Abha Thakor
Abha works in web, marketing and digital as a project manager, journalist and communications practitioner. She is involved in academic research on participation and digital aimed at encouraging wider community engagement. Abha is a fan of the WordPress community and its role in digital and collaborative innovation.
Talk will present a short overview of things to consider when working with images on the web. This will be followed by a Q&A panel on images and the web.
Ahmed Khalifa
Ahmed Khalifa is a seasoned digital marketing and WordPress professional who focuses on helping website owners to increase their online visibility, boost audience engagement and encourage conversion.
With almost 10 years experience in the field, Ahmed has worked across various industries, from a local family business to an international publishing company, and from a well-known digital marketing agency to a major national high-street fashion retailer.
More recently Ahmed runs his own business to help SMEs with their own WordPress sites.
He frequently publishes content on his site to help others in the community. Ahmed is also an active member of the WordPress community and contributes to their ethos by helping others to make the most out of their WordPress sites’ online visibility, contributing to the local Meetup and by helping to organise WordCamp Edinburgh 2018.
Ahmed’s talk on ‘Making the Most Out of SEO to Grow your WordPress Plugins & Themes Business’
When looking at how small WordPress plugins and themes businesses operate, only a small handful of them takes advantage of SEO to grow their business.
It’s tricky though because when you’ve got other things to worry about in your business, it’s not a surprise that SEO is not a major priority. In fact, it can be overwhelming to find out what you need to do…even for me, and I do it for a living.
But can you really grow your business with zero or little traffic? Especially if you are providing plugins and themes, which requires online engagements?
Whether you are new and scaling your business, or you are looking to boost your existing business, it’s time to look at how SEO can be a major investment in your business.
In this talk, we will look at the essential ways you can do that with the help of some actionable tips and strategy which you can apply today.
Amanda Webb
Amanda from Spiderworking has been working in digital marketing since 2009.
She works with small businesses in Ireland, the UK and beyond helping them develop and implement strategies and campaigns.
In 2017 her blog was named one of Social Media Examiner’s Top 10 Social Media Blogs an international contest she also won 2 awards at Blog Awards Ireland in 2017 including Gold for B2B Blog.
She founded Blog Awards Ireland with two partners and ran the event for 3 years. She has written for some of the world’s best social media websites including Jon Loomer, Social Media Examiner and RazorSocial.
She’s also a regular contributor to the AgoraPulse blog.
Amanda’s talk: ‘Supercharge It – How to Revitalise your Blog Content for More Exposure & Sales’
“Blogging was always about writing, but in 2018 our readers have less time to consume content and more content to consume.
If you want to continue to reach and grow your audience you’ll need to think beyond words alone. That’s a realisation I had in 2016, it’s one that made me change the way I blogged.
Since then I’ve built stronger relationships with readers, won multiple awards for my blog and added new income streams to my business.
I’m going to show you what I did and how you too can supercharge your blog with audio, video and visual content.”
Amanda will also be speaking with Marissa Goldsmith about ‘Getting the Balance Right: GDPR and Google Analytics’
The web sites and apps we create, both for ourselves and for our clients, need to collect user analytics for a range of reasons ranging from workflow to user experience to security.
However, user tracking can cross the line from insightful anonymised data collection to intrusive personally identifiable monitoring. GDPR, Europe’s revamp of its data protection and privacy regime, becomes enforceable on 25 May – the day before WordCamp Belfast.
The incoming ePrivacy Directive revamp also renews rules on analytics. This double overhaul creates refreshed obligations for you to inform your site users about any counting, tracking, and monitoring you carry out on your web sites and apps, to provide users with options over your counting and tracking, and to ensure that your data collection respects your visitors privacy.
In our talk, we will help you to achieve a healthy balance between data collection and privacy which respects your business, your users, and your refreshed legal obligations.
