WordCamps could not run without the help of sponsors. We want to give a shoutout to them, for helping us make WordCamp Ottawa a success! Thank you to the following Platinum level sponsors.

• Bluehost

  

  Bluehost has been a WordPress partner since 2005 and powers over 1 million WordPress sites worldwide. Their objective is to help customers, whether novice or pro, create a thriving online presence at an affordable price. With a team of in-house tech experts available 24/7, Bluehost dedicates time and resources to providing the best support and services in the industry. Join millions of other site owners and see what Bluehost can do for you and your online presence.

• Jetpack

  

  Transform how you work with your WordPress sites:Jetpack connects your site to the global services, community, and support provided by WordPress.com. Focus on the substance of your site, not the software.

  Jetpack security tools automatically shield your site from spammers, hackers, and malware, while real-time syncing and backup means never worrying about data loss. Traffic-building tools like easy social sharing help you attract readers and search engines, and pages delivered from a high-speed, global content delivery network mean those readers never bounce because of a slow-loading site.

  Jetpack’s Affiliate program gives you 20% every time you sell Jetpack to a customer or client — with unlimited referrals, the sky’s the limit!

  Whether you’re one person with a website or an agency with a dozen clients, Jetpack helps you grow. Make your site work for you at Jetpack.com

• Liquid Web

  

  For over 20 years, Liquid Web has been delivering products, services and support designed specifically for mission-critical sites, stores and applications. Known for our high-performance services and exceptional customer support, we own and manage our own core data centers and provide a diverse range of fully managed hosting offerings, including Managed WordPress, and Managed WooCommerce Hosting. Our recent acquisition of iThemes continues to evolve our service offerings to meet the ever-changing needs of our web-reliant, professional customers.

  Liquid Web has a dedicated team of WordPress professionals who have been actively involved in the community for years. Beyond contributing code to the WordPress project, they’ve also been speaking at WordCamps, participating in WordPress-related groups and meetups, and creating open-sourced plugins that are used by WordPress users around the globe.

  As an industry leader in customer loyalty, we’re known for our secure, reliable, fast, hassle-free hosting, backed by the Most Helpful Humans in Hosting™ (24x7x365 by phone, chat or ticket). At Liquid Web, we power content, commerce and potential for SMB entrepreneurs and the designers, developers and digital agencies who create for them. Everything we do is about being that partner you can trust.

  For more information, please visit www.liquidweb.com,, or subscribe to our Blog at www.liquidweb.com/blog.

• WooCommerce

  

  WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce platform built on WordPress.
  Sell anything online with the flexibility and freedom of the world’s most popular CMS.

  • 4+ million active installations
  • 55+ million downloads
  • 450+ extensions to add and extend functionality

  Whether you’re selling a few handcrafted items to a niche market, taking an existing business online, or going global with an enterprise-level eCommerce business WooCommerce gets you set up and selling fast, scaling securely as you grow.

  Your content is forever yours and customizable down to the button color. Plus you’re joining a supportive, global community of developers and store owners.

  Developed and supported by a distributed team, WooCommerce is powered by Automattic, the creators of Jetpack and WordPress.com.

Ron helped bring WordPress multi-site into WordPress core. Over the last 13 years he has made regular contributions to the WordPress community – sometimes working full time on those contributions.

Ron qualified with honours in Computer Programming Technology from New Brunswick Community College – but he also puts his knowledge down to life long learning. Ron lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, with Andrea, his partner and best friend of 30 years.

Ron will be speaking at 12:00pm on Sunday, July 14th in the Rideau room. His talk is entitled, Permissionless Software.

In “Free Software / Free Society”, Richard Stallman describes in detail the philosophy behind the (GPL) Gnu Pubic License. While that philosophy is admirable, it isn’t the reason that most people use Free Software.
In this presentation, Ron will delve into his experience with Free and Proprietary Software, why people choose Free Software, and our roles in a Free Software community.

