Speakers & Sessions: Part 2

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We’ve just published the schedule for this year’s WordCamp Toronto!

You’ll notice our theme of Gutenberg and the future of WordPress echoing throughout the sessions.

We have several developers sharing their first-hand experiences with custom block development; we have marketers talking about the impact of Gutenberg on business websites; and professionals offering their expert advice on designing for user experience and accessibility.

Ticket sales are starting to pick up, so be sure to register while you can.

In the meantime, say hello to your second wave of confirmed speakers and sessions…

Sandy Feldman

Sandy is a web geek interested in, and experienced with, web accessibility. She has built sites for disability-related organizations. These sites work for the disabled stakeholders and are AODA compliant. Working as part of a team at Inclusive Media and Design , she has conducted accessibility audits and provided coaching to developers and users.

Sandy’s talk: Making websites accessible and complying with AODA

This session is about creating accessible web sites. Sandy 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

Jesse Emmanuel (Jem) Rosario

Jem is a User Experience designer building insightful, creative and usable digital experiences. WordPress has been the backbone of his UX career. He has learned from his UX work the virtue of planning website builds far ahead and that user-centered design facilitates trust in an increasingly crowded market.

Jem’s talk: Gutenberg and the content design opportunity

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.

Ryan Meghdies

In 2014, Ryan launched Tastic Marketing, a boutique agency that has built a reputation based on partnering with client businesses and driving exceptional growth with lead generation campaigns and techniques. The agency crafts premium WordPress websites and its web design process ensures it consistently generates results for its clients.

Ryan’s talk: 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.

Adrian Tobey

From Adrian: “I’m taking my 10 years of marketing and 5 years of WordPress development experience to create new tools for the small businesses of today so that they can grow their businesses quickly without feeling as if they have to learn a whole new language.”

Adrian’s talk: Democratizing digital marketing

“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.”

Brian Rotsztein

Since 1997, Brian has worked with clients of all sizes on their websites and Internet presence, including online marketing strategies, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, web design, social media, and conversion tactics.

Brian’s talk: Current trends in SEO for businesses & 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. This session will discuss some of the latest trends that site owners and managers should be aware of.

Abdullah Ramzan

Abdullah is a software engineer and part of the PressTigers clan at Nextbridge (Pvt.) Ltd.. He is a WordPress plugin developer who loves to contribute to open source projects.

Abdullah’s talk: Gutenberg and custom block development

This session provides an introduction to Gutenberg and sets out the Gutenberg roadmap. Its focus is developing custom Gutenberg blocks. It addresses whether Gutenberg has page builder capabilities as well as Gutenberg’s impact on third party page builder plugins. It concludes with the speaker’s thoughts and predictions on the future of WordPress in this first phase of Gutenberg’s development.

Additional sessions from previously-announced speakers

Thiago Loureiro, 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.”

Andrea Zoellner, Storytelling with Gutenberg: “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.”

…

Thank you to all of our speakers for volunteering to present this year.

If you’d like to learn more, check out the bios for our speakers and detailed descriptions of each session. You can find everything on the new Schedule page.

And if you haven’t registered yet: go and register!

We can’t wait to see you all in December.