🇺🇸 WordCamp Santa Clarita 2021

The crisis last year has slowed down business for a lot of us. Some advanced and some formed new entities. In this session, Jv Libunao of OneVector Design Co together with Ron Amick of Lucky Cat Creative talks about how they created partnerships to create new opportunities.

One year ago, Sally had never heard of a WordCamp, MeetUp, Wapuu, or GitHub. She had heard about Accessibility but wasn’t sure exactly what it was all about. Sally was intimidated to even touch or edit a website and left that to her agency developers.

Fast forward one year later, and what a difference a year makes! Last summer, she dove headfirst into Accessibility and WordPress, which became a rewarding and fulfilling journey. Sally shares her experiences to inspire the same purpose and passion that the selfless WordPress and Accessibility community has inspired in her!

She’ll share some resources to help start your Accessibility journey and encourage you to take the first step, which you are already doing by attending WordCamp Santa Clarita 2021!

During the pandemic last year, our local WordPress Community focused heavily on Accessibility and WordPress. From hosting joint WordPress Meetups to contributing as speakers or volunteers at events, we highlighted the importance of accessibility. WordCamp Santa Clarita’s focus on making a more open web is a direct result of the work of a passionate local Community.

We are extremely excited to announce our event’s keynote speaker, Joe Dolson. Joe is a WordPress plug-in developer and a web accessibility consultant. He’s part of the Make WordPress Accessible team, the team dedicated to improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem.

He has been building websites & providing consulting services since 2004 and started using WordPress in 2006, converting my own blog from BlogSpot to WordPress. By 2008, he built his first plug-in (WP to Twitter), which is still going strong today!

Joe was one of the Lead Organizers for the first-ever WordPress Accessibility Day, a 24-hour event dedicated to addressing website accessibility in WordPress with presenters from around the world. The event helped our Community learn how to make our WordPress site accessible and included tips on addressing the areas where WordPress can fall short.

Joe’s keynote will kick off WordCamp Santa Clarita at 8:15 am PT on Saturday, July 17th. View the full event schedule and secure your free tickets by registering for our virtual event.

Core Web Vitals is becoming a part of Google’s search algorithm. According to Google only 12% of websites currently pass the Core Web Vitals metrics however 60% of AMP sites pass.

In this presentation, you’ll learn how AMP can get your WordPress site to pass these import search ranking metrics and boost your conversion rates.

During the pandemic last year, our local WordPress Community focused heavily on Accessibility and WordPress. From hosting joint WordPress Meetups to contributing as speakers or volunteers at events, we highlighted the importance of accessibility. WordCamp Santa Clarita’s focus on making a more open web is a direct result of the work of a passionate local Community.

We are extremely excited to announce our event’s keynote speaker, Joe Dolson. Joe is a WordPress plug-in developer and a web accessibility consultant. He’s part of the Make WordPress Accessible team, the team dedicated to improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem.

He has been building websites & providing consulting services since 2004 and started using WordPress in 2006, converting my own blog from BlogSpot to WordPress. By 2008, he built his first plug-in (WP to Twitter), which is still going strong today!

Joe was one of the Lead Organizers for the first-ever WordPress Accessibility Day, a 24-hour event dedicated to addressing website accessibility in WordPress with presenters from around the world. The event helped our Community learn how to make our WordPress site accessible and included tips on addressing the areas where WordPress can fall short.

Joe’s keynote will kick off WordCamp Santa Clarita at 8:15 am PT on Saturday, July 17th. View the full event schedule and secure your free tickets by registering for our virtual event.

Conclusion of Day 1 or a preview of Day Two’s events at WordCamp Santa Clarita 2021 online.

Final thoughts on our local Community’s third annual WordCamp Santa Clarita, Sunday, July 18th including a thank you to our generous sponsors, attendees, volunteers, organizers, and the WordPress Community.