Michael Benoit is a migrations specialist at Rebel.com, a hosting company and domain name registrar, where he crushes other hosting companies’ dreams by seamlessly migrating their customers’ sites. Mike’s approach is full concept, providing top quality support and recommending a variety of hosting platform solutions for both websites and email.
In his down time, Mike dives into a variety of projects: 3D printing and technical design; construction of his stand-up desk; and supporting the free Sidewalk Astronomy initiative with his custom, handmade telescope. Most importantly, he’s also the proud papa of rescue cat Purrious George.

Michael will be speaking at 11:00am on Sunday, July 14th in the Manotick room. His talk is entitled, WordPress Migrations 101.

Whether you’re new to WordPress, running your own site, designing client websites, or even a full stack developer, there are countless ways to get tripped up when moving a WordPress website. WordPress migration plugins cost money, often cause problems, and don’t help you gain a deeper understanding of how your WordPress site functions in the background.
When would you need to move a WordPress site?
– You built the website locally and are ready to launch
– You built a site on your own server and need to move it to your client’s server
– You want to move your site from one webhost to another
– You’re changing the domain name for a website
You will learn:
– How to import and set up your WordPress files
– How to import and set up your database
– How to set up a WordPress user through the database
– How to check the site before it’s live
– DNS rundown
– Troubleshooting: Database changes
– Troubleshooting: Plugin and PHP errors
– Extra: How to integrate your site with the WordPress Toolkit in Plesk

I am a Creative Multipreneur – a person with multiple interests and talents who is happiest and most fulfilled when developing multiple profit centers and pursuing multiple careers. I am also the CEO of WP Expert, a web agency that builds websites only using WordPress. I love helping entrepreneurs & working on multiple projects at the same time! I have been using WordPress since 2008 which was Version 2.5.

Frederic will be speaking at 11:00am on Sunday, July 14th in the Rideau room. His talk is entitled, Generate Recurring revenue with WordPress Care Plans.

We all know how is important for our business to have a monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and everybody talk about it! It’s something you need to build into your business plan. It gives you peace of mind that every month you get a certain amount into your bank account.

In this presentation, I explain how we build recurring revenue with our WordPress Care Plans, how we set the up and how we go about selling it.

Michael started building websites with WordPress 10 years ago. Since then, many things change in the CMS but one remains the same: his enthusiasm to learn and discover new ways to make the web better, especially for end users and content managers.

Today, Michael is a technical lead for a digital agency where he contributes to enthralling projects with teams in Europe, Asia, and North America. You can also find him in WordCamps, at a workshop or at the happiness bar. More than ever, he is convinced that technology can help to bring people together and support great initiatives.

Stephanie knows, first-hand, why modern website projects need to adopt a “mobile-first” approach, and this has become even more relevant in a product ecosystem where a majority of users are now only seeing your website on their device.

For a while now, Stephanie has been making websites look good on every platform with a focus on the user experience and a passion for aesthetics. As an avid gamer, climber, and archery enthusiast, Stephanie thrives on challenge and on using lateral thinking to devise creative solutions to complex problems.

Michael and Stephanie will be speaking at 11:00am on Sunday, July 14th in the Rideau room. Their talk is entitled, How Gutenberg shakes up our WordPress projects.

You started using Gutenberg or you are not sure about taking the plunge? Then, join this panel to hear how the new WordPress editor is shaking up our projects, codebase and life as a developer and a project manager. Rather than the good and the bad, we would like to focus on what changes for us in our daily approach in an agency and invite you to make your own opinion.

Miriam is the lead developer at Pondstone Digital Marketing. She started playing around with WordPress for personal projects in 2009, and for professional projects two years later. Miriam speaks at various WordCamps across North America, and is also a mentor and instructor for Ottawa’s chapter of Canada Learning Code. She has been a member of the WordCamp Ottawa organizing team since 2017.

