Author: Nichole Betterley

Guest post by Saied Abbasi, Web Developer, Founder of WPHelp.Co, and WordCamp Seattle 2017 Speaker.

Maybe you’re a theme developer, maybe you’ve heard of a 12-column grid, or maybe you’re a blogger. Wherever you stand, let me let you in on a secret…

The most common solutions to make websites responsive are hacks.

Death of the Media Query will be a discussion on how to employ ‘vanilla CSS’ to create designs that are fluid across devices. This will enable us to move away from our dependency on frameworks like Bootstrap, be less surgical with our code, and create templates that don’t break with an extra line of text.

Get ready for some buzzwords.

We’ll explore fluid solutions from a mixin that throws us back to Geometry class with the magic of linear interpolation, to CSS Grid areas that will change the rules of theme development, and to our dear friend Flexbox that finally came along and said “you want it centered vertically, no problem!” (In my head Flexbox has the confidence of an NYC construction worker).

Let’s think about a simple example with Flexbox.

You have a navigation at the top of your site with 5 links. The links run horizontally across the screen. In an ideal world, you want the first link flush to the left of the screen, the last link flush to the right of the screen, and the three remaining links to be evenly spaced in-between.

This should be easy — but no. You have your font size set just right, the text of each link covers about half an inch of the screen… so, let’s see, take 5 links carry the width of 100%, divide by 37 and multiply that by the square root of your font size in pixels — and voilà, if nobody ever changes the copy you have a perfectly spaced navigation… that only works on large screens.

As we’ll explore during Death of the Media Query, we want to avoid these situations where we have to get surgical with our code. You shouldn’t need your graphing calculator to create symmetrical designs. However, dealing with spacing in CSS historically has been tricky.

Instead, if we let Flexbox handle this navigation bar predicament, we can distribute space effortlessly. Just as easily as we can make a font size a few pixels larger, we can take five links, pin the first flush to the left of the screen, the last flush to the right of the screen, and space the other three evenly between… for all screen sizes.

Don’t believe me? Well you should come to my talk :]

Saied’s Death of the Media Query session is Saturday at 11am. Don’t miss it!

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photo credit: Aphiwat chuangchoem

Guest post by Kelli Wise, Agency Owner, WordPress Community Activist, and WordCamp Seattle 2017 Speaker.

Like so many of the speakers and attendees at WordCamp, I’m self-taught.

When I first started using WordPress, learning it meant reading a lot of different blogs, articles and Codex entries. My first website with WordPress took 3 days to setup since I was figuring it out as I went along and I didn’t want to mess it up.

Since then, I’ve installed and setup WordPress hundreds of times. I’ve broken it dozens of times. I’ve fixed it dozens of times. Not every site is a learning opportunity for me, but most of them are.

My first time speaking at WordCamp in Seattle was a walkthrough of how to setup a WordPress install as a website. It was my workflow and a recap of everything I had learned. With Q&A, it was less than 45 minutes long. I had a packed house and many of the attendees told me later that it was the first time they had ever had all of the instructions laid out for them in one place.

It was a talk I wish I had had available to me when I was getting started.

It would have saved me a lot of time and mistakes. It’s also why I love speaking and teaching at WordCamp.

I don’t give ‘developer’ level talks.

I like to teach the beginning and intermediate level stuff to get people unstuck or build their confidence to use their websites.

I teach my web design clients how to use their WordPress sites, so WordCamp gives me a first hand look at what my clients need from me. What confuses them? What intimidates them? What do they need to know to keep their sites current? What do they need to know to prevent breaking things? My audience are my instructors so I can be better at helping my clients.

This year, I’m really excited to be running a hands on workshop.

My attendees won’t just be sitting there passively listening to me yammer on. They will be working along with real WordPress sites. Not their live websites where they might make a mess, but live sandbox sites where they are free to make a mess without hurting anything important.

Learning the basics of using your website can be intimidating. There are books, websites, online classes and more. The flood of information can be overwhelming. So most users simply leave things as they were setup by their web designer. They don’t ever log in to make updates or edits.

What they need is a safe place to practice and someone to walk them through what is safe to do and what should be left alone.

My goal for the workshop is to have everyone leave feeling more confident about logging in to their site and using it. After all, a website can be a tremendous tool for a small business owner or entrepreneur. You need to make the most of it.

