Presentations

Managing the Editorial Workflow

Presented by Mo Jangda • Salon 6 Track

A look into features, techniques, and plugins (like Edit Flow) that can help optimize your writing and editing workflow within WordPress. Whether you’re a individual blogger or a team or writers and editors, we’ll explore ways to maximize your WordPress efficiency in your journey to create great content.

Effective Marketing In A Digital World

Presented by Jeff Schneider • Salon 5 Track
Take everything you knew about marketing and throw it out the window. In this session Marketing Ninjas founder Jeff Schneider will show you the impact the digital age has had on business. You’ll discover how consumer behaviour has forced businesses to change the way they communicate and how adapting new technologies allows us better meet the needs of the modern day consumer.
Good for: Content Managers

Lessons from the Edmonton Blogosphere

Presented by Mack Male • Salon 5 Track

You’ve jumped into the world of WordPress and have started a blog – now what? What should you write about? How often should you post? How can you engage and grow your audience? What are some common mistakes to avoid? We’ll explore the answers to these questions and more by taking a look at the tools, technologies, and best practices of bloggers in Edmonton.

Good for: Website content managers

Beyond “Bloggers vs Journalists”

Presented by Karen Unland • Salon 5 Track

Journalism has embraced blogging as a better way, in many instances, to cover events and engage with the community. And media organizations are increasingly looking for ways to build partnerships with local bloggers, for both journalistic and business reasons. But there’s still a long way to go. What can be done to ensure we leave the “bloggers vs journalists” mentality in the dustbin, and how can mainstream media and bloggers work together to ensure both benefit from the relationship?

Good for: Website content managers

Using Custom Post Types and Taxonomies to make WordPress play nice with your content

Presented by Daelan Wood • Salon 5 Track

WordPress works great out of the box for a number of types of content. But what if your content doesn’t fit into the pages/posts mold. In this talk we will discuss using Custom Post Types and Taxonomies to make WordPress work with your content instead of forcing you to make your content work with WordPress. I’ll provide the rationale as to why this might be a good idea and a step by step practical guide to getting things working in your theme.

Good for: Web designers and developers

Tips and Tricks to Improve your WordPress Development Workflow

Presented by Sebastien Lhomme • Salon 6 Track

We will explore several techniques to optimize your WordPress development workflow. The plan is to take you through some of the tools, tips, tricks, techniques and approaches towards development that might make your life a little easier, more efficient and generally less frustrating. We’ll talk about ways of setting up wordpress locally for faster easier developpemt, tips to deploy you site to a live environment, and suggestions to help you maintain your WordPress sites effortlessly. I’ll try to make this talk fairly light and easy to digest so everyone, even beginners can enjoy and learn from!

Good for: web designers and developers

Moving WordPress Mobile

Presented by Curtis McHale • Salon 6 Track

A medium to advanced overview of the challenges of working in mobile environments with WordPress sites. We’ll address WP Touch Pro, Media Queries and server solutions like Mobify. We’ll also cover design differences and ways to test on multiple operating systems and devices.

Good for: web designers, developers and website content managers

Search Engine Optimization in WordPress

Presented by Dana Ditomaso • Salon 5 Track

Search engine optimization (SEO) is easy, right? You just slap some keywords in the title and call it a day. Not so fast, buster. While WordPress is one of the more SEO-friendly platforms out there, it’s not perfect out of the box. In this session, I’ll go over the plugins, techniques and code changes necessary in a base WordPress install to make it as SEO-friendly as possible. Along the way we’ll discuss how SEO really works (especially local SEO) and dispel some SEO myths.

Good for: Website content managers

Plugin Development Communities

Presented by Kory Mathewson • Salon 6 Track

Developing a plugin for WordPress by yourself can be a daunting task. But every so often you have a specific need that you customize a plugin to satisfy. Consider then, that someone else on the other side of the world wants to do the exact same thing, with the exact same plugin… You could be their saviour, if only you could share your code with them. This talk will detail my experience with plugin development communities with TubePress and FlexSlider, and how important it is that we continue to share our work with the developers of the world so that we can all be working toward the next solution, and not reinventing the wheel.

