“I’ve been building and hosting WordPress websites for over 5 years. During the 15 years I’ve worked in technology I’ve designed high performance networks and specialized in network security. Currently I’m a co-founder of easyPress.ca, a fast, secure and reliable WordPress hosting service operating in Canada.”

View Victor’s speaker profile.

Presentation: Performance Hacking

“This session will present clear instructions on how to make a website load faster. There are 3 main areas that affect a website’s performance: server side stack, application code and frontend components. The same is true for WordPress. I’ll begin by providing an overview of why speed is so important for every website. Next, the tools required for analysis are introduced and their use is demonstrated. Then, I’ll spend the bulk of the talk focusing on specific frontend best practices that every designer and developer can apply to help speed up the websites they build.”

“Hi, I’m Dara, an independent web designer and front-end developer from Toronto. I’ve worked at a number of places from large organizations to small agencies, and now I run my own small (as in, one person) business. I’ve been creating websites professionally for many years, and well over 3/4 of them are in WordPress! When I’m not designing and coding client sites you can sometimes find me leading Ladies Learning Code workshops, mentoring at HackerYou, or showing up at various meetups around the city.”

View Dara’s speaker profile.

Presentation: Levelling up your development workflow

“About a year ago I realized that my WordPress development workflow wasn’t nearly as efficient as it could have been, so I took steps to make it far better, and I think that sharing what I learned would be really useful for other developers.”

A content marketer at heart, David understands that good content starts with knowing the audience. He blends what people say (customer conversations) with what customers do (website data) to help WordPress site owners build smart more attractive content.

View David’s speaker profile.

Presentation: Google Analytics and WordPress for Beginners

This session is a beginner’s guide to best practice set up of Google Analytics and navigating the user interface so you can look at your traffic more critically. We’ll also talk about how Google Analytics WordPress plugins simplify your set-up and analysis.

Elida is slightly obsessed with creating delightful user experiences and determining the best way to do just about anything. She has 15 years’ experience spanning commercial photography, digital media, design, fine arts and teaching. By day, Elida is a UX Designer at Sid Lee, an acclaimed creative agency based in Montreal. By night, she enjoys sampling fine liquids such as new world wines, craft beers and gourmet balsamics.

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Presentation: Wireframe Secrets Revealed

Wireframes. Such a mysterious and elusive term. You may have heard rumours that they exist deep in the depths of waste bins napkins to top secret security compounds. Legend states that wireframes transcend powerful benefits of website creation. But some say could be dangerous to use or almost extinct. Could this be all true?

If blueprints are to a building, what wireframes are to a website, you could be missing out on fundamental knowledge. Let us embark on a LoFi to HiFi journey, discovering wireframe types, tools and much more.

Nicole is a software developer at Alley Interactive, a leading WordPress.com VIP service partner. She develops WordPress sites for Alley Interactive’s high profile media clients, such as Fortune and The New York Post. She also contributes to WordPress as part of the Documentation Team, and has spoken at Detroit area meetups and WordCamps.

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Presentation: Core Functions You (Maybe) Don’t Know Exist

With thousands of functions in the WordPress codebase, it’s virtually impossible to remember all of them. We’ll cover some overlooked WordPress core functions that you may not know exist. We’ll walk through some practical examples for their use, and give you a variety of new gems you can use every day.

Alex Rascanu is a digital strategist and speaker. He creates and executes digital marketing initiatives that help brands win.

Alex is the Director of Marketing at Wealthsimple, a startup that makes smart, simple, low-fee investing accessible to everyone, regardless of net worth or financial knowledge.

View Alex’s speaker profile.

Presentation: Demystifying SEO

Discover what SEO best practices and resources can help you win in the long run, while complementing your current WordPress development processes. Learn how to incorporate our key take-aways to improve your organic search results and generate more customers for your brand.

“I tinker with code at Automattic on a team called “Tinker”. I like ice cream and other sugary things. I wrangle WordPress-related code at Automattic.

I like web stuff including working with open source software such as WordPress, API integration, and other cool things.”

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Presentation: The Database Schema

Learn how the database schema of WordPress is setup, including a walk-through of the tables and how WordPress stores the data and helps you interact with it via its APIs. We’ll also dive into the benefits and dangers of the schema and how to adapt it to go beyond just blog posts.

Brian Layman has been hacking WordPress for fun and profit since 2004. In 2007 he left his programmer analyst position in the corporate world to work full time io join b5media, a Toronto based blogging network. The entrepreneurs working at b5media proved that you could make a living through WordPress, blogging and OpenSource technologies. feeding his family off of the fruits of WordPress.

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Presentation: AJAX

There was a time when every action taken on a website involved staring at a white screen for 5 seconds as the entire page was reloaded. If, for your clients, that time was last week, you should attend this session.

We will learn the basics of using AJAX to improve the speed, performance and presentation of your website. This session will involve writing source code. A basic understanding of editing plugins, themes, hooks and filters will be helpful, but may not be required.

Hailing from the rolling cornfields of Iowa, Mendel loves the outdoors, hiking, gourmet coffee, programming, and prototyping new inventions. From scrappy beginnings as an entrepreneur and Web consultant for local businesses, he found his way to corporate America as a software developer, marketer, and inventor. In addition, Mendel can be found at local and national conferences speaking about small business and software development topics.

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Presentation: Pump up your search visibility with structured data

Google and other search engines use schema.org formatted structured data to power rich snippets in search results. These rich snippets make a search listing stand out, and therefore make it more likely someone might click on your listing. This talk focuses on the PODS framework and how it can be used to easily add schema.org structured data information to your WordPress content to improve the Google search listing for your content.

“I’m a web designer from Birmingham, AL with 15 years of agency experience building websites big and small for a wide variety of clients. I’m passionate about usability, obsessive about typography, and addicted to the mobile web. When I’m not designing, I also make music and grow a beard. I’m a freelance designer and also a contractor for Modern Tribe, which is a name that I’m sure is recognized in the WordPress community.

I’m a huge typography nerd and am passionate about creating great content presentation and reading experiences on the web.”

View David’s speaker profile.

Presentation: Designing for Content

“In this talk, I’ll go over the method I’ve created for designing websites from the content outward. I’ll cover aspects of designing in code, type choices, line height and typographic scale, creating a proper base style sheet for your child theme, usability best practices, semantic structure, and more. Since the web is fundamentally a text-based, utilitarian medium, making good type choices is arguably the most important aspect of web design. In this presentation, I’ll walk you through the things I’ve learned in my 15 years designing for the web.”