This year’s WordCamp focuses heavily on Gutenberg and the future of WordPress.
Gutenberg is the new visual editor in WordPress 5.0. It’s a dramatic change to the WordPress experience for both users and developers.
In light of the significance of this release, we’re working with each of our speakers to tie their sessions back to the new editor.
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Copywriting for Better UX
When we think about UX, we’re often so focused on fonts, colors, and flow to think about those small bits of text that guide users through almost every part of a web interface—the microcopy. Gutenberg makes it easier to craft engaging multimedia content and improve the user experience of your site. But what about the less sexy parts of a website like menu labels and buttons, error messages and interface instructions? These words may be tiny but they can make a significant difference in the usability of your design and affect crucial aspects of your site such as its conversion rates.
This presentation offers copywriting and communication tips that will immediately improve your user interface microcopy so your users experience is a more delightful and less frustrating one. The talk will focus on interface copy for end-users and note where elements can be edited with Gutenberg.
Copywriting tips, UX design basics, tips to improve website design
Gutenberg and the Content Design Opportunity
Gutenberg’s imminent arrival creates both excitement and uncertainty in WordPress users. On the one hand, its resemblance to distraction-free editors—Medium, for example—is a step forward. On the other hand, its impact on site building is massive. Aside from whether Gutenberg will be compatible across every single WordPress site, we also wonder if it spells the end of page builders or even WordPress consulting. This session is a forum for those questions.
We’ll assess Gutenberg’s opportunities and challenges and how we might prepare for it. We’ll especially look at Gutenberg’s content design opportunity and how it enables better content creation through atomized content. By modularizing content into blocks, we have the opportunity to approach content creation from the bottom-up—something that’s more explicit in Gutenberg than in the current WordPress editor. Whatever your views regarding Gutenberg, come to this session for a nuanced look on what it has to offer and prepare for its imminent arrival.
- An overview of Gutenberg’s editing interface and authoring experience.
- Discuss and plan for Gutenberg’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats with respect to adoption and site development.
- A broad introduction to content design and how Gutenberg explicitly builds it into the authoring experience.
The One Stop Marketing Shop: Gutenberg’s Marketing Toolbox
Can WordPress be the one stop shop for your marketing needs? Is it going to be there for you as you grow from a small business to a large one or will it let you down along the way? This session covers four critical digital marketing categories and how WordPress & Gutenberg support them through various stages of complexity.
Business owners, marketers, developers and designers will take away:
- The growth stages of the four critical digital marketing categories: SEO, paid ads, email and marketing automation, conversion rate optimization and UX.
- WordPress’s support of your business through your growth stages, with a case study.
- Powerful ways to leverage Gutenberg’s modular thinking for marketing.
Our Beloved Plugins and Gutenberg
The goal of this session is to show how some of the most popular WordPress plugins are responding to, interacting with and supporting Gutenberg as well as what’s in their roadmaps. The plugins discussed include SEO (YOAST), page builders (Beaver Builder / Elementor / Divi), custom fields (Advanced Custom Fields), gallery sliders (NextGEN Gallery), forms (Ninja Forms) and others (TinyMCE Advanced, WooCommerce, etc.).
– Although it’s release is scheduled for 2018-11-19, the Gutenberg beta is supported by some major plugins – New features that Gutenberg enables in these plugins – Ideas on how Gutenberg can be used to enhance the editing experience
Storytelling with Gutenberg: How to use the new editor to boost your blog
With the new Gutenberg editor, the possibilities for visually striking and engaging storytelling in WordPress have grown exponentially. For marketing content creators, journalists, and bloggers, harnessing the power of Gutenberg can improve the effectiveness of your messages, elevate your designs, and save you time.
In this talk, you’ll learn about current marketing trends in content design and how to put them into practice on your own site using Gutenberg. You’ll learn blogging and page design tricks that make the most of the new editor and can help your content pop.
- How to use Gutenberg
- storytelling tips
- copywriting tips
- publishing and marketing trends
WordPress as a Digital Marketing Hub: Gutenberg Edition
How to use your WordPress site and Gutenberg with various digital marketing plugins to grow your business.
We will discuss how your WordPress site is more than a just website. It can be a great platform to turn your website into a digital marketing powerhouse. We will cover plugins for reputation management, email marketing, social media feeds and sharing, retargeting, SEO and analytics. You will learn how to use plugins we recommend to get the desired exposure to get business growth.