What makes me qualified to teach this class?

Well, I’ve been using WordPress for several years now. I’ve lost track of when I started using WordPress but it was around 2009 or 2010. I was designing websites long before that, but WordPress was a better choice for my clients.

I teach all of them how to use their sites. I’ve also taught this material for the local SBA. I’m one of the organizers for the Olympia WordPress meetup (https://www.meetup.com/Olympia-WordPress-Meetup-OlyWP/), and I speak there on a regular basis.

I’m a trained and experienced public speaker, so I won’t bore you to death – but I do still say ‘um’ too frequently. I used to speak at the Intel Developers Forum, the Intel Technology Symposium, and at AT&T sales functions back when I had a corporate job.

Being an introvert, I’m more comfortable on a stage than one-on-one, so if you see me around, you’ll probably see me sitting by myself. Come say hello because I’m a bit too shy to say hello to you.

You can find me online on twitter or my websites https://pintsizedsites.com/ (for DIYers) or https://kattero.com/ (my design agency).

I’m hoping you’ll join me first thing Saturday morning at 10 am.

Bring your laptop and your questions and be prepared to roll up your sleeves and get your digital hands dirty.

You’ll have some time before the keynote to come to the room and get setup – things like getting your laptop connected to wifi and getting your sandbox site ready to go. After the keynote, we’ll dive in and start getting confident with WordPress.

Kelli’s Learn to Use Your WordPress Workshop is Saturday at 10am, right after the keynote. Seats are first come first serve that morning, but please let us know if you’re interested in attending it when you …

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photo credit: Ed Gregory

Guest post by Tessa Kriesel, Agency and Community Engineer at Pantheon and Panelist on the Women in WordPress panel.

We are all looking forward to getting the chance to speak on the Women in WordPress Panel at WordCamp Seattle. We figured it would be fun to share a bit about ourselves before WordCamp starts!

Meet Rachel Cherry

How were you introduced to WordPress?

Hi! My name is Rachel Cherry. I’m a Senior Software Engineer for The Walt Disney Company with over ten years experience in back and front-end web development and digital design. Before Disney, I spent over nine years working in higher education and am the Director of WPCampus, a community and conferences focused on using WordPress in higher ed. I also enjoy promoting the importance of an accessible web.

I got started with WordPress in January 2011 when I accepted a job at The University of Alabama. Within six months I had to learn WordPress, undergo a complete redesign, develop themes and plugins, setup a multisite, and migrate all of the existing content for the college I worked for and its seven academic departments. I was the designer, the developer, the QA, everything. I was thrown into the deep end and have enjoyed every minute.

In fall 2015, I founded WPCampus because, while WordCamps are great, the issues I encountered in higher ed were often overlooked. Higher ed is a unique and challenging space because it often requires delivering enterprise solutions with a much tighter budget. We needed our own space to share, discuss, and learn. Our community is special because our members have a bond and dedication beyond their love for WordPress: to further the vitality and mission of higher education. WPCampus has an active online community as well as annual virtual and in-person conferences.

I live in Pasadena, California but you can follow my adventures in life and code on Twitter, GitHub, and bamadesigner.com.

Tell Us a Fun Fact About Yourself

A fun fact about myself? I was once featured in a Slack ad. I tweeted about how much I loved Slack after they sent me some swag to give away at a conference. Months later, they messaged me to ask if they could have an artist draw something based on my tweet and use it in an ad campaign. Soon, I saw my tweet featured in a full page ad in The New York Times, Forbes, Fast Company, and more. You can see the ad here:

When you have to stop at the hotel shop to buy @nytimes because @SlackHQ bought a full page ad featuring your tweet. pic.twitter.com/G8L8Bh1FeM

— Rachel Cherry 🍒 (@bamadesigner) December 14, 2015

Meet Tessa Kriesel

How were you introduced to WordPress?

I was already doing Joomla development and someone needed a WordPress site so I started digging in and loved it. However, the story of how I got involved with Joomla, and open source, is quite interesting.

Back in 2007, I was obsessed with Guitar Hero. I wanted to setup a site where people would be ranked and could compete against one another online. The site would need user account capabilities and a way to enter scores to validate against the other player and rank them in a bracketed hierarchy. I figured out that I could get most of the way with a CMS, and Joomla had recently been founded and seemed promising.

