WordCamp Dublin 2017

How to quickly capture requirements, design, manage and build a WordPress site?

I will show you a systematic step by step approach from project specifications to launch.

The General Data Protection regulation (GDPR) will apply in the EU from the 25th May 2018. While the GDPR builds on existing data protection rules and principles, it introduces significant changes including new or increased compliance obligations for businesses and enhanced rights for individuals.

This presentation will explain in plain English the main obligations and will give you practical steps to ensure your business is ready by May 2018.

– Data privacy principles
– Key GDPR requirements
– Why is GDPR an opportunity for businesses?
– Practical steps to kick-off and plan.

Google Search is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web, handling more than three billion searches each day. In this session, you will learn how you can optimize your WordPress site for users and to be compatible with Google search engine. You will learn how search work, be given tips on how to do well on search and explore tools that Google offers which you can use to manage your online presence on Google Search, along with WordPress specific best practices. This session is suitable for website or business owners as well as web developers who want to learn more about your website presence on Google organic search.

My software, InstantWP, has been downloaded over a 1.2 million times and is used worldwide by developers, universities and businesses. InstantWP is a complete standalone, portable WordPress development environment. It turns any Windows or Mac machine into a WordPress development server. It should even run from a USB key.
The new version is GPL and runs on Windows and Mac and sets up a portable WordPress server in under a minute.

This talk will give an overview of InstantWP and the open source virtualisation technology underneath, QEMU. Some tips and tricks in using InstantWP to set up a development environment for various types of users, from theme and plugin developers and beginners.

In this talk I will be speaking about how to optimise your image heavy WordPress websites. I will talk about how I use WordPress for handling images, what tools I use and offering some general advice on how you can manage the slowdown that typically comes with hosting an image heavy site.

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) is a concept related to user experience especially for mobile users, where the focus is to deliver websites that are Reliable, Fast and Engaging. This presentation will cover – Why it is import to start thinking about PWAs and how to apply some technics on your WordPress website.

Technics as the service worker, features as home screen button and immersive full screen, and how to integrate AMP pages with PWA. These are the things that we will see as practical examples.

In this talk, I’d like to share the story of how our WordPress hosting team nearly broke down under its workload and how lean and agile methodologies brought us back on track. With all its interruptions and incidents, web operations work sometimes feels like having to juggle chainsaws while baking a souffle…

In 2016, freistilbox suffered heavily from our failure to keep our work in flow. Internal initiatives and feature projects got delayed more and more, in some cases by months. Then we noticed a huge drop in customer satisfaction and trust. Finally, team members started showing severe signs of burnout such as fatigue, frustration and the feeling of letting everyone down. This required quick and major changes.

In the last six months, we’ve completely overhauled how we manage our work load, and I’m happy to say we’re back on a healthy trajectory. In my talk, I’d like to share the details of what we did wrong and what got us back on track.

How often do you change your website? It’s a valid question! We’ve just finished a little refresh here at ZEAL and it got me thinking about the people I meet weekly who want to get a brand new website or even a little website refresh themselves. I also meet people who are building their own sites with WordPress or Wix or even our builder software who just don’t know why it’s not converting customers.
I’d really urge you to think about the following, either as someone who is refreshing their own site or considering hiring someone to do it for them.

These are really the basic 7 reasons why sites don’t convert. Of course, there are loads more reasons but look at these ones first!

Whether you’re a current WooCommerce user, or a WordPress user interested in adding eCommerce to your site, I’ll show you different ways to increase your bottom line:

– Add WooCommerce to your WordPress site
– Add features and functionality to an existing WooCommerce site, such as Subscriptions, Memberships, Bookings, Product Add-Ons
– Choose the right payment gateway
– Reassure shoppers – SSL / security

I’ll spend the bulk of our time showing you how to do these with a live demonstration so come armed with your imagination and lots of questions! 🙂

While there’s always discussion on how social media (our constant need for “Likes” and the consumption of superficial celebrity lives) is damaging to us – I want to take a different approach and highlight how much progress is being made to destigmatise mental health in Ireland by both our own actions and those of organisations across online channels.

