🇺🇸 WordCamp Montclair 2023

In this inspiring keynote, Caleb Matteis shares his remarkable journey of transitioning from a mailman to a software engineer in just three years, with the WordPress community as a guiding force. Discover how the power of WordPress and the support of its vibrant community propelled Caleb’s career transformation, offering valuable insights and encouragement for others seeking to navigate a similar path of professional growth and fulfillment.

We’ll take a look at multiple ways to use ChatGPT to speed up your WordPress builds, from using it to give you content that looks better than “Lorem Ipsum” to helping you with your CSS. And, then we’ll also look at using AI generated images for sites, both as main images and background images. Lastly, we’ll talk about some of the “gotchas” to watch out for when using AI generated assets!

Have you ever launched a website only to return to find some annoying SEO has come after you and destroyed it? Has some obnoxious marketer bugged you for lots of little changes- outside the client’s scope and budget?

I’m sorry. That might have been my fault.

Let’s work together to help our clients. I’ll share my secrets on setting up a WordPress site for SEO success. While this won’t guarantee SEO results but it will set up your clients for optimal Google love.

We’ve often been asked “why did ‘they’ make this change” or “when is WordPress going to do this?”. We are not mere spectators, but can find a place of belonging as WordPress contributors.
For WordPress to become a better project and meet its philosophies, it needs a more diverse set of backgrounds. Your life experiences are needed to move things forward!

During this session, you’ll learn about the teams that make WordPress, and ways to bring your unique background and influence.

What are the biggest changes you’d like to see? Come join the team: coding is optional.

That’s what I thought to myself back in 2019 when I launched WPCoffeeTalk. I learned by doing. (Which means I learned by making a LOT of mistakes.)

Since then I’ve launched a few more podcasts, guested on even more, and co-host a few, too.

Launching a podcast is amazing, but there’s a lot you need to take into consideration, and a lot of questions to ask yourself when you get started.

Join me for a session to learn what to do, and what not to do, when you decide it’s time to become a podcaster.

Have you been handed the keys to a WordPress site and don’t know where to start? Maybe you got a new job or started volunteering somewhere and now your responsibilities involve caring for the website, so you have to get up to speed quick! In this session we’ll talk about key concepts and skills for taking over a WordPress site you didn’t build confidently.

Accessibility is about people. Web accessibility is about allowing people to use & understand your website without barriers. This talk covers the different types of cognitive and physical abilities that people have and how designers & developers create many unintended barriers to them using a website.

It talks about a number of practical matters, such as how to choose color palettes and what color combinations can cause barriers. It also discusses basic page structure and how that can make life easier or harder for people. It includes practical examples of websites and keyboard navigation through them.

Being a “web designer” is like being in a constantly shifting storm of definitions, skills, and changes in expectations and demands. This is a workshop about building a design business around generosity and impact. Learn how Maple Creative creates successful sales frameworks for clients and how we’ve created our own list of qualified leads to stay resilient in these times.

In this session, I will share my experience using WordPress at the Longo Faculty of Business, Humber College, as part of my teaching portfolio and applied research initiatives.

Students’ Digital Portfolios:
As part of our Web Development course, students are tasked with creating their own digital portfolios using WordPress as their major individual midterm assessment for the course. This includes creating the information website, blogging, SEO, as well as repurposing some of the content for social media to establish a robust online presence. The portfolios serve as a valuable asset when they apply for jobs, including both summer internships and post-graduation employment opportunities.

Sustainable Business Websites:
We take our WordPress knowledge beyond the classroom and into the community as we partner with small business owners looking to enhance their online presence through a new or revamped website.
This is an extracurricular activity that is typically funded through Humber College where we engage students from various academic programs and faculties to form a multidisciplinary team that collaborates with industry partners.
We make this a sustainable solution by providing the business owner(s) with training and resources on how to update and maintain their WordPress websites. This includes developing user manuals, video tutorials, and one-on-one training sessions that are recorded for our business partners.

International Development Initiative:
One of the WordPress projects we are most proud of is an international development initiative where we developed a curriculum to teach female refugees in Kenya how to create their own WordPress websites and establish a strong online presence. Through this project, we aimed to empower these women with a valuable skillset and provide them with an opportunity to showcase their talent and entrepreneurial spirit to the world.

Attendees of this session will gain insights into using WordPress within the college setting, for both teaching and applied research purposes. We will discuss the challenges, successes, and lessons learned of these projects and share tips on how to engage students and small business owners in the process.

Is anybody truly good at context switching? Our business culture values multitasking, but our brains just aren’t built for it! Nonetheless, whether you are a manager or individual contributor, to move up in our careers we inevitably have to juggle more and more tasks of increasingly different types.

Agency life requires more context switching than other environments, and we’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of these challenges. In this talk I will share practical strategies that I and my colleagues find useful for keeping track of it all: how to jump between projects and land on your feet, and how to get back into the groove faster after switching between different types of work. Teaser: the answer isn’t to try to do everything all at once!

We typically think of WordPress as publishing information for humans, but WordPress is also quite good at publishing information for computers via the WordPress REST API. We’ll look at how to write code to retrieve this information and how to extend the WordPress REST API so our WordPress site can serve our own custom information.

Afghanistan has one of the lowest rates of female participation in the workforce and education, which is further exacerbated by the recent Taliban takeover. The Taliban have prohibited most girls from attending secondary school, banned all women from attending and teaching at universities, and prevented women from working. Afghan women are left with limited options for economic and personal growth. However, technology and coding skills can be a game-changer for women who want to access job opportunities and contribute to their country’s development. In this talk, the speaker will discuss the challenges and opportunities of teaching Afghan women how to code, based on her experience working with a nonprofit organization that provides coding courses and mentorship to women. This talk will highlight the cultural and social barriers that women face in pursuing coding education, such as lack of access to computers, the internet, and safe learning environments, and the additional challenges posed by Taliban restrictions. This talk will also showcase the benefits of coding education for women, including increased confidence, financial independence, and community impact. The goal of this talk is to inspire and encourage more educators and tech professionals to join the mission of empowering Afghan women through coding.

Successful content marketing does not happen overnight.

In this workshop, we will take a step back from actual content creation and dig deep into the foundation of your brand. After all, all great content begins with understanding who YOU are as an entrepreneur and the value of your business.

We will:

– Discover the purpose for developing an online presence
– Consider our core messaging on our website, social media, and email.
– Identify our unique selling proposition
– Discuss competition and how to learn from their content