Wrapping Up #WCYHM 2015

That’s a wrap!  Thanks so much to all who attended to make the event such a success.

Thank You to…

WPtouch sponsorOur sponsors. We wouldn’t have been able to pull this off without your support: WPtouch, Imagination Plus, Bluehost, WiredTreePlanetHoster, JetPack, Testlauncher, Carbon60 Networks, Hamilton Economic Development, OrbitalDreamHost, WPML, Enterprise Intelligence Inc, Camp Tech, WinningWP, Encompass Design, and Web Solutions.

McMaster Innovation Park. Thank you for all your help in setting up and hosting our event!

Our speakers. Without you, there’d be no reason for anyone to attend.

WordCamp Hamilton 2015 TshirtOur volunteers. You were amazing. From registration, to room hosts, to video recording the two tracks and more, there’s no way we could have run this event without you.

Our attendees. What good is a WordCamp without attendees?

Our caterers and hosts. The Village Green for providing breakfast, lunch, coffee, refreshments, and snacks for the entire day, and Snooty Fox for hosting our speakers’ dinner.

WordCamp SessionOur website and branding. A huge thank you to Eder Saos for our wonderful branding work, and Marlon Lulgjuraj for getting our website up and running!

You’re all awesome!

What Can We Do Better?

Please take a few minutes to complete our feedback survey. Results will be published afterwards.

Presentation Slides

Presentations slides are being published to the site as we receive them from our speakers.

Session Videos

Videos will be submitted to WordPress.tv and shared on our Videos page as soon as we can.

What Next?

Craving more WordPress community goodness? Check out the Hamilton WordPress meetup group!

Until next time…

Brian Hogg, Chad Fullerton, Shanta Nathwani, Nick Tomkin, Adam Wills, Michael Salvatori

Photos by Shanta

Final Details for Attendees

We are looking forward to seeing you Saturday June 6th!  Please note that we are sold out, so there will be no tickets available at the door.

Registration Time

Registration will open at 8am, with our opening remarks shortly after 9am.  While there will be some light snacks and coffee/tea available you’ll probably want to grab some breakfast beforehand.

Bags

We’ll have some swag to give away as will some of our sponsors, so you may want to bring a small bag to carry them around if you won’t have a car to throw the goodies into.

Parking

McMaster Innovation Park has confirmed parking will be free.  So feel free to park in the lot, conference parking, or across the street if both are full.

Seating / Laptops

Seating will be chairs only in rows (no tables), and while you could bring your laptop and use it on your lap there will be no plugs available for powering them.  Most speakers will make their slides available afterwards, and feel free to bring paper/pen to take notes!

Lunch

We have done our best to accommodate all special requests.  If you did not request a special meal during registration, please do not take any of the vegetarian, vegan, or gluten-free meals until attendees with special needs have been accommodated, and there is a restaurant just around the corner from the venue if needed.

After-party

The after-party is happening immediately after the last session, in the Atrium of the building directly outside the conference rooms.  Be sure to plan to stick around for a bit!  Drinks and some great snacks including meat & cheese platters, chips & salsa, and even popcorn will be available 🙂

Meet Carbon60!

Established in 1999 and headquartered in Toronto, Carbon60 Networks specializes in “End-to-End” Hosting Solutions for enterprise-class WordPress websites and applications.  Our customers value our expertise and full accountability when they need WordPress hosting with high levels of agility, reliability, performance, and security. With state-of-the-art cloud computing centers in Ontario, British Columbia, and the United Kingdom,  our goal is to make sure all the hard work that goes into developing a demanding WordPress site gets fully appreciated through its fast and secure delivery to end-users. We are excited to be part of WordCamp Hamilton 2015 and hope we get a chance to meet you there.

Why Test With Real Users?

This is a guest post from one of our sponsors, Testlauncher originally published on Medium

Do you know how usable your site is?

The importance of knowing how usable your site is seems to not be fully understood in the startup/online community as it should. Let’s break it down and educate ourselves a bit more on some of the ways we can find out how usable our website is and why it’s one of the most important tests we can perform against your site.

