WordCamp SLC 2015
We missed WordCamp SLC last year (2014), but we made sure we could attend this year for 2015. If you’re not familiar with WordCamp, it’s an informal, community-organized event that is put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. So if you ever get a chance to go to a WordCamp in your area, I definitely recommend it. Here’s some highlights from WordCamp 2015.
How to Measure Page Speed using WebPageTest.org
Joseph Scott
features provided by WebPageTest and how to use that information to improve the performance of your website. This will
include the general structure of WebPageTest, the performance features that are tested, and tips on how to setup a private instance of WebPageTest.
He walked through how to understand the results when you put your site into WebPageTest.org. Including the waterfall, the ping to the server, and how to identify image size and other things that could be compressed.
Filmstrip View allows you to see exactly what the site looks like in ms while the page loads. It also has an option to create an actual video to show what it looks like with or without certain elements for a comparison view.
He then went through the advanced settings which allows you to test the site without loading things like js, or ssl errors.
Intro to Sass for WordPress Theme Developers
Suzette Franck
If you are a theme developer, using Sass or Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets is a time saving way to write your code and it is easy to learn once you are familiar with CSS. In this session, you will learn how to harness the power of variables, nesting, and mixins to take advantage of everything that SASS has to offer to write awesome code. In order to get the most from this session, you must have a good understanding of HTML and CSS.
Two flavors of SASS .scss and .sass
- http://thesassway.com/beginner/getting-started-with-sass-and-compass/
- http://sassmeister.com
style.scss fills holes in CSS and is more efficient. You can use variables (huge!). Which allows you to put in a style element once, then just refer to it throughout your document as you style different elements.
Mixins are similar to variables but you can do complete styles such as all the fonts, color, etc. Then you can push those styles to elements using @include mixin and it will auto add those styles.
http://sassme.arc90.com allows you to see the SASS color functions.
You can find her slides (for now) on speaker deck and slideshare
You Win, You Learn, There is No Losing!
Dre Armeda
Dre has a lot of experience building businesses from the ground up. Dre was the founder of Cubic 2, a custom web design & development shop that provided custom solutions for WordPress clients. Then he started Sucuri Security, and turned it into a very successful multi-million dollar, 30+ employee company that services millions of unique monthly scans, monitors thousands of websites, and makes sure that 100′s of websites are cleared of malware daily.
Dre is going to be drawing from his wealth of experience in business management to talk about growing your business. Starting a business is hard, but it can be fun and extremely satisfying as well. This presentation will relate back to a lot of Dre’s own personal experiences in the field and he will be giving tips and pointers for those working hard to build their business today.
How to Increase Website Conversions by Applying the Laws of Great Product Design
Lindsay Bayuk
In this talk, Lindsay Bayuk will cover the core concepts for building a great product and how to apply them to your WordPress site. Learn how to optimize your WordPress site and increase conversion with better targeting, positioning, messaging, personas and testing.
Test the message…not the words
Usability Hub
The User Ecosystem of WordPress
Brady Nord
The life cycle of the average WordPress user has many phases. Each user journeys through hosting, installing, themes and plugins until they find what they want and have a successful WordPress site. I will share insight from years of working with millions of WordPress users on what their behaviors are and what they are looking for. WordPress is a great open source product and I look forward to sharing how businesses and users can better understand what the entire ecosystem entails.
Designing with Typography
Joel Jenkins
Joel went through the history of serif vs san-serif fonts the pro’s and cons, and some great sites for font pairing. Such as:
VoiceandTone.com by MailChimp lets you match up tones on messaging you’re trying to get across.
You can even embed fonts with only the letters you are using.
Will It Scale? Breaking Your Website on Purpose by Pushing It to the Limit
Ryan Sullivan
The day of your new product launch isn’t when you want to find out that your website can’t handle high levels of traffic. In this talk, I’ll go through a series of WordPress optimization techniques, and how to get your site performing well on a server with very little resources.
Then I’ll take the talk to the next level and share loads of data that I’ve collected over the years showing tools you can use to test your website at scale, and how to determine where your site starts to breakdown when the load becomes too much to handle.
Some tools he recommended are:
- Pingdom Real User Monitoring: https://www.pingdom.com/product/performance-monitoring
- Simulate Traffic at https://loadimpact.com or https://www.blitz.io
- For Image Scaling: tinypng.com or https://kraken.io
Conclusion
Overall it was a pretty good WordCamp and had some great topics. I definitely recommend anyone to find their local WordCamp in their area by going to: https://central.wordcamp.org
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