Our talk will cover:
- How to understand your audience so that you can understand their data
- Why minimal data collection and retention makes sense from an ethical perspective
- What user tracking is and is not permitted under GDPR as well as the ePrivacy Directive revamp
- How to explain your use of analytics and tracking in your privacy notices
- How to provide your visitors with an opt-out of analytics and tracking
- How to collect analytics with the greatest respect for user privacy
- How to ensure information is not personally identifiable to an individual (Deaggregation/anonymisation/pseudonymisation)
- How to determine a data retention and deletion period
- Dealing with third party tools: Google Analytics as our example
- What other forms of tracking cross ethical and legal boundaries
André Naumann
André is a Search Outreach specialist working on Web Security within Google’s Trust & Safety team in Dublin.
Before joining Google, he graduated with a Master’s degree in Public Policy from the University of Oxford.
When not at his desk, he enjoys climbing, hiking and running.
The session will introduce best practices of website security and how to implement them. The goal is to help webmasters effectively identify and reduce risks or website compromise.
Bill Gilmore
Bill describes his passion as building beautiful and accessible front end interfaces.
I am a front end developer at Flint Studios and have been a WordPress fanboy since before I could even code. My passion is building beautiful and accessible front end interfaces using HTML, CSS, JS, PHP and of course WordPress API.
I worked as a Creative Media Trainer for two years so expect a fun, engaging presentation full of WordPress tips and tricks for web developers of all abilities. I also have been know to give out amazing DLC resources to audiences who laugh at my cheesy jokes.
I hope you can join me for my talk “Building Better Themes”
In my talk I will cover a wide range of interesting WordPress API features. We will start with the basics like pulling dynamic content from pages and posts, moving onto using featured images and custom fields to a build a reusable banner as a chunk of php to call into our theme templates.
If any of that sounded worrying please remember I am not a PHP developer, WordPress just makes life easy for all of us if you know to to use it. We will also cover topics to give your end user move control like custom shortcodes, widgets areas, menus and author bios.
We will then dig into creating custom post types and advanced custom fields, all made easy with Toolset Types plugin. Then we will focus on how to pull post types into templates using wp-query.
Finally we will look at WordPress Customize features giving your end user control over all the content we have built so far as well as the colours, logo image and style of the site. This will wrap up into a dynamic theme with a user friendly interface… and there might even be some free DLC resources I have been working on.
Please remember I’m going to keep this talk in a language and terminology that everyone can understand, I am not a backend PHP robot, I’m an experienced developer and trainer. Hope you see you there WP Devs!
Brecht Ryckaert
Brecht is a WordPress enthusiast from Belgium who has been using WordPress since version 1.5.
He has 10 years of experience in the hosting industry and is well versed with security, performance and problem solving.
When not diving into WordPress, he loves to write while nipping on a single malt.
He occasionally blogs at https://brechtryckaert.com.
Corey Maass
Corey Maass is a full-stack web developer with a love for entrepreneurship and building web apps on WordPress.
He built his first website in 1995, his first SaaS app in 2003, and his first WordPress plugin in 2009.
In 2015, after 4 years of full-time WordPress development, he combined his passions and launched his first commercial plug-in, Kanban for WordPress.
He has spent the last few years growing the business. He currently lives in Saugerties, New York, USA.
The talk ‘Stuck in a Rut: How I Overcame Six Months Without Progress’ is about how he overcame battled depression, doubt, jealousy, imposter syndrome.
You’ll hear about how he was finally able to identify what was stopping him, move past it, and what he’s done to prevent a lot of this ever happening again.
Corey will also be speaking about ‘Building a Web App MVP with Little or No Code’
WordPress is known to be a powerful and versatile tool for rapid proof-of-concept web app development.
During this WordCamp presentation, we will investigate why WordPress may be the best tool to help create your next web app. We will look at different examples of business cases where WordPress is the best option, and also where it falls short. I will illustrate how I have solved the most common UI patterns required by web apps using plugins, web resources and occasionally code.
We will walk through one of the apps I’ve built from idea to development to production to see the patterns in action. Finally, I share other considerations from my experience like deployment, syncing dev environments, AJAX, the REST API and iterating on feedback.
After the presentation, the audience will have a better understanding of WordPress for web app development. They will be ready to build a minimum viable product (MVP) web app on top of WordPress even if they have limited coding experience.
