To non-designers, design can seem like a mysterious realm inhabited by natural artists — inscrutable beings whose heads are constantly in the clouds as they hunker down in Photoshop, desperately trying to get every last pixel aligned perfectly (Okay, maybe there’s a *bit* of truth to that). Realistically, design is just a series of informed decisions based on a set of principles guided by best practice. By learning the basics of design, you can make your WordPress sites and applications more usable and compelling. This session is meant for anyone new to design.

In this session, we’ll look in depth at some of the more common and problematic errors made by commercial theme developers, and how to fix them. We’ll analyze what constitutes best practices in each instance, and the problems brought about by doing things the lazy way. Some of the topics included in this talk are … * Why shouldn’t I just use Google Hosted Libraries like jQuery? CDNs are awesome and save on bandwidth!!! * Why shouldn’t I just hardcode links to my theme’s CSS and JS files? * Stylesheet Directory and Template Directory? Those are the same thing, right? * Trust my users? They bought my theme! Why wouldn’t I trust them?!?!?!

The web we love (and hate) now today, is not the same web from just only five years ago, and won’t be the same web we know next year. The web is rapidly changing and in multiple ways. How we use it, where we use it, what we use it for, and how we are accessing it. Between being accessible now by multiple devices from mobile handsets, tablets, even TVs and refrigerators, we can only guess where it may end up next, or what the next iPhone will be like. Though we can’t be 100% future-proof for what may be next, we can take some steps in the right direction to give a great experience today that will hold up tomorrow. Most of all we need to change our way of thinking.

Congratulations! Today is your day.
You’re off to create Child Themes! You’re off and away!

You have brains in your head. You have nothing to lose.
You can pick a WordPress theme any style it up how you choose.

You’re on your own. And you know what you know.
And this session will help you decide where to go.

You’ll look at many designs and layouts. Look ’em over with care.
About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.”

With your head full of brains and poetic code oh-so-sweet,
you’re too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

And you may not find any Themes you want to bring down.
In that case, of course, you’ll just straight code your own.
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(adapted from Dr. Seuss: “Oh The Places You’ll Go!”)

Themes are very popular with users of WordPress, primarily because the theme defines the look and feel of your web site, and the functions within the template carry your content forward to the eyes of your readers. This session takes the user through the basics of creating Child Themes based off an existing theme in order to customize a theme to your liking, without having to code/develop the whole kit and kaboodle! Child Themes are a time saver and a great way to learn about WordPress Themeing. At the end of this session, users will walk away with a downloadable example of a Parent/Child theme used in the session as an example so they can study the code and learn how to apply the techniques to their next project.

Your Photoshop layout might look good to the client, but is it designed and organized with the next phase of production in mind? Are your layers properly ordered and labeled to assist the developer with producing the WordPress theme efficiently and with as little drama as possible? And are you using visual effects that can be achieved with CSS3, or will you burden the final design with DIV soup and multiple images just because you didn’t run it by your dev team and got approval from the client? Learn how to design a layout with the development phase in mind by understanding theme structure! No need to learn how to code a theme, just how the coder will go about slicing your work. This talk will offer workflow tips, offer a few examples of well-organized PSDs, and even show some live theme code.

As web designers and print designers encounter WordPress for the first time, it can be a challenge to understand how WordPress works. Yet, it is so important for designers to know the system for which they are designing. This presentation will address key points for helping designers understand the basic functionality and structure of WordPress — so that they can design truly beautiful and functional sites that run well on WordPress. This presentation will aim to help designers understand what developers do to get their designs live on a WordPress site.