Ari Black is Content Circus Ringmaster at WebMarketers, a boutique digital marketing agency based in Ottawa. He comes from an old school, Mad-Men-esque advertising background, having made the leap to digital to avoid becoming a dinosaur. He’s still admittedly an old man (relatively speaking) playing a young person’s game, but welcomes the challenge and embraces constant learning & adapting. When Ari isn’t working on content marketing, you can find him on stage doing stand-up comedy or giving motivational speeches.
Ari will be speaking at 1:00pm on Saturday, July 13th in the Parliament room. His talk is entitled, Content Marketing: Brand, Voice & Story.
Whether you’re a business of one or a Fortune 100 company, telling the story of your brand has never been more important. Relating with the customer and relaying the journey of what got you here is an integral part of an effective content marketing strategy. More and more, people are looking to do business with brands that are “real” and “genuine.” In this talk we’ll cover:
• how to build an authentic brand that connects & resonates with your audience • how to find, leverage and amplify your brand’s voice • the elements that comprise a powerful brand story
And we’ll talk about how to combine these elements across different platforms to communicate your brand with the most bang for your buck.
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 Silver level sponsors.
Dreamhost
Since 1997 DreamHost has helped individuals, small businesses, entrepreneurs, and developers worldwide bring their dreams to life on the Internet. A leader in Managed WordPress hosting, over 400,000 customers trust DreamHost to be their online home. Supporting the open source community with dedicated resources and a passionate team, DreamHost believes in the power of the Open Web and the people that make it happen. Learn more at DreamHost.com.
Pondstone
86% of consumers rely on internet searches to find a local business(source: BrightLocal). It’s never been more important for companies to invest in their online presence. Pondstone is a results-driven digital marketing agency dedicated to creating lasting relationships as valued partners in our customers’ success and growth. We build beautiful WordPress websites and use proven digital marketing strategies to help our clients expand their brand recognition, outrank their competitors in search results, and convert more leads into customers.
Kevin is a User Experience Developer with 5+ years of experience working in the web development industry. He currently works for a Westboro based web design/development agency called Industrial and have worked with them for nearly his entire career. He has worked with many different tech stacks but Kevin focus primarily on WordPress and Drupal based projects.
He have a passion for clean code and developing for inclusivity. This means following accessibility standards set by WCAG 2.0 and optimizing code to be accessed from any device.
Kevin will be talking at 11:00am on Saturday, July 13th in the Manotick room. His talk is entitled, Building for the future: Developing a maintainable code base.
Websites are a significant investment. With the rate at which technology advances websites need to be kept up to date in order to stay relevant. Ensuring that your codebase is as easily maintainable as possible is critical in both saving time and money.
Some of the points that will be talked about: – Managing core and plugin updates with composer – Using a task-runner to compile assets – Organizing your theme using partials and includes – Impactful code commenting
Tricia is a web designer who creates sites for small service-based businesses. She believes every business deserves a strategic, professional-looking website, not just a pretty one. She goes the extra mile to help business owners get online and loves to come alongside others and help them learn WordPress.
Tricia will be speaking at 11:00am on Saturday, July 13th in the Rideau room. She is leading a panel entitled, Ethical Behavior in an Open Source Community.
A panel discussion with members of the WordPress community exploring ethical issues that can arise when working with clients, with each other, and within the WordPress community at large.
The hallway track is what happens outside of the scheduled sessions. It is the side conversations, the interesting discussions, the networking opportunities and the in-person connections you make which most often leave you feeling like a WordCamp is equal parts conference and community. The organizers of WordCamp Ottawa were equally accommodating and enthusiastic in accepting my talk topic – Humans in hallways getting help – that aims to help prime the proverbial conversational pump for the hallway track of WordCamp Ottawa 2019. I was quite appreciative that they offered this blog post to help me help you get the most out of the experience in some new and novel ways.
What are your Hallway
Track Topics of Interest?
Before July 10th, go to http://wordcamp.gravityflow.io/ to share up to 3 topics that you are most interested to learn about and up to 3 that you have the most experience/knowledge to share with others. Keeping the theme of 3 going, this info will be put to good use in the following 3 ways:
It will be printed out in advance of the
conference sized for a spot on your registration badge. This will give everyone
an easy ice breaker to new conversations with new people where your skills /
interests overlap. Fear not if you’re reading this after July 10th,
the badge will have space to write-in your own topics of interest.
It will help me know what topics are of most
interest to most amount of attendees to group up some speed networking topics
for the 2nd
half of my presentation. That also means, for those who show up to my
session, Saturday 1PM in Manotick room, you’ll be able to put face to name of
people with related interests to keep an eye out for the rest of the
conference.
Are you really hoping to connect about a
specific topic during the WordCamp, but not sure who to ask? Stop by the Gravity Flow booth in the sponsor area! You
will be able to see/search for attendees by topic that you may want to connect
with (of those who agree their contact info can be shared at least). You also
can see how easy it was to use Gravity Forms,
Gravity Flow and the related suite of
add-ons to put it together.
Since this blog post is coming out a few weeks ahead of the
conference, I figured it makes sense to share a few of the hallway track tips
that relate most to things to do or mindset as you prepare to attend.
Don’t be afraid of
the elephant in the room
Yes, organizers have put a lot of work
into crafting a schedule for you and yes speakers are hard at work putting
quality content into their session/slides. But don’t feel bad if every session
doesn’t feel like it is meant for you. There are a wide range of technical
skills and areas of interest that a WordCamp tries to cover. If a slot of
sessions don’t seem to scratch your itch that is a great time to check out the
hallway track. Chances are others in the hallway at that time might be ones
you’d really enjoy meeting. All sessions and slides will make their way up to wordpress.tv after whereas the hallway track
will not.