Take the example of a shopping cart. Many checkout carts tend to have links to support, knowledge bases, social media links, terms of use, advertising, direct product links or even related products etc. If a potential customer who hasn’t purchased yet (but is about too) decides to click on any of these links mentioned above, you potentially have lost the sale. Think about it for a second, if you are waiting in line, stores often have simple quick-sell merchandise like magazines, chocolate bars and gum available during the checkout process. Realize, you are bounded by the products on either side of you so you cannot escape easily and are funnelled into a cashier regardless of line-up length. When clicking a link, such as a twitter or advertisement, you are essentially escaping from the line. Now they are controlled by the forces of life again, such as a phone call, crying baby or even a distraction such as a poor review or second thoughts if the purchase is a large one. It may be wise to get the customer to have instant success purchasing a smaller purchase but offer related products to be added quickly after the purchase is made, maybe a discount if they purchase within 10 minutes or an email with related products possibly. Have you noticed Paypal’s checkout process is very plain and boring? It just makes you want to finish the process. Its distraction free and a sale is made almost everytime.

Usability tools we can use come in many forms and often each is required to uncover your websites full usability score.

User surveys and focus groups are marketing tools to find out what a selected group of users remembers about a web site to determine the importance of branding and corporate image. A good feeling will increase trust.

User feedback, whether we ask to chat with selected users or via surveys can solicit views aimed directly from selected user groups. Generally visitors who hate the site leave promptly without responding. Visitors with minor problems (broken links, typos) often do provide feedback as do those who love the site. The majority probably think the site is OK and don’t bother to tell you this.

Web developers tend to rely on mechanical aids, google analytics or automated scripts to check log files for numbers of users, number of pages a user visited, unique visitors, user exit pages, users referring site and so on. Some automated services find typos, broken links and rate your websites SEO. All important as well.

Visitor heatmaps and user recordings are really hot nowadays by making it so easy to track user frustration or success. You are able to view where users click, scroll, including the timing between clicks and scrolls and where a particular user travels inside your site and mouse movements. Based on mouse movements you can easily feel a users frustration (multiple clicks or wildly moving the mouse) for example. Studying your actual users can help gain valuable usability information quickly on a daily basis with little cost.

The most important technique is to actually see (via video or in-person) someone using your site, specifically someone within your popular demographic range where you can visually see and hear their behaviour as they use your site. Typically 5 users can generate a lot of data. Testing can take place at almost any stage of development. The earlier the better for obvious reasons. It is also important to note that after conducting any type of test and making changes based on any of the testing listed above, another set of tests are recommended to determine the success or failure of the changes.

Remember that founders, owners, designers, marketing, web developers and you have their own biased views of what users want or need. But only users can really tell you whether your site meets their needs.

Meet Imagination Plus!

We are Imagination Plus: a Hamilton-proud web development and design agency celebrating 20 years of award-winning websites, print projects, app development, digital marketing and branding in 2015. We’re in this biz to be extraordinary—for our clients, employees and the community. We aren’t afraid of commitment. We live an open source lifestyle. We’re Agile. We believe what we do matters. And we’re happiest in flip flops. We like to work hard and play hard, so it’s no surprise that we’re proud sponsors of the Wordcamp Hamilton 2015 after-party. Oh yeah. And we love WordPress.

Thanks Imagination Plus for sponsoring our after-party!

Meet Testlauncher

Testlauncher is a full-service web and mobile testing platform completely removing the need to hire in-house QA testers. Using the Testlauncher “Intelligent Testing Platform”, your test lead will setup an “elastic” on-demand team of expert software testers to focus on finding the most critical bugs. Testlauncher can also monitor and help detect security vulnerabilities, usability & performance issues, localization differences, spelling, SEO, and accessibility constraints. Receive daily and weekly reports regarding the health of your web property. Every report will detail exactly what a developer would need to find, reproduce and resolve the issue.

WordCamp Hamilton Featured Speaker: Shanta Nathwani

We have a packed schedule of fantastic speakers for WordCamp Hamilton 2015, and want to let you get to know a bit about them before you arrive at the event June 6th! Each week will be featuring a speaker, and we’re starting this week with Shanta Nathwani.