Sponsors

• AddWebSolution

• Bluehost

• Clap Creative – 24/7 WordPress Management

• Cloudways

• EasyWP by Namecheap

• Elastihost

• Elementor

• Expander Digital

• GoDaddy Pro

• GreenGeeks

• IONOS

• joesimpsonjr.info

• Klaviyo

• Lucky Cat Creative

• Maryam’s Mark and Co. – Web Development & Arts, LLC

• Sumner M Davenport & Assoc. LLC

• Vipe Studio – WordPress Development Agency

• WP Engine

• XtendedView

Organizers

• Ahmed Chaion

• Joe A Simpson Jr

• Michael Pilley

• Nico Gauthier-Pin

• Sally Thoun

• Scott Dayman

• Sumner M Davenport

• Tiffany Wong

WordCamp Santa Clarita begins with remarks from Lead Organizer Sumner M. Davenport including thank you’s to our generous event sponsors (Bluehost, GreenGeeks, GoDaddy Pro, and more).

The crisis last year has slowed down business for a lot of us. Some advanced and some formed new entities. In this session, Jv Libunao of OneVector Design Co together with Ron Amick of Lucky Cat Creative talks about how they created partnerships to create new opportunities.

Should you use your email service provider’s subscription form or should you use the form your builder provides or a 3rd party plugin? Let’s talk about the limitations of these types of forms so you can make an informed decision about what to use.

We’ll cover:

• Mailchimp forms
• Elementor popups and forms
• Gravity forms
• 3rd party forms for Mailchimp
• Mailmunch

For WordPress and the WordPress ecosystem to be truly accessible, it has to be available to everyone. When we talk about accessibility, we do mean accessible to those with disabilities (and we often focus on screen readers, etc.). But what if I told you that people in the BIPOC, LGBTQ+, Neurodivergent, and even older communities (like me), often find the way to success paved with roadblock after roadblock? And just like the tales of our parents and grandparents “it’s uphill both ways.”

This talk will bring forth the struggles that people in our community experience in finding success, as well as ways we can all be advocates for one another, and make room at the table for all.

Many business owners and developers want to make their websites more accessible and usable for people of all abilities. There are a plethora of accessibility tools and plugins on the market proclaiming that they’re the right tool to support and improve your website accessibility initiatives – some better than others. With so many to choose from (more than 45 on WordPress.org, alone), it’s hard to know where to start.

This presentation will discuss the accessibility plugins available on WordPress.org and the pros and cons of each type of plugin by functionality. Attendees will leave with a better understanding of the accessibility plugin landscape, knowledge of how to test accessibility plugins for accuracy and usability, and which plugins, if any, might be worth installing.

The WP REST API creates enormous new opportunities for WordPress across the entire Internet. That means new business opportunities for WP developers and agencies.

Web Components are Custom HTML tags that we can create and are part of the browser specification. Being framework agnostic, we can create our own HTML tags to use in our WP pages, Gutenberg blocks or even create HTML/JS/CSS & plugins to deploy in external sites and thus use WP as a micro app/service in any site. This expands WP out from ⅓ into 100% internet.

This talk will be split between the technology and the business implications and uses.

This talk will look at what meta boxes and custom fields can do for your content and compare three dominant libraries that make it easier to manage them.

Building custom functionality on top of WooCommerce Subscriptions feels a bit wading into uncharted territory: “Wait, there isn’t a Stack Overflow answer for this!?” “How do I test the action that fires off after an automatic subscription cancelation?”

In the process of deploying a seven-figure WooCommerce Subscriptions site, I’ve discovered many best practices for developing, debugging, testing, and monitoring code that interfaces with the platform. In this Lightning talk, I’ll share my top lessons so you can feel more confident around WooCommerce Subscriptions.

There’s a lot of concern around full site editing and what that means for themes and theme creators. Are they even worth building anymore? Should all themes just be a blank slate? Will we only need a hand full of themes now?

NO! In-fact, good themes will be more important than ever now. Given the amount of flexibility the block editor and full site editing offer users, have well-designed themes with all the right guideposts is imperative.

So if you’re a theme developer, or want to be one, here’s what you should focus on.

This is a behind-the-scenes look at how moderated usability testing really goes down. In this session, Nielsen Norman Group, Master Certified UX Strategist Trevor Calabro put together a real test, for a real WordPress website, that a real user will walk through live. (It’ll be in real-time, so who knows what will happen!) Afterward, we’ll debrief on what we’ve learned and connect the dots with user-centered design methodologies.

