create a Pipeline of Leads For Your Business
– Create a High Converting Landing Page with WordPress
– Leverage Linkedin Tools to Increase Website Traffic
– Advertise on MSN’s Homepage for as Little as $25 a Week
– Drive Unconventional Traffic To Your WordPress Site
Get to know (beyond a doubt) who’s visiting your website
We all want to engage website visitors, bring them value and maybe even convert them into paying customers. I know I want to do all three! But if you don’t know who the people visiting your website are or what they really want, how can you do any of this? I want to give you some actionable tips and tools that will shed some light on who’s visiting your website and allow you to get the feedback you need to turn your site into something your visitors can’t get enough of 🙂
So You’ve “WordCamped” – Now what?
Leveraging Your WordCamp Experience for Better Social Media Engagement
WordCamp is a great experience for the WordPress novice, expert and everyone in between. But, how exactly does one apply all the great information they’ve learned from the conference? This talk will explore the reasons why one should attend WordCamp and how-to effectively apply WordCamp skills, knowledge and information for better Social Media engagement.
Speeding up WordPress
Having your site load quickly is important for many reasons. Having a faster site impacts your SEO, sales, and user engagement. In fact, a 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions!
In this talk, we will be discussing the reasons why your WordPress site may be slow and showing you ways to make your site faster. You will learn about different tools to test your site speed as well as how you can make the changes these tools suggest.
How I Built it: groundcontrolbot.space/
With the accelerated launch cadence as commercial rocket launches become more affordable I wanted to know when rockets launch from the Space Coast and how I could watch! So, I built a WordPress plugin that posts to Slack (and twitter).
This talk is a practical walk through this plugin highlighting the REST API, Composer, OOP concepts and the impact of early decisions over the course of plugin development.
How to Resolve a Breach of Contract
Drafting, negotiating, and executing a business contract is a serious matter.
A business contract may define many duties, responsibilities, guidelines, limitations, operational procedures, and many other issues of relevance. A business contract may be simplistic or as detailed as needed by one or both parties involved. However, if you did not hire professional legal counsel to negotiate, prepare, review or modify your business contract, your legal rights may be at risk, especially if you and another party used online forms to create a contract.
If a breach of contract should ever arise, there are many ways to resolve the issue. This presentation will provide you with the various avenues one may take to avoid litigation as well as the process involved in bringing the matter to court.
So you installed Yoast SEO, what’s next?
SEO can be confusing. The rules change almost daily and with so many ways to get started – it can get overwhelming for a beginner. In this talk, you’ll learn the fundamentles of search engine optimization, that will help you get started with ranking on Google for your Blog, Website or Store.