Outside of her web development life, she is an 3rd degree black belt, plays clarinet with the Barrhaven Community Concert Band, and also competes in the pro-am categories in international latin ballroom dance.

You can connect with her via Twitter at @mirigoldman or Instagram at @dancingsensei.

Miriam will be speaking at 4:30pm on Saturday, July 13th in the Manotick room. Her talk is entitled, Lessons from the Dojo: How being a sensei make me a better mentor in tech.

Being a lead developer not only means being responsible for clean and optimized code, it also means mentoring and teaching junior developers. This is the case for any lead role in the tech industry. Having been a karate sensei for almost 9 years, come learn how I took cues from my time at the dojo, and applied it to helping junior team members. From learning styles to patience, and to self-confidence, much can be learned from the martial arts.

Jean-François is Co-Founder of SatelliteWP (a WordPress maintenance server), has been using WP for 14 years, participates as speaker / volunteer at WordCamp Montreal since 2010 and since 2018, supervises the translation of WordPress, Beaver Builder and WP Rocket in “Français du Canada”. In his spare time, he’s preparing for his marathon… of 10km, and improves his knowledge of sailing techniques on his sailboat.

Jean-François will be speaking at 4:30pm on Saturday, July 13th in the Rideau room. His talk is entitled, “I manage 100+ projects in a spreadsheet” said no one ever.

This presentation will discuss the different project management approaches for design and/or development in a WordPress context, and will offer an overview of the different tools, free or not, which are available. There are no specific pre-requisites to attend, but you will get a lot more out of this if you currently manage more than one project at a time.

Often called a geek translator by his clients, Paul specialises in helping website owners and creators transform the buzzwords of web marketing into business results for bloggers and small/medium businesses as well as enterprise clients.

As an SEO and web marketing consultant at Buzzwords to Business https://www.buzzwordstobusiness.com, Thompson focuses on optimising existing sites into powerful marketing platforms. Using his extensive expertise in technical SEO as a basis, he incorporates audits, custom analytics, content marketing, conversion optimisation, email marketing, and paid search (ah, the buzzwords!), depending on the client’s needs. Thompson also provides one-on-one coaching and training in these areas.

He’s been managing and optimising sites for over 15 years, including stints managing the websites and web marketing programs for Banff Lake Louise Tourism and Travel Alberta, and has been working with WordPress for over a decade now. He’s recently moved from the mountains of the west to the Ottawa Valley. When he’s not at the keyboard, he’s likely on his bike or cross-country skis, or wandering around with his camera and tripod over his shoulder.

Paul will be speaking at 4:30pm on Saturday, July 13th in the Rideau room. His talk is entitled, SEO is Evolving Faster Than Ever. How to survive and benefit from all the recent changes.

Does it feel like keeping up with SEO has been a wild ride the past year?

The one constant in SEO is change, but the past 14 months have been especially turbulent. And the rapid pace of change is speeding up! Hard to know which changes to pay attention to and what to do about them.

Voice Search?
Mobile-First Index?
Quality and E-A-T algorithm updates?
Site speed?
Structured Data and Schema?
Major changes to SEO Tools (Hello, Yoast SEO and Google Search Console!)
Whew.

You’re not alone in feeling overwhelmed. We’ll get right into the nitty-gritty of understanding the implications of the major changes and nailing down specific strategies and tactics to adjust our thinking and adapt our WordPress sites, content, and processes to succeed in this new reality, while maintaining our sanity. And slay a few sacred cows in the process.

We’ll particularly focus on the needs of small business sites, bloggers and small to medium, e-commerce sites while keeping the jargon under control.

WordCamps could not run without the help of sponsors. We want to give a shoutout to them, for helping us make WordCamp Ottawa a success! Thank you to the following Gold level sponsors.

GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks is an independently owned and operated hosting provider.