Good for: Developers

Master and Manage Engaging Website Content

Presented by Idris Fashan • Salon 5 Track

Searchers, Readers, Buyers, Ambassadors. These are the types of people who will elevate your content to new heights. Without them—well, you don’t exist without them. Idris Fashan has taken the last few years learning how to research the most useful information to define those audience types, their affiliation to you and their readiness to buy. He will show you how to create content that works for search engines and is compelling enough to get shared. He will show you the ways to arrange that content for fast reading that still converts audiences. In this talk, you will learn how to find, connect and build your searchers, readers, buyers and ambassadors. You will also learn about WordPress plugins and options that will help you master and market your online content.

Good for: web designers and website content managers

Typography & The State of the Web Today

Presented by Jeff Archibald • Salon 6 Track

We’ve come a long way: from heiroglyphs on cave walls to the written word, and now from the websafe typefaces of the past like Verdana and Times New Roman to today’s web font solutions. We’ll touch on the past but focus on the now of typography & the web: what can be done with embeddable fonts, solutions and services like Typekit, as well as tools & best practices for web font selection and use in your own website design and development.

Good for: web designers and developers

Developing Client Themes for Theme Review

Presented by Curtis McHale • Salon 6 Track

The talk will cover what the WordPress.org Theme Review process is and basics of how to develop a theme that would pass theme review. We’ll then talk about why we should be developing our client themes with the same thoughts as we find in the Theme Review process and finally address a few of the practical ways we will differ for client themes.

Good for: web designers and developers

Strategies, tips, and tricks to effective content creation and blog marketing

Presented by Nick Coe • Salon 5 Track

From both a high and low level perspective, this talk will give you a comprehensive understanding of effective content and marketing strategy. We’ll start by discussing overarching content and marketing principles and drill down into tactics like keyword analysis, social media utilization, search engine optimization, and e-mail marketing. We’ll explore different ways to make your WordPress site or blog more “social” and uncover tools that will take your content and site to the next level. We want to help you create optimal content that has impact through the right marketing techniques!

Good for: Website content managers

Designing a Client-Focused WordPress Site

Presented by Jeff Archibald • Salon 5 Track

As designers, developers and web entrepreneurs, we strive to make user-focused sites; sites that are efficient & effective; sites that are designed progressively; sites that are cross-browser friendly; sites that make users take action and so forth. This is great, and shouldn’t stop. But there’s one area that gets left behind quite a bit when it comes to designing CMS-powered sites: the clients that are using them. We should be designing to make their experience as good or better than the end user experience. This talk will focus on tips, tools & best practices to make your WordPress site the most client-friendly it can be.

Good for: web designers, developers and website content managers

Remixed Themes: Beginner’s Guide to Customizing Existing Themes

Presented by Marc Davison • Salon 5 Track

Remixing Themes will cover the ins and outs of making a theme your own. You’ll learn how, with a little trial and error, you can use any theme as a framework and with a bit of coding knowledge you can customize any theme. This will be a ‘down and dirty’ topic. You’re not going to learn how to find the exact array that leads to an intended result, you’ll learn how to find the piece of code you need to modify, whether it’s a simple rounding of the corners, or adding a new sidebar. A number of tools and methods will be discussed and how to use them to achieve great results in a short amount of time.

Good for: web designers, developers and website content managers

What is WordPress & Why Is It Great?

Presented by Kory Mathewson • Salon 5 Track

WordPress has taken the world of online publishing by storm since it first gained popularity in 2003. Now, it is used by more than 22% of all new websites to create easy to manage backends, beautiful, customizable front ends, while handling everything in between in elegant free, open source PHP and MySQL code. WordPress is used for everything from e-commerce to portfolio sites, from single page websites, to multiple hundreds of pages of dynamic content. It is the community of users, plugins, themes, frameworks, and general mindset of developers, designers and users that make WordPress so easy and fun to use.

Good for: web designers, developers and website content managers

Using SASS to code better WordPress templates

Presented by Dana Janssen • Salon 6 Track

There are many new tools for easily writing and maintaining CSS. In my talk, I will:

  1. Compare SASS and LESS
  2. Show real-life examples of SASS variables, mixins, if/for/each/while loops
  3. Discuss how SASS encourages good coding: file organization, class naming, DRY principal
  4. Show how SASS can be used with WordPress (or any other CMS)
  5. Provide resources for learning more about SASS and LESS

Good for: web designers and developers