Damien Carbery
Damien is a freelance WordPress developer and WordPress source reading fanatic.
He quietly cheers in finding a new do_action() or apply_filters() calls, and using them to do simple but cool things.
Damien’s talk is about “Demystifying Hooks, Actions & Filters”
Hooks and filters are critical part of WordPress.
They are used by the core product and they are what theme and plugin developers use to provide the massive range of add-ons for WordPress.
They are easy to use and let you access the internals of WordPress.
Dave Potter
Dave has been working in IT since 1977 when large companies celebrated a memory upgrade to 32kB.
In his career, he has worked as a developer, database administrator, systems programmer, operations and technical delivery manager, software support engineer, release and implementation manager.
In 2004 he moved into IT project management. He is particularly fond of managing a good data centre move.
His technical itch is satisfied by building WordPress sites, which he has been doing since 2012.
The talk ‘Follow the data’
Today’s WordPress environment generally results in numerous organisations managing either our data or the hardware and software that it relies upon.
Although we subcontract out parts of our WordPress infrastructure we are still accountable for the data processed by our Websites.
This talk takes a look at a typical WordPress set up and follows the journey that a user’s data might take and some potential threats at each point on its journey.
It looks at what we can do to minimise our exposure to risk of outsourcing management of our infrastructure, the considerations we should make and what questions we should be asking of our hosts.
David Hoy
Professionally I design and build bespoke websites that not only use bleeding edge marketing know how, but also make your business easier to run. Away from the desk I’m raising 3 kiddos and 2 dogs to enjoy, love and respect the outdoors.
The is about how for years I held myself back thinking that because I couldn’t comprehend PHP there was a limit to how far I could go as a developer.
With WordPress and plugins like Toolset this is absolutely untrue. There is no data management problem I cannot solve with these two powerful platforms working together.
In this workshop , I want to demonstrate how quickly a front end form can be created and then how the data captured can be manipulated to create awesome solutions for our clients.
Any of the new form builders can be used, but Toolset is my go to as the support is unreal. To date I’ve built recruitment platforms, tourist portals, an entire HR Suite and much more using Toolset.
For WordPress users this knowledge could be very useful, for WordPress Developers this knowledge opens the door to lots of repeat business from their existing client base.
Fellyph Cintra
Fellyph created his first WordPress theme as a developer in 2008.
In 2010, he organised the first WordPress course in São Paulo, Brazil, two years after he attended his first WordCamp as a volunteer.
He said: “Now, I’m really excited to attend my 13th WordCamp.”
His talk on ‘PWA’ Progressive Web Applications.
Progressive Web Apps (PWA) is a concept related to user experience especially for mobile users, where the focus is to deliver websites that are Reliable, Fast and Engaging.
PWA became so popular the past year but how can we apply it to our WordPress projects?
On this technical presentation, We are going to apply step-by-step features as home screen button, service worker, cache API and accessing native features as a native APP in a real project.
Heather Burns
Heather Burns is a digital law specialist in Glasgow, Scotland. She researches, writes, publishes, consults, and speaks extensively on internet laws and policies which affect the crafts of web design and development.
She has been designing and developing web sites since 1997 and was a professional web site designer from 2007-2015.
She is a co-organiser of WordPress Glasgow, a member of the WordCamp Edinburgh organising team, and a survivor of numerous WordCamp afterparties.
Heather has a talk on WordPress GDPR compliance project. A basic overview of what the project is, what we’ve been working on, and what tools we’ve made. And what is in the planning to help make WordPress Compliant with the new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations).
Heather will also be speaker with Marissa Goldsmith about “Getting the Balance Right: GDPR and Google Analytics”.
The web sites and apps we create, both for ourselves and for our clients, need to collect user analytics for a range of reasons ranging from workflow to user experience to security.
However, user tracking can cross the line from insightful anonymised data collection to intrusive personally identifiable monitoring. GDPR, Europe’s revamp of its data protection and privacy regime, becomes enforceable on 25 May – the day before WordCamp Belfast.