Building and Automating WordPress Workflows
Do you have a complex WordPress eLearning, eCommerce or membership site that uses lots of plugins? You’ve probably run into challenges getting them all working together. When a user makes a purchase, how do you give them access to 2 things? Or, when a user completes 3 actions, how can you automatically trigger a fourth? In this session, we’ll look at ways that tools can help you build and automate workflows like these to make your user experience as seamless as possible as well as keep your admin effort to a minimum. We’ll also look at the implications arising from the release of WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg.
- Some of the common challenges faced by users setting up complex websites that use a lot of plugins or require frequent admin intervention
- An approach to solving these problems using plugins, CRMs and other applications
Migrating 1,300 websites from HTML to WordPress, a business process case study
We migrated 1,300 websites from HTML to WordPress. Learn how I assessed the business processes beforehand, conducted a company-wide process audit and implemented improvements involving the client services, business account managers, sales, finance, marketing and IT teams. I will also discuss how I built the CRM requirements and worked directly with the CRM developers to track and automate reporting of the various website statuses such as cancellations, suspensions, and brand new website build requests. Finally, learn how I would have evaluated the impact of Gutenberg on the migration had it been released prior to the project.
• How to assess the big picture around website processes • How to work with different teams within a large corporation to educate them on business process updates • How to work with the older generation on selecting website templates for migrations • How a multi-site instance was set up for the migration of 1,300 websites
Who Moved My Editor? Addressing Gutenberg Facts and Fears
Change is hard. For a developer, changing our workflow is especially difficult. In his book, Who moved my cheese?, Dr. Spencer Johnson uses an allegory to teach healthy coping mechanisms for change. When it comes to choosing a CMS, developers rely upon the tools with which we’re most familiar. Traditionally, WordPress doesn’t make breaking changes. But with the upcoming release of the Gutenberg editor in WordPress 5.0, how can we realistically adjust both our attitudes and our workflows?
What if WordPress forks? What if it forks several times? How do page builders fit into a Gutenberg world? Will my favorite plugins adapt and how? Will my clients’ sites break?
It’s okay to ask questions. Learning to anticipate, monitor, and adapt to change leads us to a healthy place of positive acceptance.
In this talk, we will spend some time discussing the actual risk-benefit assessment of WordPress 5.0. You will leave with a better outlook — guaranteed.
- Don’t fear forking
- Truth vs fiction
- It will be OK
CSS Grid, Gutenberg and the future of Layouts
Released last year, CSS Grid changes everything for the web and the WordPress communityIt means that, for the first time, we can think of layout on posts and pages as two-dimensional and fully responsive. CSS Grid is not another plugin hack or bootstrap patch. Quite simply, it’s the solution for which designers have been asking. It is here to stay and right now is the perfect time to learn it.
Why CSS Grid? How to use Grid? When to use Grid? Demos!
Democratizing Digital Marketing. Why We Need To Create A Better User Experience.
Lead generation, page builders, email marketing, customer management and advertising are marketing tools that have exploded in number and popularity because of SaaS, the cloud, has made them inexpensive to build with low initial subscription costs. With a 100 different cloud based platforms offering 14 day free trials, rarely does someone looking for the latest and greatest in marketing tools think of WordPress.
That’s a problem because WordPress provides some of the best marketing tools and the lowest costs. With WordPress, you can build sophisticated eCommerce stores, send emails, and create automated follow-up. For example, there are literally hundreds of lead generation strategies and WordPress offers website builder the most effective SEO markup.
So why are people going to the cloud when they could be getting the same or better for less or free with WordPress? It’s because the cloud currently offers a better user experience.
With the advent of Gutenberg, a new era is beginning for WordPress, one that marks a new focus on providing a greatly improved user experience. With it, you can make your vision come a reality.
In this session, whether you’re a developer or not, I’m going to share with you tips and strategies that will help you create a better user experience for your plugin, your theme or your site so you can compete with the SaaS tools and make WordPress a better place for everyone.
Growth and the Future of SEO using Gutenberg
Most websites are only using SEO to target 30% of available traffic. This is a practical presentation that will help you identify how that missing 70%, the SEO techniques to integrate it into your web design, and, finally, how Gutenberg makes the development far more effective. You’ll also learn to identify easy SEO wins for your business and how web design and SEO are so closely related.
