🇬🇧 WordCamp Whitley Bay 2023

Jonny is Head of Design & UX at Big Bite and has worked on several enterprise websites for clients such as The Times, Wall Street Journal, Gumtree, V&A, and Octopus Group. In this talk, we will take a behind-the-scenes look at how enterprise brands are utilising WordPress.

We all dream of the Utopia that is a truly inclusive community or workplace. Somewhere where everyone feels valued and welcome no matter their background.  The land where the dreams you dare to dream really do come true.

The WordPress community is hugely diverse, and represents people from all sorts of backgrounds and with a wide variety of skillsets. But is it also as inclusive as it could be, especially for the LGBTQIA+ community? Let’s discuss some of the challenges faced and how, as individuals, we can make small changes that could help to remove some of the barriers that prevent people from being open and true to themselves.

How important is rich content? This talk uses real-world case studies to explore the value of using rich content to enhance audience engagement and interactivity, on balance with keeping websites accessible, usable and optimised to drive conversions and business growth.

“Headless” is more than just a buzzword. It’s a way of thinking with the potential to revolutionise WordPress design and development. But how can we effectively integrate composable build practices and harness the true value of Headless in areas where it matters most? We’ll explore how Headless development methodologies can enhance composability, extensibility, and efficiency. Attendees will gain valuable insights into how these techniques can be integrated with existing WordPress projects.

Drawing from our hands-on experience with both SMB and SME website projects, we’ll examine the impact of Headless on our traditional monolithic development, exploring how these methodologies can increase flexibility for marketers and publishers while significantly streamlining development processes.

In August last year I took on a new challenge, acting chief of staff to the CTO at GitLab. In this talk I share the lessons I learned from working alongside leadership, how I applied them to my regular role, and how you can too. 

Reducing your website’s carbon emissions and making your website accessible is good for business. Sustainable websites improve the user experience, whilst implementing accessibility best practices and improving performance can directly influence conversion rates, repeat business, and search engine rankings.

This talk will focus on the resources and practical steps for designers and developers to consider when creating a new WordPress website. You’ll learn how we can all contribute to a greener and more responsible digital future by raising awareness of accessibility and digital sustainability which will in turn empower WordPress website owners to have a positive impact for people and planet.

Did you hear about the time that Joe’s site got hacked because of a meme? Who is Joe? Well, that’s unimportant, which meme and now we are asking the big questions.

Tim will take Joe’s hack and several others’ misery and turn them into a scary but practical learning experience. As we join him in firefighting, exposing vulnerabilities, hacks, and learning with the power of hindsight what we can do to prevent them.

This talk walks you through the journey of a baby WordPress site growing up, from a simple two-dollar shared host, all the way up to a multi-server distributed hosting architecture. We’ll cover compute, networking, storage, databases, backups and deployments.

Compatibility is often indicated with labels like “works with Gutenberg” or “Gutenberg ready.” However, these labels often only mean the product can function with it. It’s essential to fully embrace and use the new features to enhance the quality of your interface and workflow.

What does it mean to embrace the new phases of WordPress as a product? Specifically, how can you take advantage of them now and in the future? In this talk, I will share steps and offer insights into how to embrace the changes.

Gutenberg has revolutionised WordPress theme development, paving the way for a future where creating themes requires minimal to zero coding. This talk will cover creating and editing block themes within the editor, using the design tools available in Gutenberg in combination with the Create Block Theme plugin. It will describe the features of both tools, showcasing the practical ways to leverage Gutenberg’s block library, layout options, customisation tools, and advanced features provided by the Create Block Theme plugin.

You can’t know everything going into a digital development project – it’s just impossible. Almost everything we do, and every problem we face, in digital projects is a direct result of these gaps in our knowledge and the risks they open up, but we very rarely see the whole picture well enough to understand this, nor do we generally have a framework to use this understanding to help us do our best work. In this talk Ant gives a new model for us to consider this gap, and explores how this new point of view can help us use the tools and techniques we have to deliver better results from happier teams.