I will focus on social media campaigns run by businesses & charities, the increase in mental health blogging by young people, the open sharing of emotions and discussions on mental health issues, and how all of this is actively helping individuals across the country.

Building a partnership takes an investment of time and energy for both the client & delivery agency. Earlier this year, Sage embarked on an ambitious programme to rebuild its entire online presence. Part of the plan was for a global WordPress multi-site.

This will be a discussion, co-presented by Sage (the client) and Pragmatic (the agency), which will provide a 360 view of a large WordPress project, covering both the technical and non-technical aspects. We’ll talk about the steps you can take when facing a hugely challenging project – facing up to tight timelines and translating multiple desires into a deliverable programme of work. We’ll look at how you can maximise your efficiency during production, leveraging the core functionality that WordPress provides and building on top of it, and how planning the architecture with an eye on the future can be the key to building partnerships. We’ll hear about the project from the client’s perspective as Sage will talk about their experiences – and from an agency perspective, delivering the work.

There were plenty of challenges along the journey on both sites – creating a custom WP API in a matter of days, training internal staff on new tools and migrating thousands of posts. But most of all, we’ll look at how we focused on building a partnership – creating trust and efficiency which benefited both sides.

Page Builders free WordPress from the constraints TinyMCE Editor. However, you don’t have much choice over what they render, and left in the wrong hands, designs can get messed up past the point of easy untangling! By piggy-backing on the Post Meta Data we can build feature-rich Page’s in a bespoke manner with full control of the end product.

This talk will walk you through how to build an in-house Page Builder that fits your particular needs using Advanced Custom Fields. By deconstructing a Page into its constituent parts, we can render the frontend in a very flexible manner so you and redesign as necessary and future-proof your content. With the addition of Bootstrap or Zurb Foundation, a fully responsive design can be easily achieved.

Don’t modify WordPress core; don’t modify theme files – make children instead.

Don’t be scared, don’t feel guilty – it’s easy. Then you can mould that child as you wish.

I will show you how to create a child theme, take advantage of the template hierarchy to enhance it and what to do when the parent theme isn’t fully child theme enabled.

WordPress is a great platform to build a website on but what about mobile applications. Stressing the real potential of the words Content Management System, you can use WordPress to give your clients an easy way to update, create and manage their content on mobile applications. This pairing of WordPress as the backend management system and React Native as the mobile front end extends your potential not only to offer a new amazing service but it can function as great way to bridge your skills into a new area without leaving behind the glorious world of WordPress.

With GDPR’s deadline day just seven months away, there’s no better time to begin incorporating better data protection and privacy practices into your workflows. Using GDPR’s requirements as well as the Privacy by Design framework as our starting points, I will walk you through some of the steps that healthy compliance should involve in both the front end and the back end. These strategies will range from data minimisation in your database to practical consent methods on your front end to the privacy notices in your footer. We’ll also cover good business practices like technical and security safeguards, staff training, and documentation.

Turn the 2017 theme into an Attendee Event Website with custom signup attendee list and all the bells and whistles WordPress can offer.

In 2006, I started working in a non-profit music school and founded the first ever accessible harp programme in the west of Ireland. Ten years later in 2016, my harp students were invited to perform in a concert of music students from all over the world in the Royal Albert Hall… and they rocked out! My students come from a background of no harp, and/or no music education in their families, so I had to think outside the box to reinforce their learning. I used WordPress to create a site with video tutorials and other resources for them, which was a huge factor in their successful performance.

We’ve all experienced it. We publish our blog posts and send them out into the Internet black hole and wait. We wait for people to read our carefully chosen words. But the readers don’t always come. In this talk we’ll look at some real tactics you can use to get people to visit your blog and read your posts. This isn’t your usual talk about quick fixes and cheats. We’ll look at real tactics for building a stronger readership that not only read but share and tell others about your blog.