The incoming ePrivacy Directive revamp also renews rules on analytics. This double overhaul creates refreshed obligations for you to inform your site users about any counting, tracking, and monitoring you carry out on your web sites and apps, to provide users with options over your counting and tracking, and to ensure that your data collection respects your visitors privacy.
In the talk, they will help you to achieve a healthy balance between data collection and privacy which respects your business, your users, and your refreshed legal obligations.
The talk will cover:
- How to understand your audience so that you can understand their data
- Why minimal data collection and retention makes sense from an ethical perspective
- What user tracking is and is not permitted under GDPR as well as the ePrivacy Directive revamp
- How to explain your use of analytics and tracking in your privacy notices
- How to provide your visitors with an opt-out of analytics and tracking
- How to collect analytics with the greatest respect for user privacy
- How to ensure information is not personally identifiable to an individual (Deaggregation/anonymisation/pseudonymisation)
- How to determine a data retention and deletion period
- Dealing with third party tools: Google Analytics as our example
- What other forms of tracking cross ethical and legal boundaries
James Hall
With more than 15 years of experience working in the web industry in the public sector, James began freelancing in his spare time.
In 2014 and with an increasing client base, he decided to take the plunge and turn HeX Productions into a full time business. He said: “As a self-confessed geek, I am passionate about all things web from working on small independent projects to large local government and higher education sites and developing accessible, mobile and social strategies to enable easy access to information on the move. Whether it’s working with new clients on improving their web presence to help grow their business or supporting existing customers with their daily web needs.”
Join James’s for his talk “Quick Fixes & Adding Accessibility to your Workflow”
HeX Productions are working on their way to become a fully accredited accessible agency with every project being tested internally and externally for accessibility issues, it’s not been an easy road and we would like to share our experiences with you.
By providing live demonstrations and real world experiences James will talk through quick wins to help make your sites accessibility and help you agency move forward to only producing accessible websites without interfering with workflow.
Kate Bolin
Kate is the Marketing Executive at Heart Internet. She built her first website in 1995 and bought her first domain in 1999.
She likes working with documentation, organised processes, old-fashioned plain HTML, and saying “Remember when the Internet…?”
Kate’s talk: ‘Documentation: Because Everyone Dies!’
“Sure you think you’re going to be around forever, but one day, somehow, you will not be working on that website.
How do you make life easier for your clients, your colleagues, your replacements, and yourself?
Discover the power of documentation!”
Kayleigh Thorpe
Kayleigh is a WordPress specialist at 34SP.com.
You will often find her socialising at tech meetups throughout the UK. When she is not learning more about WordPress, she loves to travel and is passionate about the WordPress community.
At WordCamp Belfast 2018, Kayleigh will be getting us back to basics and thinking about how we build a website together. Her talk will give an introduction to people who are newer to WordPress and using it for making websites. She will explore how to use the dashboard to create a new website.
Topics covered will include how to create posts, pages, menus and how they correspond to the content displayed on your site. She will also explain how to create galleries and tips on searching for themes and plugins.
Kayleigh will give some useful advice on how to use Yoast and add a contact form to your site.
Luminus Olumide Alabi
Luminus is a WooCommerce Happiness Engineer at Automattic with a penchant for helping people figure out the easiest and most reliable way to achieve their objectives with WordPress, WooCommerce and everything in between.
He says: “Sometimes coder, abysmal designer, expert hugger and wannabe social butterfly with a 6th-degree black belt in hanging out. If you see me standing in a corner by myself it’s totally okay to come say hello and give me a hug.”
Marcin Kilarski
Marcin is a front-end developer and a technical SEO geek.
He enjoys optimising websites for performance, users and search engines.
Marcin wasn’t born in Ireland, but he has spent almost a third of his life on this amazing green island.
He was part of the team behind the wonderful WordCamp Dublin 2017 and is now supporting WordCamp Belfast 2018.
Marissa Goldsmith
Marissa Goldsmith is a digital analytics specialist from Washington DC.
She works with not-for-profit organisations, governments, and SMEs on auditing and implementing digital data collection strategies, helping them to use the information gleaned from analytics reports in a privacy-friendly way to maximise donations and resource allocation.
