The phrase, “Set it and forget it”, when it comes to cooking rice in a rice cooker, can be great, but when applied to a website, it can prove to be catastrophic. This short sighted approach can set your business and/or your clients’ businesses up for failure. In order for a website to be more than just a temporary digital ornament, and to make the investment worthwhile, it must be: Stable, User Friendly, Flexible, and Sustainable. Lets explore what each of these means, on a practical level, and discuss how refining our approach to new and existing projects not only improves our immediate situation, but also contributes to the overall reputation and market demand for more WordPress solutions.
Archives
Outcomes vs. Outputs: How Outcome Driven Development Planning Changes Everything
As freelancers, developers and project managers working on a project, it’s easy to get blinded by outcomes. Tasks on a project are often defined by the specific thing that we expect to build or present to the client or customer. But what if our assumptions are wrong? Or the scope changes along the way? What if there was an easier way to produce a desirable, user-friendly end-product without specifically defining what that end-product is? (Spoiler: There is!) This talk will discuss how to shift your focus from outputs to outcomes and how that little mental shift, changes everything. Really!
Composer for WordPress Projects
Do you commit plugin or theme files into your main WordPress project repository to then have to deal with large diffs and manual updates? Do you have multiple development areas in your project that need builds? Do you want to script more of your build and deploy process? Then this talk is for you. You’ll learn how to:
- Manage plugins and themes.
- Manage your private repos.
- Manage your premium plugins and themes.
- How to automate builds, setup, etc
WordPress Walkthrough
This is a hands-on talk, so bring your laptops or tablets! Bring your photos! Bring your content and ideas! And be sure you have access to the accounts you need, because our goal here is to get some work done. Velda will map out the process of creating a blog, business site, or portfolio — or all three if that’s what you need. Then she’ll share the next steps and help you figure out where to find support going forward. If you don’t have a site yet, or if you’ve started and got stuck, this is a talk for you.
Hosted or Self-Hosting
WordPress is an easy to install and use Content Management System, but should you? There are lots of options for running WordPress from installing on a Raspberry Pi to setting up an account at WordPress.com. This presentation will give a list of some of things to consider when starting out and growing such as: * What are some of the pros and cons of self hosting? * What are some of the pros and cons of self hosting using a hosted instance? * What are some of the pros and cons of fully hosted providers?
Web Accessibility: ADA Compliance and You
What is accessibility and how does it affect you? Not just a legal issue, web accessibility affects conversion rates, search engines, and basic usability. This talk will be about how to talk to your clients and your coworkers about ADA compliance on websites, why it’s important, what WordPress is already doing to support accessibility online, and how to improve your code, graphics and content. We’re also going to address some myths, such as “my customers aren’t disabled, so it doesn’t matter” or “web accessibility is too complicated to bother with.” We will cover development and the ADA, but this is also a fantastic subject for graphic designers, SEO technicians, and content writers.
Headless WordPress
Using WordPress as a Headless CMS could be the future for WordPress development. In this presentation, I want to go over what a headless setup might look like, what would be the advantages to it, and what might be some downfalls/gotchas. I plan to cover the technologies that might work in this type of system such as: – WordPress – GraphQL – The REST API – React – Gatsby – etc.
Image Sizing & Optimization For the Web – The Non-Designers Approach
Every website needs images, but without proper optimization for the web, images can be a terrible detriment to website performance and SEO rankings. Learn some simple tricks you can do to reduce the size of your images while still maintaining great quality. Learn more about image resolution, image dimensions, and file size. And as a bonus, learn how to resize your images online without Photoshop.
End to end tests in WordPress using Cypress
As web sites and web applications get bigger and more complex, we end up investing more and more time to test all its features while developing or updating our production environment. These tasks may be repetitive and a bit boring, particularly if you need to test a large site, such as an online store or a big custom development. End to end (or browser based) automated tests are not something new, but sometimes they are hard to include in our development process, due to the possible need of new tools, new languages and even the infrastructure to run them, plus the extra burden of keeping your tests updated and healthy. Enter Cypress, a Javascript based tool that will help you write solid tests faster and with less code, so you can focus more time on implementing new feature on your site than maintaining your tests. Why Cypress? – Javascript based tool. You only need Node to run it, so no extra tools to worry about. – Easy to set up in common tools, like Webstorm or Visual Studio Code. – Cross platform: will run on Mac, Windows and Linux – Easy to run locally – Has out-of-the-box handling of page load, ajax loading and other things that could cause flakiness in other automated test platforms – Includes a lot of extra goodies, like screenshots, video recording and even a dashboard that you can plug into your Continuous Integration pipeline (free package available!) – Easy to plug into CI/CD vendors like CircleCI or Jenkins By using tools like Cypress, you can be confident that every code change you perform will leave your site stable and it will help you catch bugs before your client notifies you.
Creating a Problem-Solving Framework for Faster Website Troubleshooting
One of the most underrated skills in website ownership is problem solving and rapid troubleshooting. As I’ve talked to, interviewed, and hired support technicians over the years, I’ve found that great developers aren’t always great troubleshooters, and lots of phenomenal troubleshooters can’t necessarily write code. WordPress has a huge number of moving parts. It’s a complex software. Being able to track down and diagnose bugs and the source of issues is a highly valuable skill and becomes even more valuable as new functionality is introduced into the stack. Having the right framework for troubleshooting and resolving issues will help manage frustration, maintain momentum on web development projects, and give WordPress users the confidence to dive headfirst into solving issues they haven’t encountered ever before. My goal is for all attendees to walk away with a system they can use to create a calmer workplace environment, troubleshoot their own website issues, and deliver faster resolutions and better quality results to their clients.