{"id":575,"date":"2015-08-31T16:00:50","date_gmt":"2015-08-31T21:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/2015.toronto.wordcamp.org\/?p=575"},"modified":"2015-08-31T12:27:37","modified_gmt":"2015-08-31T17:27:37","slug":"featured-speaker-dara-skolnick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toronto.wordcamp.org\/2015\/featured-speaker-dara-skolnick\/","title":{"rendered":"Featured Speaker: Dara Skolnick"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/29a35943b2f1e3174211c0a7e0f35e18?s=100&amp;d=mm&amp;r=g\" alt=\"\" \/>&#8220;Hi, I\u2019m Dara and I&#8217;m an independent web designer and front-end developer from Toronto. I\u2019ve worked at a number of places from large organizations to small agencies, and now I run my own <a href=\"http:\/\/daraskolnick.com\" target=\"_blank\">one-person shop<\/a> where I design and code websites for entrepreneurs, creatives, and big-hearted small businesses. I\u2019ve been creating websites professionally for many years, and these days the majority of them are in WordPress!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h3><em>Presentation:\u00a0Help Me Help You: Practical Tips for Designers from A WordPress Developer<\/em><\/h3>\n<p>&#8220;In addition to doing full website projects where I&#8217;m both the designer and the developer, a lot of my work is doing development for designers who either don&#8217;t know how to code or prefer not to code.<\/p>\n<p>While the designers I work with regularly are great, I&#8217;ve heard a lot of horror stories from both designers and developers about terrible working relationships, and I&#8217;ve come across lots of designs that look nice but just don&#8217;t work well from a development perspective. I&#8217;ve had many one-on-one conversations with designers about how to make their designs more web-friendly, and I realized that since I was saying the same things over and over again, a lot of people could probably benefit from knowing this stuff. And that, in a nutshell, is why I decided to present on this topic.&#8221;<\/p>\n<h3>What unique perspective are you bringing to this talk?<\/h3>\n<p>&#8220;Since I&#8217;m both a designer and a developer I empathize with both roles, so I think both designers and developers will take useful information away from my talk.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve also been told that I talk about technical topics in a non-jargony, amusing way!<\/p>\n<p>Because I&#8217;m a one-person shop, my talk will probably be most useful for freelancers, small teams, and people who partner with designers\/developers remotely.&#8221;<\/p>\n<h3>What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?<\/h3>\n<p>&#8220;I love the WordPress community so I&#8217;m looking forward to hanging out with both old and new friends!&#8221;<\/p>\n<h3>What&#8217;s one really cool thing people will discover during your session?<\/h3>\n<p>&#8220;My aim by the end of my talk is to help more designers and developers get along with each other! We&#8217;re all on the same team (that&#8217;d be the team that creates awesome websites, of course), so life is much better when we can all be friends and speak the same language.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>More from Dara:\u00a0<\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/daraskolnick\" target=\"_blank\">Dara on Twitter<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/daraskolnick.com\" target=\"_blank\">Dara&#8217;s website<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Hi, I\u2019m Dara and I&#8217;m an independent web designer and front-end developer from Toronto. I\u2019ve worked at a number of places from large organizations to small agencies, and now I run my own one-person shop where I design and code websites for entrepreneurs, creatives, and big-hearted small businesses. I\u2019ve been creating websites professionally for many [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6358608,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4636],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured-speakers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UjGY-9h","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toronto.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toronto.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toronto.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toronto.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6358608"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toronto.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/toronto.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":582,"href":"https:\/\/toronto.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions\/582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toronto.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toronto.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toronto.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}