Shanta is a Web Design and Information Architecture Consultant as well as an Instructor in Web Design and CCIT Capstone at Sheridan College, located in Oakville, Ontario, Canada which includes teaching WordPress. The ICCIT program is a joint program with the University of Toronto at Mississauga. She teaches students and small businesses how to use their websites and social media to increase their online presence leading to increased revenues and improved customer service. She has assisted companies to incorporate social media in the real estate, financial, non-profit, education and technical fields to name a few. She is from Toronto, Ontario, but now lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Shanta will be giving the WordPress 101 session first thing in the morning!

We asked Shanta a few questions about her presentation and her passion for WordPress, see below!

Shanta R. Nathwani, Speaker, WordPress 101

Tell us about your presentation?

As someone told me after I’d delivered this before, this presentation is meant to give people the alphabet of WordPress so that they can learn the dictionary. It is intended for anyone that has never even touched WordPress before and needs some basic information to make some decisions that will start their WordPress experience off right. I assume that people attending my session have no prior knowledge.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I want them to get an understanding of the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org (self-hosted), what themes and plugins are and educate themselves enough to know when they might be in over their heads and need to hire a professional. You may walk away with more questions, but at least you have a starting point and know better which questions to ask, or to whom you need to speak. You’ll be better able to speak with people of all levels, not only at WordCamp, but beyond that one day.

Why did you decide to speak?

This is my home. I want people from all over to see what Hamilton can offer in the way of WordPress and what a great community that it has. I did an amazing tour last year and got some great feedback on this subject. I love teaching the beginners and seeing the look of enlightenment on their faces. Knowledge is power and I’m all about sharing it.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I had done web design in an earlier life and when I was looking for my next gig, post-graduation from my degree, I didn’t know what to do. I thought about going back to web design, but it had changed so much. A friend of mine pointed me in the direction of WordPress and immediately following the meeting, I went to the store and picked up a book. I’ve never looked back and never regretted it. Now, I teach it, not only at WordCamps, but as my job!

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

I would have to say that Backup Buddy by iThemes is my favourite. It is such an easy tool to use and for those users that I work with who don’t want to be bothered worrying about schedules and what to back up and when. Set it up once and let it run. You can schedule it to do a full backup or just a database backup. You can tell it to store the backup elsewhere, like Dropbox. The best part of it is for those that develop websites for their clients. The migration tool is incredible! I’ve done a demo in front of my class and moved an entire site from one domain to the other in 10 minutes, with instruction to them. A perfect working copy.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Hamilton?

I’ve been talking to people in the Hamilton/Halton area for the last couple of years about WordPress and they’ve been eager to learn about it. This is their chance! It is such a boost for the local WordPress and Web Community as a whole. And, after having done 7 WordCamps across North America last year and planning on doing 10 this year, for this WordCamp, I get to sleep at home in my own bed. 😉

Ticket Updates and After-party

Tickets

Don’t miss out on a full day of quality WordPress talks!  There’s limited capacity in the venue so once they’re gone, they’re gone.

Click here to grab your ticket

Afterparty Event

This year we’ll have an afterparty event straight after the last session of the conference, in the large atrium of the McMaster Innovation Park outside the rooms where the talks are being held.  Some food/snacks will be provided and will be a great chance to relax and connect with the local WordPress community after a day of awesome talks!

Say Hello to WPtouch!

WPtouch is a mobile plugin for WordPress that goes beyond responsive, automatically transforming websites into elegant mobile experiences.

Created by Hamilton-based BraveNewCode and under ongoing development since 2008, WPtouch is the leading mobile solution for WordPress websites, with over 7.2 million downloads and tens of thousands of customers worldwide.

Meet the team and learn more about WPtouch Pro at WordCamp Hamilton 2015!

Schedule has been posted!

The schedule has now been posted for WordCamp Hamilton 2015. We’ve got some great speakers coming in for two separate tracks. Take a look at who we have presenting, then grab your ticket if you haven’t already!

View Schedule

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