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🎉 It’s my birthday, but I’m sharing the gifts! Save 20% off any item in the TWPW shop with code BDAY40. 🎉
🎉 It’s my birthday, but I’m sharing the gifts! Save 20% off any item in the TWPW shop with code BDAY40. 🎉
Check out the folks who attended WordCamp Calgary 2016:
You can mark yourself as going to this camp in your account settings!
Paul Thompson
7 Ways to Take Your WordPress Website to the Next Level Using Your Own Data
**What knowledge should an attendee have?
Beginner and intermediate website owners are the primary audience. Even experienced developers will discover more effective ways of assessing how to optimise their sites. Layman’s terms will be used/explained throughout, but those who already have analytics tracking on their sites will get the most direct benefit.
**What knowledge should an attendee walk away with?
Site owners and developers will leave with seven specific methods to gather additional critical data about how well their websites are performing, and how to interpret it to make improvements to their sites.
**What is the talk about?
Too often, site owners are frustrated by conflicting advice and priorities about what to work on to improve the performance and success of our sites. Add the additional frustration from not have the data we need or that it’s too hard to decipher and much time-wasting guessing ensues.
What if a little customisation would let you:
and more, including teaching Analytics how to show you the important data you care about, instead of having to dig it out every time you want to check it.
This presentation will help WP site owners and developers capture and understand real data about their own websites’ performance that will empower them to prioritise, make (and measure!) real improvements. No more “best practices” guesses!
**Why are you passionate about this talk?
We all want to improve our websites. But data and statistics can be so intimidating – and the complexity of tools like Analytics can reinforce that. I love helping people discover that their own analytics data can empower them to focus their energy and resources where it will have the most impact. Data then becomes the powerful tool for their satisfaction and success it was meant to be.
Dan Stephenson
WordPress for Podcasters
Intermediate. You should know how to install and run WordPress on a web server and how to install plugins on your site. This session will not cover actually producing podcast material, so understanding how to produce your audio or video content would be an asset.
You’ll walk away with a better understanding of how to take all of the great content you have (or will) produce, and get it out to your audience as a podcast.
Podcasting is becoming more popular every day – because it’s becoming easier to create a podcast every day. This session assumes you already know how to create your audio and/or video content for your new podcast, and will walk you through some of the tools that make it easy to publish and promote your podcast online easily by customizing your RSS feed, embedding and hosting your own media content, integrating with popular social media sites, submitting to iTunes and Google Play Music and more.
Setting up your podcast website to maximize your exposure can seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. I’ve learned a lot by trial-and-error while I was getting my podcast Fireside Chat established, and I’ll be sharing it all with you to help you get up and running as easily as possible.
When I started the Fireside Chat podcast I found that it was easy to produce the show, but a lot harder to make sure all of the technical ‘behind the scenes’ stuff was setup properly to get my show the maximum exposure. Having run the show for 4 seasons now I have learned a lot about podcasting, and how to make WordPress do a lot of the hard work for me. I want to teach you how to get your site setup properly so you can focus on what’s important – creating great content.
Themify Flow – The Last Theme You Ever Need!
Beginner. You should know how to install and run WordPress on a web server, and how to install and activate a theme.
You will walk away with a basic understanding of how to use the Themify Flow framework to build a simple theme for your site or blog.
The WordPress community is flooded with frameworks and tools to make your site development easier. The Themify Flow framework is a great new development tool that makes it easy to create any design you can imagine without writing a single line of code! In this session I’ll show you how to get up and running with Flow and walk you through how to build a custom theme in less than an hour!
During this session session you can “play along” easily if you have your laptop with a WordPress site and the Themify Flow theme installed and active.
I am in no way affiliated with Themify, I am just a big believer in this product.
Too often I hear from my clients and others about how hard it is to launch a website – and it really doesn’t have to be. Using tools like Themify Flow anyone can design a theme and get their site up and running without writing any code.
I want everyone to be able to spend more time producing great content, and getting their fantastic ideas online and not spending time designing and coding your website.
Jason Dorn
Designing with style: Using style tiles in responsive design
Beginner on up, however having at least 1-2 completed web projects under your belt will be beneficial as base process to reference.
In this talk you’re going to walk away with a better process for developing & presenting design concepts to your web clients, and the value in presenting smaller pieces of a broader design system, instead relying on the great “pull back the curtain” reveal.
This talk is to serve as an introduction/overview into the world of Style Guides for web projects, instead of relying on pages & pages of static design mockups. We’re going learn why static mockups don’t always work, why they don’t scale, and why it’s better to develop reusable components in defining your responsive visual design language.
– Why are style tiles/guides needed? What problems do they solve?
– What are the core components of a style tile?
– How do they fit into a design process?
– How do they benefit project stakeholders such as clients, developers, project managers?
I think great design is truly the sum of it’s parts, but spending too much time on “pixels perfect” mockups takes focus away from the project as a whole. I want to arm designers/developers/clients with a better approach that will allow them to focus their attention on the big picture, and save them from hours of mind numbing design reviews and massive PDF files.
Richard Archambault
Launch your site with Jetpack!
Beginner to intermediate
How to configure and use the Jetpack plugin so that you can focus on creating your site’s content and not on searching for a bunch of different plugins to do the things you want.
In this talk, I’ll go over the basics for using the plugin (how to connect it to WordPress.com, how to configure some of the more popular modules). I’ll also share some best practices for using Jetpack on client sites, as well as a few more advanced tips and tricks.
I provide support for the Jetpack plugin every day as part of my work as a Happiness Engineer for Automattic. I love being able to show people the neat things that Jetpack can do that they weren’t aware of!