Our specially engineered platform offers WordPress users web hosting that is designed for the fastest, most secure and scalable hosting available in multiple data centers. Our WordPress hosting makes deploying and managing WordPress websites easy with automatic 1-click install, managed updates, real-time security protection, SSD RAID-10 storage arrays, PowerCacher and expert 24/7 support to make for the best web hosting experience.

Since our launch in 2008, GreenGeeks has been the industry’s leading eco-friendly web hosting provider putting back 3 times the power we consume into the grid in the form of renewable energy. We are based out of Los Angeles, California with a global workforce that provides a better web hosting experience to customers from over 150 countries.

GreenGeeks is actively engaged within the WordPress community and is a proud sponsor to various WordCamps around the world.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy Pro offers a robust suite of free tools to web developers & designers to help them save time managing all their clients and sites. With GoDaddy Pro, you can easily shop for your client, monitor their sites, and manage all their WordPress websites from one place. Exclusive time-saving tools let you update WordPress core, plugins and themes with one click, as well as automate WordPress backups, cloning and migrations. Get real-time performance, security and uptime monitoring across all your websites. Additionally, your free membership includes advanced 24/7 technical support.

When you pair GoDaddy Pro with GoDaddy hosting products, the benefits are even greater.

Check out the Free Tools

Gravity Flow

Turn your paper forms, lists, follow-up calls and emails into efficient workflows, securely stored on your own server. Business Process Management – Built for WordPress.

Visit them at https://gravityflow.io/, and follow them on Twitter at @GravityFlow

Weglot

Weglot is one of the best WordPress multilingual plugin to translate and display your website in multiple languages.

Founded in 2016, Weglot is trusted by more than 50,000 websites owners and developers, with a 5-star rating on the WordPress directory (800+ reviews).

Key benefits include:

• Simple and quick set-up.
• Multilingual SEO best practices.
• Compatibility with any Themes and Plugins (incl. WooCommerce).
• Human and automatic translations.
• A unique dashboard: edit and replace any content, add your own translations rules, invite in-house freelancer or team mates to collaborate.
• Expert Support: Fully dedicated translation technical expert of 10+ team members.

HubSpot

HubSpot (NYSE: HUBS) is a leading growth platform. Since 2006, HubSpot has been on a mission to make the world more inbound. Today, over 56,500 customers in more than 100 countries use HubSpot’s award-winning software, services, and support to transform the way they attract, engage, and delight customers. Comprised of Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and a powerful free CRM, HubSpot gives companies the tools they need to Grow Better. Learn more about HubSpot for WordPress.

Shanta has spoken at more than 30 WordCamps, mostly in beginner and content architecture talks. She was a professor in Web Design and Development at Sheridan College for 5 years before joining Weever Apps Inc. in Hamilton, Ontario a year ago as the Customer Service Co-ordinator. She is now the Quality Assurance Supervisor, overseeing the QA Department.

She blogs at shanta.ca and can be found on Twitter @ShantaDotCa

Shanta will be speaking at 3:30pm on Saturday, July 13th in the Manotick room. She will also be running a workshop on Sunday, July 14th in the Rideau room. Her talk is entitled, Create a 3-page Website in 30 Minutes, and her workshop is entitled, How to organize your content through navigation and wayfinding.

Create a 3-page Website in 30 Minutes

With all the new changes to WordPress with Gutenberg, many people are confused.
I’m going to show you how to create your home, about and contact pages in 30 minutes using Gutenberg blocks.

How to organize your content through navigation and wayfinding

There is so much confusion about what types of things should be put on a page and what should be in a post. Static vs. Dynamic content is the best way to tackle this. An “About Us” page would be just that… A PAGE. If you are talking about something that is more time sensitive, then you want to do a post. Connected to this would be Categories and Tags. What are they? When creating a website, you can edit a menu to include not only pages, but also category archives that can create a more complete experience for small businesses. This is not just how to do it but WHY you should do it. This gives an in depth look at the justification for placement of content on your website and way finding.