We’ll cover these four aspects of usability testing:

• Building a usability test
• Tips and tricks of test facilitation
• We’ll test a real user on a WordPress site live
• Reporting the results

This talk also comes with a worksheet attendees can use to build their own usability test scripts.

We love to include images on our websites and digital assets. Images support and add context to our information and concepts. They can act as visual cues and help some users orient themselves on a page. Media, especially social media, include images for conversions; having images on posts leads to a higher clickthrough rate and ROI (return on investment).

Images can be simple and easy to add alternative text, but they can also be more complex like infographics, charts, or maps.

Let’s take a nostalgic walk through some imagery from the 80s music scene and ensure our alt text conveys the information in a meaningful way for those who cannot access the images visually. From 99 Red Balloons shaking us all night long, to Burning Down the House we don’t want to leave any of our users behind.

As a digital agency serving organizations with ongoing WordPress maintenance and support, we have the opportunity to see a wide range of websites built by many different people. Website Audits are a critical part of our agency’s operations for all incoming websites. In the past year, our team has completed 105 site audits and made 1,661 recommendations to our clients on ways to improve their websites.

Through these audits, we have gathered hard data that shows the most common mistakes made on WordPress sites. This presentation will share these findings highlighting the audits points that are most frequently deficient. I’ll not only describe these mistakes but also show you strategies to address them.

We all want the free traffic that SEO can bring to our sites. However, SEO advice always seems to be changing. What’s the best things you can do to get more traffic (and, better, business) from your SEO efforts in 2021? More specifically, what do WordPress users need to pay attention to in order to get the most love out of Google? David will share what he’s doing with his clients- so you can apply this advice to your website, as well.

Big brands invest heavily in social media marketing. So do writers, influencers and every entrepreneur who wants to increase reach. But freelancers already have so much work on their plate, being a one-person-show, how can they develop a successful social media presence?

In this talk, I share insights I learned in the early years after Elementor launched. Lessons I learned from building Elementor’s social media presence from scratch, while taking care of all other aspects of our global marketing efforts. This strategy helped us grow Elementor from 0 to 8 million websites, and from 5 to 300 employees.

Instead of getting lost in preparing content specifically for social, you will learn how to create a virtuous cycle where your social media content is seamlessly integrated to your business. The more you focus on your own business experience, knowledge and expertise, the more you are able to translate those insights to social media content.

Websites frequently need more than posts and pages to organize our professional content. Fortunately, WordPress provides Custom Post Types so we can easily create new features.

During this session we will take the Twenty Twenty-One theme and transform it into a professional portfolio website by writing our own plugin! Yes, we’ll be writing some PHP, no it’s not difficult. Custom Post Types and Custom Fields are easily “customized” for any project.

This session is for anyone interested in learning a little about WordPress development.

If you want to grow your business or make changes in your personal life, join us for this session on The 12 Week Year. The 12 Week Year is a book that takes annual goal setting and turns it into a meaningful, effective plan that spans 12 weeks. We’ll walk through the basic principles of the book including how to set goals, how to identify tactics to support those goals, how to make and execute a plan, and how to score your progress and stay accountable. We’ll also talk about common pitfalls that might arise. You don’t need to have read the book to attend!

A tactical talk about recruiting and coaching new organizers in a local meetup group. (yeah this description is a work in progress)

WordPress is by far the most widely used Content Management System, with tens of millions of websites based on this software. All visitors should be able to browse the content of these websites, even people with disabilities, and by default WordPress should ease full access to all information for everyone.

But this is not enough: people with disabilities should even be able to create blogs, websites and apps using WordPress without meeting extra difficulties, because everyone has the right to make their own voice heard in spite of their situation.

All of the above explain why ten years ago the Accessibility Team was born within the WordPress Community. The Accessibility Team is a group of volunteers who share their skills to improve the accessibility of the entire project.