When she’s not elbow-deep in spreadsheets (and loving it!), her side-passion is accessibility.
Marissa talk ‘More than a Plug-in: My Journey to becoming a Passionate Accessibility Advocate’
“I had my first brush with accessibility in 2002. My boss was in a panic that our web application was not accessible, and that we would lose government funding.
Since that experience, I’ve found myself arguing for more accessibility in web design and development. More often than not, I lose that argument.
My professional activism on the topic has caused others to label me an expert on the topic. But I don’t consider myself a practitioner. I am a vocal and heartfelt advocate.
This talk will intertwine the history of web accessibility with my own personal story of how I evolved in my views on accessibility.
I will also discuss the role the open source community has to play, for an accessible web.”
Marissa will also be speaking with Amanda Webb about ‘Getting the Balance Right: GDPR and Google Analytics’
The web sites and apps we create, both for ourselves and for our clients, need to collect user analytics for a range of reasons ranging from workflow to user experience to security.
However, user tracking can cross the line from insightful anonymised data collection to intrusive personally identifiable monitoring. GDPR, Europe’s revamp of its data protection and privacy regime, becomes enforceable on 25 May – the day before WordCamp Belfast.
The incoming ePrivacy Directive revamp also renews rules on analytics. This double overhaul creates refreshed obligations for you to inform your site users about any counting, tracking, and monitoring you carry out on your web sites and apps, to provide users with options over your counting and tracking, and to ensure that your data collection respects your visitors privacy.
In our talk, we will help you to achieve a healthy balance between data collection and privacy which respects your business, your users, and your refreshed legal obligations.
Our talk will cover:
- How to understand your audience so that you can understand their data
- Why minimal data collection and retention makes sense from an ethical perspective
- What user tracking is and is not permitted under GDPR as well as the ePrivacy Directive revamp
- How to explain your use of analytics and tracking in your privacy notices
- How to provide your visitors with an opt-out of analytics and tracking
- How to collect analytics with the greatest respect for user privacy
- How to ensure information is not personally identifiable to an individual (Deaggregation/anonymisation/pseudonymisation)
- How to determine a data retention and deletion period
- Dealing with third party tools: Google Analytics as our example
- What other forms of tracking cross ethical and legal boundaries
Matt Boyd
Matt has 3+ years of experience working in TV with production companies such as HBO, Nickelodeon and BBC.
As a movie lover, Matt always wanted to start his own TV and film review website and took the jump six months ago.
Now with comicfilmsmd.com, he works on this alongside his full time job, managing a team of four designers and writers.
Matt’s talk is on starting your blog idea with WordPress.
If you have an idea for a blog or a website, don’t hesitate and start it. WordPress has the features to make it an easy task for you. Hear from a person with no web experience who has been running their own website for the past 6 months.
Mike Rynart
Mike is a full-time Front-End Developer living in Rotterdam.
He has been creating websites for more than 10 years. Over time, he has branched out his skills with responsive design, web development and an enthusiasm for website performance.
He spends his days helping both startups and large companies create usable and engaging web experiences, his evenings blogging about food and travel, and his nights dreaming about how to make tomorrow’s WordPress blogs and sites even better.
Mike will offer some ‘Tips and techniques that can dramatically increase your site performance’
- Why speed matters.
- How you can measure it – Tools to measure your page speed.
- Ways to improve it – Best practices for optimisation.
- I’ll also discuss Google – Mobile Page Speed Update 2018 and if you should AMP-lify your web site.
Peter Meehan
Peter has been running bigrockdesigns computer training consultants for almost 15 years.
It specialises in WordPress courses, digital marketing and graphic design.
He includes WordPress in his firm’s digital marketing master course as a key element in digital marketing.
Peter’s talk is on ‘In-bound Marketing – Integration with WordPress’
Measurable outcomes: Key tools the you can employ to create a successful inbound marketing strategy combining WordPress and 3rd party applications.
Discussed Sections:
- WordPress – website
- Tawk – Site chatbot or similar
- GetResponse / Mailchimp / SendinBlue – Email marketing system and WordPress integration
- GetResponse / Thrive leads – Landing pages to attract leads to give their email in exchange for information and how it can integrate into WordPress
- CRM system – manage leads with WordPress integration
Raffaella Isidori
I create brands and design the communication for businesses around the world and assist companies in their localisation.
