You are jazzed about cranking out a WordPress site and the first thing you do is you reach for a theme. But wait is that theme you bought accessible? Will all your users be able to traverse through your site without any issues? You could run an accessibility test. Or even better, you could keep accessibility top of mind during the build process and make it a must have before launching a WordPress site.
Who Needs Themes When You have Blocksets
Groups of gutenberg blocks, “blocksets”, are the future of WordPress design AND content. They’ll be more flexible, and more portable. Instead of downloading, installing, and customizing a theme, you install a complete site where each page is a tailored collection of blocksets, complete with the content appropriate for your industry or purpose. Page level theming will become a real possibility. Meaning that instead of Lorem Ipsum, you’ll get the imagery and copy you need to have a mostly ready site.
Blocksets will be exchanged in public forums, and will be packaged and sold. If you like a page on someone’s site, for the first time you’ll be able to ask, “hey, can I get a json file for that page.”
We have a little ways to go before this is feasible, but we’re getting close. I’ll demo how blocksets work and why they are superior to themes. Then we’ll discuss some ways the WordPress community can get the ball rolling.
Design for Interaction: Using animation to enhance user experience
Modern browsers, JavaScript libraries, and CSS3 have made it easier than ever to create exciting, dynamic animated experiences within web interfaces. But we have also seen the unfortunate side effect of trying to do too much: websites that are resource hogs, eating up bandwidth and slowing load times to a crawl, all for effects that are ultimately just there for the “show” factor. This talk will discuss how to use these animation skills for good: to establish context, convey status, give feedback, and yes, even add a little delight. Along the way, we’ll discuss the principles of animation that guide everything from your favorite feature films to the actions of a button on your screen, and learn how deliberate animation choices can improve the experience for your user. We will also touch on the available tools in JS and CSS and how to choose which one is the right one for your animation task.
Design Systems
Design Systems are all the rage right now. Drawing from parallels within the culinary world, I want to explore 3 different perspectives that a design system can address within an organization. Most people only tend to think of the first perspective but doing so limits the impact a design system can have.
Proven Steps to Make any WordPress Site a Lead Generation Platform
There is no shortage of beautiful, perfectly useless WordPress websites. Digital agencies litter the Web with artistic and clever designs that have no hope of generating a positive ROI. In this talk, I’ll share a highly actionable checklist to ensure all your WordPress websites produce sales leads.