But what is WordPress commitment to accessibility? What does the Accessibility Team do? Is it possible to get involved? Starting from his personal experience, Stefano will describe how, week after week, a few contributors team up to improve the accessibility of WordPress.

While visual elements are becoming more and more important in web design, a large part of online information is still conveyed through text: this is why typography should still be the basis of web design.

But making the content of a website legible, readable and appealing even for people with disabilities require some extra attention: a wrong typographic choice may not only make navigation worse but even prevent people from accessing the content of a website, which is the reason why they open a web page in the first place.

Stefano will share some considerations that you may include in your design process to make a more informed decision on how to display text in your website so that even people with disabilities can browse more easily and reach their goals.

18 years and 40+ releases later, WordPress today powers 41% of the internet (and counting!). This popularity of WordPress has kicked off an obvious demand for WordPress professionals along with an ever growing need for WordPress training.

The Learn WordPress initiative (learn.wordpress.org) was officially launched in December 2020 to address this demand. In his session, Hari will give participants a detailed overview of the Learn WordPress platform and the many opportunities it offers.

Hari will go into detail on how individuals and local communities can contribute to the initiative and will share a sneak peak on how the future of WordPress learning looks like!

Before meeting William, Aida had no idea what a WordCamp was or how it could change her life. Since then, they have traveled to, spoken at and volunteered for more than 25 different WordCamps, Nationally, Internationally and Virtually and their love and commitment to the community has led to a greater love and commitment to each other.

They are both WordCamp Speakers, Room MCs, Organizers, and Volunteers, including Meet-ups and KidsCamps! They also host a monthly Meet-Up dedicated to Kids -WPJAX Kids.

Join them as they share the highs and lows of traveling and building a business together using WordPress. They will also share the challenges of championing diversity by being an African American male and an Afro-Latina in a space where they are often the only people of color representing their communities, as well as, the fun of volunteering at KidsCamp and the joys of the friendships and connections they have built with WordPress users throughout the globe!

Theirs is a love story that shows that couples, families and friends can share this experience together and what a fun adventure it can truly be – especially when you bring Wapuu along!

There are certain rules that you follow if you don’t want to end up dead. One of them is to never attend the town fete. That’s only if you life in a small town in England. But when it comes to solving the mystery of your website’s problems, it’s like solving a murder! In this session, we’ll go through some of the forensics and psychology of the website’s behaviour how important witness statements can be in bringing the criminal to justice!

Everyone makes mistakes, but we have a culture not to accept mistakes, which can have dire results. This talk will review some of the most common WordPress mistakes but, more importantly, how we can learn from our mistakes and make our projects better.

This is a presentation about automating the maintenance processes in a WordPress site. I’m going to share some very important processes and plugins that will help automate WordPress to save time, resources, energy and money.

Can you REALLY create any website you can imagine with a Page Builder? Let’s discover how we can design a website using the #1 Free WordPress Website Builder with Elementor. We’ll walk through some examples to create a pixel perfect design in WordPress.

When planning a website, disabilities affecting the brain are often the last accessibility consideration, many times even overlooked completely. But they are equally important, and implementing appropriate accommodations will even improve the overall user experience of the site. You’re probably familiar with many cognitive and neurological disabilities, but haven’t thought about how they impact how someone interacts with a website.

This presentation will discuss several groups of cognitive/neurological disabilities and highlight ways to make your website more accessible for people with these disabilities.

Simon has a severe hearing loss, wears hearing aids and relies heavily on lip reading. The Pandemic has been devastating for everyone, but the addition of mask wearing has added an extra layer of difficulty for those who are Deaf.

But what is it like to be Deaf, what have the challenges been, and what can you do to communicate more effectively with someone who has a hearing difficulty?

This talk will tell you everything you need to know, and also put you in the shoes of someone who is Deaf, so you can experience first hand what it is like!

When a platform improves in accessibility, the improvement trickles down to millions of websites built using it. However, when a platform introduces an accessibility issue, the effect on the one in five people who live with disabilities can be devastating.