Besides that I study, teach, take pictures, write, translate & coach professionals on communication & language.
You can see my work at www.raffaellaisidori.com. Curious as a cat and in love with diversities, I collect books, fonts & essential oils.
I live and work in the country, surrounded by flora & fauna, where I cultivate dreams & push boundaries.
This talk is a primer on the origin and the evolution of the concept of branding, so to better understand and care for our brand(s), regardless of their being a company, a product or a personal one.
The talk will highlight key aspects of quality branding, and serve as a theoretical introduction for the workshop where I will teach the basics for building, tending and grooming a brand.
Simon Dickson
Simon leads European business development for the VIP program at WordPress.com, promoting the benefits of WordPress to large-scale publishers and enterprises, and supporting the growth of Europe’s leading WordPress-specialist agencies.
He switched from hands-on development to agency management in the late noughties, co-founding Code For The People, which was acquired by Automattic in 2014. He claims partial responsibility for eliminating ‘howdy’ from your WordPress admin, and bringing Wapuu to the world.
At WordCamp Belfast 2018, Simon will be sharing his experience of helping some of Europe’s largest enterprises which have adopted WordPress, the opportunities for individuals and agencies in the WordPress ecosystems, and his own WordPress story. He will be interviewed by journalist Abha Thakor at the event in May.
He will once again be filling the gaps between the proper speakers at next month’s WordCamp Europe.
Simon lived in Bangor until the age of 18, and is fighting hard to retain what’s left of his accent after nearly 25 years in and around London. He misses Maud’s ice cream, and proper scampi.
Simon will be sharing his experience of helping some of Europe’s largest
enterprises which have adopted WordPress, the oppotunities for
individuals and agencies in the WordPress ecosystems, and his own
WordPress story.
Tammie Lister
Tammie works at Automattic, where she has been an experience designer donated to the WordPress.org project full time.
Her background is varied and includes psychology, design, front end development and user experience. She is passionate about Open Source and community.
Tammie will be speaker about ‘Building for Stress Cases’.
We use the term edge cases, it’s time to stop using that and switch to saying stress cases.
It’s time to stop dismissing and make sure those stress cases are exactly what we do focus on creating the experiences for.
By building for the stress cases, we create a better experience for everyone.
Tom J Nowell
Tom’s day job is as a VIP Wrangler at WordPress.com VIP for Automattic.
He reviews and deploy millions of lines of code each year for large sites at scale.
He is also a community moderator at WordPress Stack Exchange, project lead for the ‘WordPress The Right Way’ ebook, an Open Source developer and conference speaker.
The talk is about speeding up websites using Taxonomies.
Taxonomies can give you product categories, or city tags, but did you know with the right tricks they can massively boost your sites performance?
Follow Tom down the rabbit hole of private taxonomies, learn the common data storage mistakes that cripple your sites performance nobody’s talking about
Ulrich Pogson
Ulrich is a dedicated WordPress contributor.
He started the WordPress Meetup in Bern @WPBern was the lead organisers for WordCamp Bern in 2017.
He works for required, a remote WordPress agency from Switzerland & Germany, as a WordPress developer.
Ulrich will be showing how you can improve your code by using automated tools and what the positive effects of it are.
We will be looking at a few different examples how automation has improved the code quality in a team, and also in open source projects.
He’ll also be talking about “The good, bad and the ugly of contributing to open source”.
Ulrich has been contributing to open source for the last 6 years in different ways, from support to documentation to bug fixes, and organising events.
He will talk about how this has helped him but also about the challenges involved to contributing to open source.
Una Murphy
Una is Co-founder VIEWdigital a community media social enterprise which produces and publishes social affairs journalism.
Una’s talk is about how ‘WordPress can help to save the media!’
WordPress has become a valuable tool for community media outlets such as VIEWdigital.
We believe that Word Press can help save the media by becoming the number one tech tool for community media outlets.