How do I prepare my website and marketing for Voice Search and Google’s Knowledge Graph? In recent months, these have become very popular topics. Businesses want to stay ahead of the curve so their lead generation does not fall behind – online marketing is key to their success. As we look into the future of WordPress with Gutenberg and SEO, it will become clear what search engines are looking for from you and how it directly relates to the 70% we’ll be uncovering together.
Key Takeaways:
- What the breakdown of search traffic is today
- How to identify easy SEO wins and integrate them into your website
- What is SEO-driven design
- How Gutenberg makes it easier to integrate SEO
- The future of SEO and why you won’t need to worry with good SEO
Building Gutenberg Blocks, the Playlist Block Story
In this talk, I will outline the story and what we learned from building the Playlist block for the Gutenberg editor. We will explore both the epic wins and failures in the course of building our first block. If you are learning Gutenberg or React and have hit road blocks in understanding the flow, data or tools available, this talk will clear the air on many of those issues. We’ll explore local development tools and design patterns used in block creation.
If there is one takeaway from this talk, it is that Gutenberg isn’t scary.
Building my first Gutenberg Block
This technical session is for developers as well as users with at least a little coding experience. After a brief introduction to what Gutenberg is and what it can do, the presentation will show simple bits of code and demonstrate how these bits of code translate into a Gutenberg block.
- Building a Gutenberg block is very simple
- Gutenberg blocks make the editing experience a lot richer
Current Trends in SEO For Businesses and Bloggers
The basics behind search engine optimization (SEO) and high rankings in Google haven’t changed much in the last decade. While both on-site SEO and off-site SEO tactics remain important, newer areas of focus have come into play. Topics such as content quality, website speed, security, design, the Knowledge Graph, artificial intelligence, algorithm updates and Google mandated changes should be considered by anyone looking to stay up to date with SEO. This session will discuss some of the latest trends that site owners and managers should be aware of.
Fast and furious: using Redis as a WordPress object cache
WordPress makes dozens (or hundreds) of SQL queries every time it serves a page. Every single one of them involves MySQL, and many of them hit the disk. Learn how Redis can turn those hundreds of queries into a handful, speeding up your site and reducing the load on your database.
Along the way, you’ll learn about WordPress transients (a way of storing data temporarily in the WordPress database), see the world’s most technically-compliant cache, and learn secondhand about server crashes (so you don’t have to learn firsthand).
In the session, you will receive the preliminary results of experiments to evaluate the impact of Gutenberg on a site’s database load. For example, does the way Gutenberg blocks are stored or the standardization of blocks reduces the hits on the server?
In this talk, you’ll learn:
- How WordPress transients work
- setting up an external object cache with Redis
- simple Redis monitoring
Gutenberg Strategy Panel
Join us for an open-ended question and answer session with a panel of our speakers and WordCamp Toronto organizers, moderated by Robin Macrae. The one topic we will discuss is adoption strategies for individuals, business and enterprises and other practical issues in the changes brought by Gutenberg.
Come and tell us whether you’re stressed, elated and/or resigned and we’ll do our best to put Gutenberg into perspective for you.
Making websites accessible and complying with the AODA
This session is about creating accessible web sites. I will talk about:
- Ontario’s accessibility requirements
- Some tips for creating accessible code
- Free tools to test for accessibility
- WordPress themes that are accessibility ready and
- Gutenberg and accessibility
People with disabilities can’t use Gutenberg effectively. Larger organizations who implement it may face legal fallout.
The WordPress accessibility community is rallying to make WordPress do the right thing by disabled users. I will talk about those efforts, as well as the efforts of the Gutenberg team to improve its accessibility.
Attendees will learn about:
- how blind people use the web
- creating accessible web sites
- the guidelines that help you know what to do
- free tools to test for accessibility and
- accessibility ready WordPress themes
According to the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) beginning January 1, 2021 all public websites and web content posted after January 1, 2012 must meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA. Learn about meeting this requirement.
https://www.ontario.ca/page/how-make-websites-accessible.
Beginning January 1, 2014: new public websites, significantly refreshed websites and any web content posted after January 1, 2012 must meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level A.
Beginning January 1, 2021: all public websites and web content posted after January 1, 2012 must meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA other than criteria 1.2.4 (live captions) and 1.2.5 (pre-recorded audio descriptions).
Closing Remarks
Phew…We made it.
We will have a short closing remarks session to gather your feedback on the event before we head to the after party venue next door at 6pm.
