Alex worked with the Ontario Public Service as an information management advisor and team lead in the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade as well as a product manager at two technology startups. He started his career as a developer at Apple in Austin, Texas.
Alex is also an active participant in the cloud community in Toronto and abroad including businesscloud.to, TechConnex.ca, GoDaddy Pro, WordPress, and Formstack product communities.
Presentation: Managed WordPress Demystified
“The WordPress ecosystem now supports many businesses from plugins to themes to marketplaces. Hosting lacks glamour and is pretty utilitarian, yet when it comes to making sure your WordPress site runs well, it is critical to success.
I noticed a year ago that managed WordPress companies were sprouting up all over the world and I wanted to choose the best for my customers. So I decided to deep dive and find out the differences between each one of them.”
What unique perspective are you bringing to this talk?
“I work with customers who are primarily non-technical. They are all small businesses who depend on a full service approach to providing all details of hosting, development and maintenance of WordPress sites.
We’ve learned (the hard way) that without a strong hosting partner, WordPress sites are very vulnerable — not only to malware attacks but also to breaking due to unsafe development practices. We will talk from our experience with real customers and talk about real experiences.”
What’s one really cool thing people will discover during your session?
“Did you know there are over 20 managed WordPress hosts? Each does nothing but host WordPress websites and provides a very high level of support and functionality for WordPress developers. Hosting on a shared host is really just the beginning of WordPress hosting. Surprisingly each one of the companies that does managed WordPress hosting develops their own custom workflows and technology to help the WordPress community.”
Do you have a good WordPress related story, anecdote or memory?
“Sure… My first white screen in WordPress was really fun. I was editing a theme using the code editor in the back end and hit update. Boom. Nothing would load. After a bit of digging around I realized that the WordPress can be very picky about the spacing on the closing tags of ?>
That’s when I learned that WordPress has a very special set of “”unknowns”” just like any other environment. And I’ve learned many more since then. Getting to know these “”unknowns”” makes every WordPress expert a special butterfly, unique in their knowledge set.”
What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?
“Meeting the Toronto community — we are new to WordCamp so it will be a pleasure to get to know the folks that have been building the scene in Toronto.”