As creators of themes, plugins, and code that will be used by millions of people, you have a responsibility to ensure that accessibility is baked into everything you do. In this talk, Sam Proulx, the accessibility evangelist at Fable and a blind screen reader user himself, will share some of the most important things you can do to ensure the tools you create help, rather than harm, accessibility.

Based on his own lived experience, plus Fable’s over 5000 hours of research and testing with assistive technology users, Sam will help you come to grips with how the tools you make affect the accessibility of the content people create, where they often go wrong, and how they can be made better.

Accessibility is more important than ever before. One way you can ensure accessibility for all is by ensuring your WordPress backend is accessible. This ensures all users are able to edit your website, important if you have employees with accessibility needs later on. In this presentation, you will learn best practices for ensuring backend accessibility.

I will show what are the pros and cons of converting WordPress into a static site. During my talk I will also show how we can achieve this and show some interesting numbers about going static.

Today, JavaScript development, including React is an important skill for many WordPress developers to have. The best way to level up your JavaScript skills is with automated testing.

Learn why automated testing for your WordPress plugins, themes and sites is important and how to test your JavaScript.

What are Amazon’s most critical competitive advantages? And what can local stores learn from the giant to build a sustainable business?

Discover new ways of attracting local customers and increase store conversions bridging the gap between online and brick-and-mortar. Building a strategy around your customer needs using tried and tested methods out of Amazon’s toolbox.

Gaining this insight will help support your clients, running a sustainable and successful WooCommerce store.

For both Content Creators & Developers – Learn how block patterns and reusable blocks can level-up your Landing Page creation process. We’ll build a Landing page together that can be used as a basis for A/B testing, vertical targeting and more.

The talk will cover both what features of FSE are coming in WordPress 5.8 and the story of the Outreach Program, including various decisions around format and a peek into how it evolved over time: https://make.wordpress.org/test/handbook/full-site-editing-outreach-experiment/

Shockingly, only 2.6% of the Web is truly accessible to those who are disabled or cognitively challenged. Did you know that you can enhance your content in simple ways to make it more accessible?

Join me for a few Ah-ha moments and breakthroughs as I share 7 easy things you can do immediately to make your content more accessible.

Let’s go deeper and outside-the-box to transform your content into an experience to be enjoyed by all.

You were born a leader, one who strives for A11y Excellence. It’s time to master the 7 habits that can catapult your content toward Accessibility mastery.

You know the value of creating and maintaining an accessible website and content. As you search for where to start, you find there is just too much information out there. It’s a bumpy roller coaster ride!

First. Breathe. Better? Meryl will take you on a smooth roller coaster ride to help you get started with accessibility. The important thing is to start. Progress not perfection. She’ll share simple ways to create accessible content, resources for getting started, and plug-ins for WordPress.

Put away the panic button and come learn:

• Why an accessible website is worth it (just in case you’re not convinced or need to make the case)
• What you can do to start creating accessible content (not just on your website)
• How WordPress makes it easy to create accessible content
• What plugins can do to help with your accessibility efforts

How do you test the accessibility of your code. Can you check everything automatically? In the browser, in the command line, with GitHub actions?

What tools do you have at your disposal for this and what is the best workflow. And also: how meaningful is it?

Rian discusses a few scenarios and gives you tips on how to integrate accessibility testing into your work.

WordCamp conferences are wonderful events that can help HBCU
or Historically Black College and University students build their
Professional Learning Communities (PLC) before graduation and
finding where to start their careers as entrepreneurs or employees.
Having the opportunity to build a Professional Learning Network (PLN) with experts, business owners, digital entrepreneurs, and innovators already in the “business” of web development, graphic design, hosting, developing, and HTML coding. Making this a win-win situation in attending WordCamp and potentially volunteering and speaking at future WordCamp conferences.

WordCamp conferences can blossom into other areas of tech, social media where being part of the right network and “connected” to the “right” people can lead to an awesome career.

Many HBCU students are lacking the knowledge base and experience to apply for entry-level positions in some tech careers and not familiar with the business-level ingredients to running a digital business. Gaining valuable connections and valuable information that can place students ahead of the business curve allowing HBCU students front row seats to listen to and learn from the WordPress community and experts in many key areas.