WordCamp Baltimore 2015

Working remotely can feel creatively isolating. Switching from a brick-and-mortar agency, to pants-optional sounds awesome—but if you’re accustomed to joining a coworker at the whiteboard, to hammer out a UI concept over marker fumes, you’ll agree the back and forth in GitHub/Slack channels doesn’t cut it.

In this talk, I’ll share how our work-from-home team overcomes technical and social hurdles, to mirror natural, in-person creative ideation (sketching, wireframing, etc.) with a mashup of hardware and cloud tools. This talk is best for teams allowing or considering telework, as well as freelancers who want to impress their clients.

Once perceived as a mere blogging or small website tool, WordPress is an enterprise-grade CMS … stable, secure and scalable enough to be used on large websites. emagine is a leader in at acquiring large, lucrative WordPress projects and would like to provide insights and considerations for doing so.

Takeaways:

How to identify the most lucrative prospects
How to pitch large projects (value proposition, differentiation, overcoming objections
How to execute (IA, Project Management, Resources, post-launch support)

Having a website that loads fast is important and we all know that. It can have a major impact on user engagement, conversion, retention and even SEO but for some reason, websites on the web continue to get bigger and slower. Why is this the case and what can we do about it?

This talk will primarily focus on the tools and techniques that can be used to create faster websites. Some topics that will be covered during this talk include performance testing, automations, mobile, design decisions and dealing with clients.

Getting the graphics and content into your website are just the beginning. There are a lot of other things to set up and configure for your site to really get found and work as it should. Get an overview of what else you need to do: *Accessibility *Measuring your traffic *What is schema code or rich snippets? Why and how can you implement it? *Determining how links to your site look and work when previewed on social media sites *Does your site look good on mobile? Do your links help your mobile visitors? *Performance, Speed, Backup, & Security

This talk introduces a important things to know about learning PHP as it relates to WordPress. The talk covers coding standards, best practices and important concepts in both PHP and WordPress that new and intermediate developers will find helpful.

Design is everywhere: including in the films of Baltimore’s filthiest person alive, John Waters. Chris Ford explains what Divine, Domino Sugar and dog poo can teach you about becoming a more confident, creative and effective designer. Let your freak flag fly!

This is a ‘sequel’ to the talk I gave at WordCamps last year; taking the principles I spoke about and putting them into practice, I will talk about how in Parsec, I made images responsive, lightened load time, and introduced Sass. While earlier talks focused more on design decisions and planing, I will talk about coding, implementing, and testing!

We’ll be talking specifically on how to utilize WordPress to further your nonprofit’s mission. This includes theme selection, donation collection/management, event registration/management, email marketing, e-commerce, Customer Relations Management, and finding a champion.

This talk is about fundraising on a WordPress site. I will draw on my experience of working with a house of worship and several other nonprofits to help you navigate the waters of taking donations on your WordPress site. I will discuss issues involved and solutions I’ve implemented and recommend. It’s time to move beyond the PayPal Donate button and take donations to the next level!

In this talk I will showcase some of the tools I use to speed up my development process and some of the reasoning behind the way I have things set up. I will touch on subjects like developing locally, using git, the benefits of Sass and why everyone should be using it, running grunt tasks to compress your css, js, and images as well as using autoprefixer. I can also briefly touch on using frameworks if time and interest allow for it.

Whenever a post is saved, a page is loaded, a comment is created or a template is loaded, WordPress fires off events that, as developers, we have loved and cherished. These events are hooks. While hooks have been the quintessential building blocks of WordPress for over a decade, they come with a cost. Often times, developers will hook functionality into the save_post event, for instance, to fire off a notification to an external service or perform some sort of background task. The more of these tasks are hooked into WordPress, the slower WordPress becomes.

In this talk, I will show you how to alleviate these bottlenecks with asynchronous hooks – hooks that can be used to perform the exact same tasks, but not block the rest of WordPress from running. Through a library created by 10up’s Eric Mann and John Bloch for TechCrunch on WordPress VIP, the overhead of running actions can be reduced to a negligible amount.

Finding the right theme for your website can be a true challenge. The Genesis Framework offers a powerful foundation for a WordPress driven web site. In Getting Started with Genesis we’ll cover everything you need to get your web site online with the Genesis Framework. We’ll also dig into the best plugins and resources that will help you make the most of your Genesis powered web site.