I had never worked with PHP or MySQL and was still fairly new to web development in general, but I dug in and was able to get 90% there. I recruited a fellow gamer that was a PHP developer to help me complete the rest of the bracket system. Somehow, users started coming in, very quickly. I wish I could remember the number of users we had by the time I walked away, but I know it was well into the thousands.

The best part was that Activision recognized our mission and asked us to start posting our tournaments in their online community. I was stoked. I never imagined the site would get as far as it did, and then to be recognized by ACTIVISION, the creator of my favorite video game! They were super supportive and sent me tons of GH swag like guitar stickers, pins, sweat bands and more.

After having my first child, I no longer had time to maintain the site or play video games anymore and I stepped down. The site has since been drastically changed and renamed, but you can still find a few of the original posse over at http://ghshredders.com.

You can follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tessak22.

Tell Us a Fun Fact About Yourself

I have always been a bit of a tomboy. As a child, my family’s weekend hobby was mud-racing, which I later ended up doing myself when I was 16. I can fix a car, enjoy four wheeling, being outdoors and shooting archery.

Meet Miriam Goldman

How were you introduced to WordPress?

It was 2008, and my friends and I were starting a band for a local church. They wanted some young people to help lead their worship time. The job fell to me, as the web developer of the group, to develop and design a website, as we had ambitions to branch out.

Knowing that I wanted to go with a CMS, I did my research. I came down to Drupal and WordPress – and WordPress won out, for the ease of updating the templates, and adding the plugins. I ended up tinkering around with it over the next few years in my spare time, and then got lucky enough to be hired by a company that used it exclusively, in 2012. Since then, it’s been my main specialization in my day job.

Tell Us a Fun Fact About Yourself

I’ve played clarinet since I was 13, and saxophone since I was 15. From 2009-2014, I was part of the pit orchestra for local musical theatre productions – in where I almost got taken out by a rogue dodgeball that fell into the orchestra pit during a production of Hairspray.

Meet Bridget Willard

How were you introduced to WordPress?

Hello! I am Bridget Willard and I came to WordPress (dot) com from Leo Laporte in 2007, the same year I heard about Twitter. In 2013, I attended my first WordCamp when my Twitter friend Pam from Pam Ann Marketing said she wanted to meet at WordCamp Orange County in 2013. I began to attend all of the WCOC’s with my BFF/Blogging Buddy Carol Stephen and in 2017 I was on the organizing committee. I built bridgetwillard.com in April 2015 — my first self-hosted WordPress site and started working for GiveWP.com in December of 2015.

Tell Us a Fun Fact About Yourself

Most people don’t know that I was the second string nose guard for the 8th grade flag football team.

Meet Francesca Marano

How were you introduced to WordPress?

Buongiorno! My name is Francesca Marano and I am the WordPress Community Manager at SiteGround. Before that I was a freelance websites creator, an executive assistant, a factory worker in a kibbutz. I loved every job I had in my life and learned something from each one of them.

I live in Torino, Italy but I feel at home in every place where I can connect to the wi-fi and sit down to write my next talk submission with a good cup of tea (Countess Grey from Fortnum&Mason is my current favorite).

When my son was born I joined a group that would forever change my life, both professionally and personally. You will never guess how my involvement with WordPress started – I became a member of a knitting club. No coding classes (although I almost graduate from a Coding, Art & Multimedia curriculum in Italy, I dropped out, three exams from graduation, when I realised my professors didn’t know who Jeffrey Zeldman was), no WordCamps: all the ladies of the knitting club had a blog, why didn’t I have a blog? So I got one. And I started tinkering with it. Soon I found myself helping other people setting up their blogs and websites and my new career was born.

In 2015 a friend told me about contributing to WordPress without being a PHP developer, I couldn’t believe I could make a difference without writing one single function. I started contributing to the Polyglots team and then became more involved with the Community team. I help other communities grow through mentorship, organize meetups and WordCamps in Torino and take part in many other WordPress events worldwide.

Tell Us a Fun Fact About Yourself

I love to knit, dance, sing in the car at an awfully loud volume even though I am completely tone deaf.

Don’t miss out on what promises to be a fun an informative panel at WordCamp this year. It’s happening on Saturday, 11/4 @ 2pm!!

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