Check out attendee list in advance
The attendee page on the WordCamp
Ottawa page is one to watch! You can see the websites of your fellow attendees, add them to your
twitter feeds and figure out mnemonic device(s) you might use when it comes time to
introduce yourselves. Or re-introduce yourself to people you have seen/heard
but haven’t properly met before.
Practice Pacman
Simply stated, “When standing as a group of people, always
leave room for 1 person to join your group.” More memorably, stand like Pac-Man
/ Ms. Pac-Man! This encourages other people to enter into the space and join
the conversation. Don’t forget that a Pac-Man has to open his/her mouth wider
for yet more people to join 😉
Default to listening
On any given topic, you may very well be the smartest person
in the room, but a WordCamp isn’t the place to try and show out / try to prove
it. By defaulting to listening, you increase your own chances to learn and will
often find the opportunities for a more engaging conversation flow forth. When
you do decide it’s time to talk, remember to start small and pause throughout,
to confirm others are still interested in where the conversation is growing.
Speaking of defaulting to listening, I would love to hear about any of your favourite hallway track tips & tricks in the comments of this post or at the conclusion of the Hallway Track Topics of Interest Form
Say Hello to Jamie O
at Gravity Flow!
When not speaking, you’ll be able to find me find me at
Gravity Flow booth where I’ll have some fun toys to help you get into conversational
flow state. Whether you are looking for ways to save time/effort in managing
business processes for your own website or a developer/agency looking to
differentiate yourself as one that can deliver more than just customer
engagement / marketing materials via the web, or fit into another niche, I look
forward to meeting you, learning about your uses of WordPress and share how
Gravity Flow can be an excellent option in your development toolkit.
Meagan Hanes is the Technical Project Manager for Maintainn at WebDevStudios. She is responsible for managing ongoing development across a wide range of projects and ensuring Maintainn clients receive top-quality support and communication. Her experience in relating client needs and developer technicalities in order to produce elegant solutions has been valued by clients and partners alike throughout her 15+ year career.
She has been on the WordCamp Ottawa organizing team since 2014 and was Lead Organizer for the 2016 and 2017 events. You can often find her volunteering, speaking at or mentoring a WordCamp across Canada and the United States. Some of her talks are available to watch online. She has taught and volunteered with Canada Learning Code, as well as providing private WordPress instruction and instructor support.
When not on a computer, Meagan enjoys a variety of visual artistic crafts, including painting and embroidery, and is on an eternal quest to complete her Pokedex. Meagan resides in her hometown of Ottawa, Canada.
Meagan will be speaking at 10:00am on Saturday, July 13th in the Manotick room. Her talk is entitled, Update Smart: Using a Staging Site!
Performing theme, plugin and core updates on your site can be intimidating and overwhelming, especially for older and more complex sites with many interconnected plugins – WooCommerce, I’m looking at you!
The solution is simple: use a staging site – a private copy of your site where you can safely test updates and resolve problems before your users ever experience an issue.
I’ll guide you across a number of ways to create a staging site depending on your specific needs, performing these updates, and then applying these updates to your main site. You’ll leave with a concrete plan for how to set up your own staging site, and will fear the update process far less!
Remy is the lead developer of WP Rocket, a premium caching plugin installed on more than 750 000 websites.
He is also a regular speaker at WordCamps in Canada and Europe.
Remy will be speaking at 10:00am on Saturday, July 13th, in the Rideau room. His talk is entitled, Modernize & Standardize Your PHP Development for WordPress.
With WordPress 5.2 now supporting PHP 5.6 as the minimum required version, any developer can leverage the language improvements which happened over the years to make development easier and more efficient.
We’re going to dive into examples of syntaxes, tools and standards that will help you write better code, faster, and improve your PHP skills at the same time.
Jonathan Perlman is an experienced web developer working for Dawson College in Montreal, Quebec. Having 15+ years of experience in web development, he builds custom solutions for the educational institution. Jonathan is also an instructor for Dawson College’s Centre for Training and Development specializing website and database technologies such as HTML & CSS, PHP and WordPress along with SQL.
Jonathan will be speaking at 10:00am, on Saturday, July 13th in the Parliament room. His talk is entitled, WooCommerce Fundamentals.
What is eCommerce? It’s selling something (physical or digital) on the internet.
To a lot of people, developing eCommerce is a very scary thing. “It is only for the Advanced Developers,” some people say.
Let’s break down those walls together, as I show you the basics of building an online store.
Étienne Bélanger is a full-stack developer working @ District Web. He love WordPress and been working with it for more then 10 years. He has built custom themes, plugins, extensions of plugins. His experience range from small sites to large ecommerce multisites ecosystem. He loves learning new things everday. From WordPress to nodejs, from backend to frontend, he enjoy exploring new ways of making the web.
Étienne will be speaking at 9:00am on Saturday, July 13th in the Manotick room. His talk is entitled, Your First Headless WordPress Project with ReactJS and GraphQL.
With the revolution of Javascript in the past years combined with the greater need of mobile and super fast sites, new tools are out for developers. GraphQL is a new tool that replaces REST API’s. In this conference, we will look how to bring GraphQL into a WordPress development cycle.
How to build a headless theme using GraphQL and ReactJS.
This talk will give you the basic knowledge necessary to grasp this new tool and will leave you excited to discover more about it.
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