Community Archives

Earlier this summer, Westwerk partnered with WP Engine to host its first-ever WordPress Summer Mixer. WP Engine is a large-scale, highly-managed hosting platform with more than 20,000 customers, including several of Westwerk’s client sites, and brought a lot of great insight to the event. The afternoon meet-and-greet included a presentation on some of the latest trends in WordPress, HHVM implementations and e-commerce on WordPress. Cocktails and networking followed, and there was a great turnout from the Twin Cities WordPress community – both developers and clients alike. View a bit more info on how HHVM may effect the future of WordPress here.

Interested in future Summer Mixers? Subscribe to Westwerk’s enewsletter and stay on top of upcoming events. Have a topic for a future Summer Mixer? Tweet at us @WestwerkDesign.

We wanted to create a small repository of sorts for our various presentations and talks at WordCamp Minneapolis 2014. Videos of our presentations can be found at WordPress.tv.

Designing For Interaction, Travis Totz

Touch, gestures and voice control are quickly becoming more important for designers (and developers) to think about and design for. Interaction can enrich a user’s experience of a product or service, and express character and feeling within those interactions. During this talk I will assist in equipping you with the process you need to design for interactive experiences on WordPress and on the web. How can we achieve clean, easy and scalable interactions that are optimized for every device? This talk will focus on current solutions from various experts in the field, as well as our best practices, and optional tools to use.

Download full presentation here. Video here.

WP-to-JS and Back Again, Nick Pelton

WordPress is an amazing tool. JavaScript makes it even better. Learn how to push data from WP-to-JS and back again in this primer on AJAX. Key takeaways will be several methods making WP and JS work together as well as some tips and tricks for better performance.

Download full presentation here. Video here.

Where’s My Maserati? Dave West and Amy Abt

There are a lot of steps between starting a business and buying a maserati. In our discussion, we’ll cover a few critical areas to consider as a new small business owner begins to hone their process. Walking through some of the common business mistakes and misconceptions can help get attendees on the road to growing their business and being more profitable.

We’ll cover:

– Estimating
– Time Tracking
– Analyzing Time Data
– Evaluating Profitability

Download full presentation here. Sample category headlines for terms and conditions can be found here. Video here.

Remote Project Management

There are lots of benefits and challenges associated with managing projects when your clients and your developers are separated from you by several time zones. I’ll go through what I’ve learned in the past year as a project manager working with people all over the world. Topics will include how take advantage of unique experiences and opportunities that arise from working outside of your geographical area, how to overcome language and cultural barriers, and tools you can use to keep your project on track and successful. Video here.

Download full presentation here.

A few other resources:

Time Zones:
http://xkcd.com/1335/
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/

Good Tools:
http://www.desk.com
https://trello.com/
http://www.skype.com
http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/ – Gmail, Hangouts, Drive all working together

Waterfall Methodology:
http://werkpress.com/process-for-quick-turnaround-projects/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model