Jetpack Secrets: Theme Tools, Actions and Filters, and other little known facts
Intermediate to advanced
Jetpack has a lot of goodies hidden in it for developers; we’ll take a look at some examples of things that can be used by theme developers, freelancers, and site-tinkerers (like me!).
Jetpack comes loaded with filters and actions in almost every module, that let developers modify the default behaviour. It also comes with many theme tools that can be used when building a theme, whether it is a custom theme for a client, or a free or premium theme that you will sell or distribute. I’ll also have some fun new thing to reveal to all who attend!
Whenever a theme developer tells me “I have saved so much time by using the tools included in Jetpack”, I always wish that everyone knew about them! There are so many useful bits of code, I’m sure that there’s something for everyone who uses Jetpack. I’m excited to help people find the bits that will help them the most!
Idris Fashan
Digital Storytelling: Bring Stories to Life with Dynamic Content
None required / beginner.
In this talk, you’re going to walk away with a knowledge of how to tell stories in digital spaces that engage people in a real way.
Stories have been with us since the dawn of language. They are the core of our art, our religious practices, and even the life lessons that we were taught as children. Many have argued that stories remain the best way to connect with people and share information.
And stories are even more important today in the digital world of noise and information overload. We see that stories and great storytellers drive the ‘viral’ content that moves across the globe, but yet, the majority of content on the web lacks story. Instead, we see endless bullet lists of features and benefits, useless descriptions and flat, heavy information that holds little weight.
In this workshop, content creators and marketers will learn the building blocks of great stories and how they can define and assemble them into well crafted nuggets. Then they will be given techniques to coat those nuggets to make them even tastier to their audiences (without affecting the authenticity of the story). They will also strategize where and how they can publish that content for impact.
So what will you walk away with?
For years, I have worked in the trenches of marketing, and I have watched technology advance, but I have also seen how slowly content and storytelling has kept pace. Admittedly, the great storytellers in art, media and advertising have shown us some of the way, but the majority of businesses, creators, groups and organizations don’t have huge resources to tell stories. For them, it can seem impossible to do digital right.
I’ve chosen to learn and teach how to present, produce, create and plan content that is as real as it is riveting to people. I believe that everyone that has access to technology should have access to tell great stories on that technology. It makes for a better experience, and it makes for a better web—one that’s driven for and by people who connect through content.
Jeff Archibald
Edward McIntyre
Kevin Kwan
Christina Varro
Tools for Managing Multiple WordPress Sites
Intermediate: attendees have some prior knowledge in the subject matter and understand basic concepts.
In this talk, you’re going to walk away with an overview of the tools available to manage multiple wordpress sites more quickly and easily.
WP core, plugins and themes require constant updates and there are a variety of ways to track and manage these updates. We will look at strategy and tools to managing multiple WordPress sites quickly and efficiently. After almost 6 years of running a freelance business, I have over 25 WordPress clients and need to stay on top of updates.I have used a number of management tools and dashboards and want to share my experiences.
Because ain’t nobody got time to waste going site-to-site to do updates on multiple WP sites.
Dana DiTomaso
Russ Fee
The Freelancer’s Guide to the Common Client
No prior knowledge is needed! Come as you are 🙂
In this talk, you’re going to walk away with not only strategies to handle your next web project – but strategies to turn every client into a long-lasting business relationship.
My talk is about understanding why the client relationship breaks down, and how to get in front of the problems before they occur. While it’s popular in our industry to demonize the client, my personal belief is that in many instances the end result could have been easily avoided. My preference is to look at the client not as an obstacle, but as a partner requiring guidance. The aim of my talk is to provide strategies to designers/developers who find themselves consistently running into hardships with clients. It will include:
I’m passionate about this talk because much like all our clients, I’ve had plenty of experiences where I was a fish out of water. That’s a situation that creates anxiety and frustration for me without fail, and those who have been kind enough to help me through those situations have my undying gratitude. As a result, one of my favourite things about my job is helping people when they find themselves out of their element.
David Andrew Wiebe
How to Leverage the Power of Content to Create New Opportunities
Intermediate. Though I will be sharing primarily about the music industry and keeping that part simple, some knowledge of WordPress, marketing, social media, and business would be helpful.
In this talk, you’re going to learn about the current state of the music industry, how I went from part-time musician to full-time freelance writer, why I invested in a music tech startup, and how one can establish authority in their industry with the use of WordPress and consistent content creation.
The scope may need to be narrowed a bit, but all of these components do interconnect.
The music industry: the 4 P’s of the music industry (product and artist development, promotion, performance and production), what has changed in each of these areas, and the 11 key components the industry is made up of today.
The opportunity in the music industry: why I put $60,000 of my own money into a music tech startup, what happened to that startup, and the underutilized opportunity that still exists in the music industry today.
How building a blog opened up opportunities for me: as result of the connections I’ve built through podcasting, blogging, and interacting on social media, freelance writing has become my bread and butter. I work with clients in the music industry, in business, in entrepreneurship, and a variety of other niches.
This is what I live and breathe. I want to see positive change in the music industry, I want to share about the current state of the industry, I want to give the audience as much value as I possibly can, and I’m more than happy to share the mistakes I’ve made and how others can avoid them.
These are the people that make this event happen. They work tirelessly for weeks and months to plan, coordinate, and execute the best event possible. If you get a chance to thank them, please do!
Rae Carlson (+ add me)
Michael Tighe (+ add me)
Tony Grimes (+ add me)
Connor Turner (+ add me)
Megan Powell (+ add me)
Kasia Gawlak (+ add me)
Tammy Lee (+ add me)
Carrie Mah (+ add me)
Nancy Seeger (+ add me)
John Smiley (+ add me)
Details TBD.
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