This workshop is for WordPress Theme developers who are interested in improving the Front-end Performance and User Experience of their Themes.
We'll start by reviewing why the Front-end performance of Themes (or any web site) is important, and what special considerations we have for a South African market. Then we'll look at what indicators of good performance are, what tools we can use to help us, and make a checklist that we can use for reviewing sites.
We'll use these ideas to look at a few off-the-shelf Themes as examples, and see where they might be able to improve on their Front-end performance. We'll spend the second half of the workshop working on our own projects making them lighter, faster, and better for our users.
Steve Barnett works as a code mentor at Project codeX (http://www.projectcodex.co/), and as a freelance Front-end developer and User Experience person. He’s a bit addicted to meetups: you can find him helping out with RailsBridge Cape Town (https://railsbridgecapetown.org/), Cape Town Front-End Developers (http://www.meetup.com/ctfeds/), and Mozilla Webmaker (https://stevebarnett.makes.org/thimble/MjAyMDg2ODYwOA==/webmaker-event) events. If he’s not there, he’s probably crouched in an awkward position in front of something funny-looking, taking pictures of it (https://www.flickr.com/photos/maximilianbarners/).
You can find him on Twitter as @maxbarners (https://twitter.com/maxbarners), on GitHub as SteveBarnett (https://github.com/SteveBarnett/), and on his own site Naga (http://naga.co.za/) (which really, really, needs a redesign) as, erm, himself.
Danielle Eriksen, Front-end developer who's walked a long and winding path from art and graphic design to where she is now.... Currently working as a software developer for Psionet, adding C# to her existing Front-end skill set.
Loves learning new things and sharing with others. When not puzzling out the next problem that needs solving, she dedicates her time and energy to introducing newcomers to Ruby on Rails with the RailsBridge Cape town group, and helps encourage and equip young girls in Tech as part of Code 4 Cape Town (http://code4ct.com/).
Almost as addicted to meetups as Steve. Regular attendee of CTFED (Cape Town Front-End Developers - http://www.meetup.com/ctfeds/) meetups. Lurks on zatech.slack as slinky_bass, and keeps a random assortment of experiments on GitHub as slinky-bass (https://github.com/slinky-bass)
Steve: I did a 3m pitch a few years ago. I'm a regular-ish speaker: I have given talks at CTFEDs, the UXSA conference, and SUGSA, and have ran workshops for CTFEDs, the UX SA conference, and I help run quarterly RailsBridge Cape Town workshops.
Dani: I did a lightning talk at a recent RailsBridge, and have helped run several RailsBridge workshops.