Initially a Google project, started in october 2015, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) has now grown into a set of open source technologies used by most search engines (Google, Bing, Baidu), and many other large companies (Twitter, Ebay, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Feedly, …) to display an alternate version of content to visitors when they are on a mobile device. AMP pages are standard HTML pages that follow a set of rules and optimized javascript to make them extremely fast on mobile devices. They can be created automatically from any WordPress site using a variety of plugins.

Highlights:
– Pretty much any type of site can benefit from enabling AMP pages: blogs, news site, recipes, e-commerce, directories, etc
– Having AMP on your site is probably an SEO must in 2017
– AMP opens the door to Progressive Web Apps
– Although adding AMP pages to your site can be as simple as activating a single plugin, this is unlikely to give good results and can even have negative effects.

During this talk, we will go quickly through how AMP works, why and if you should add it to your site, and very importantly the dos and don’ts of a successful AMP implementation.

Intercom’s Editor Geoffrey Keating will outline how old-fashioned editorial principles helped fuel Intercom’s growth from from 1 to 17,000 customers.

Gutenberg is the name for the new editor focus in WordPress. What is it? Why is it important? In this talk I will take you through a rough guide to the project. How it began and why it’s needed. Then, I’ll show you where the projects is currently at and finally how you can also get involved. Join me and get to know Gutenberg.

Building a partnership takes an investment of time and energy for both the client & delivery agency. Earlier this year, Sage embarked on an ambitious programme to rebuild its entire online presence. Part of the plan was for a global WordPress multi-site.

This will be a discussion, co-presented by Sage (the client) and Pragmatic (the agency), which will provide a 360 view of a large WordPress project, covering both the technical and non-technical aspects. We’ll talk about the steps you can take when facing a hugely challenging project – facing up to tight timelines and translating multiple desires into a deliverable programme of work. We’ll look at how you can maximise your efficiency during production, leveraging the core functionality that WordPress provides and building on top of it, and how planning the architecture with an eye on the future can be the key to building partnerships. We’ll hear about the project from the client’s perspective as Sage will talk about their experiences – and from an agency perspective, delivering the work.

There were plenty of challenges along the journey on both sites – creating a custom WP API in a matter of days, training internal staff on new tools and migrating thousands of posts. But most of all, we’ll look at how we focused on building a partnership – creating trust and efficiency which benefited both sides.

In this talk you will discover the story of how I arrived in Australia with nothing but a plastic bag, a toothbrush and a pair of boxers (due to a kidnapping incident in Peru), to leaving with a 6-figure SEO business and the ability to travel the world & work from anywhere.

I will show you how you too can live the dream, work 4 hours per week and become a digital nomad.

Whether you’re a marketing professional or business owner, you understand the importance and value of engaging directly with your audience. You want to foster new relationships, nurture existing ones, listen/respond to feedback, and build trust and rapport with each action you take as a company. Not easy, right? You’re up against competitors who may be taking similar approaches to building their own brands and who might outright copy everything else you’re doing. It’s frustrating, to say the least when you’re struggling to gain traction as a company.

Mark will share his own experiences of building Learn Inbound and explore tactics and strategies that you can employ to set yourself apart from others.

With more and more advanced integrations being possible for WooCommerce the ability to automate your online store and increase your sales productivity is only few clicks away. Automating processes like lost cart recovery, discounting, lead tracking, referral programs and reviews will have a direct impact on your ROI. With automation you can take a more hand offs approach to managing your store so you can put more focus on growing your business. In addition to having more time automation can also help you squeeze every last sale from your website with techniques such as lost cart recovery, exit intent, dynamic re-marketing and intelligent discounting. According Nucleus Research, businesses that use automation on average see a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. Imagine what this could do for your business. Take the next step to growing your business and use the tools available for WooCommerce to make automation a reality.

So you want to become a WooCommerce Expert?

Great, let’s get you started today. Learn advanced WooCommerce, and turn yourself into a WooCommerce superstar!

If you’re a Web Designer or a WooCommerce store owner, this workshop will teach you how to handle WooCommerce customization with PHP coding (via your child theme by using hooks). Minimum requirements: basic HTML 🙂

My goal is to make you master WooCommerce and – finally – stop wasting precious development and customization time.