Shanta R. Nathwani, B.Com., MCP

Category: WordCampTour19

These are my musings, comments, photos and more from my WordCamp Tour 2019. I’m hoping to speak at Buffalo, Rochester and helping out with Hamilton this year. Hope to see you there!

  • How To Organize Your Content Through Navigation and Wayfinding – WordCamp Rochester 2019

    Thanks to WordCamp Rochester for having me back. Here are my slides for the session and I’d love to hear some feedback! Would you like to do a whole course on this? Would you like to learn other stuff from me? Please comment below or contact me.

  • Navigation and Wayfinding Workshop – WordCamp Ottawa 2019

    This was my third time running this workshop at WordCamp Ottawa. I always have fun with this and I know that I could run this every year, and I’d still fill a room full of inquisitive minds. This year was no different.

    Navigation and Wayfinding On Your Website – WordCamp Ottawa 2019 from Shanta Nathwani

    For our case study this year, we had the pleasure of using https://www.ridgemachinequilting.com, a company of Andrea Rennick, who, for those of you who don’t know, has been an amazing member of the WordPress community for years and has since retired to do quilting. It was an honour to help out Andrea and her husband Ron in this workshop. We’ll make sure to check up on them in a few months to see how they are progressing. I’m going to do my best to wrap some of the thoughts in a future post on this case, as well as catch up with Andrea and Ron.

    Remember if you signed up for one of the accounts on DragonTeach, they will expire at the end of August, but you can play around in that sandbox until then. You will receive a notification from DragonTeach before it expires asking if you’d like to download or transfer your site.

    Once again, a big thanks to Kiera Howe of Wiley Solutions for hosting these sandboxes for my courses. Her product, DragonTeach, helps instructors teach WordPress, including marking systems. Tell her I sent you! Full disclosure: I’m not making ANY money from this! She’s just a great friend and she has an awesome product. While she isn’t sponsoring WordCamp Ottawa this year, she is sponsoring WPCampus at the end of July.

    I’d love to hear any suggestions from this session. I’m working on my first online course, and if you’d like to know when it’s released, you can sign up for my mailing list here: I want to sign up for the online course notifications!

    If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me and thank you again for coming to my session!

  • 3 Pages in 30 Minutes – WordCamp Ottawa 2019

    Thank you to everyone who came out to my talk at WordCamp Ottawa this past weekend. Here are my slides from the presentation, and while there aren’t very many, I’ve linked the presentation I did at WordCamp Buffalo below, that will remind you of this talk very much. I’ll see if I can update with some of the questions that we had in our own session, since I did record the audio.

    Remember if you signed up for one of the accounts on DragonTeach, they will expire at the end of August, but you can play around in that sandbox until then. You will receive a notification from DragonTeach before it expires asking if you’d like to download or transfer your site.

    Once again, a big thanks to Kiera Howe of Wiley Solutions for hosting these sandboxes for my courses. Her product, DragonTeach, helps instructors teach WordPress, including marking systems. Tell her I sent you! Full disclosure: I’m not making ANY money from this! She’s just a great friend and she has an awesome product. While she wasn’t sponsoring WordCamp Ottawa this year, she is sponsoring WPCampus at the end of July.

    I’d love to hear any suggestions from this session. I’m working on my first online course, and if you’d like to know when it’s released, you can sign up for my mailing list here: I want to sign up for the online course notifications!

    If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me and thank you again for coming to my session! As always, you can sign up for my regular mailing list, through my contact form and let me know your thoughts!

    Here’s the video from WordCamp Buffalo for 3 Pages in 30 Minutes:

    UPDATE

    I wanted to address some of the questions I got on the feedback forms. There are plenty of sessions and resources out there about how to use the Gutenberg Block Editor. My session, was intended not to teach how to use the editor, but to expose people to what they needed at a bare minimum to get their site to a state and get it up and running. It was meant to show how quickly one can set it up, provided that you had the right tools lined up. It would have been a waste of time watching me download a plugin. Sure, I could tell you how long it takes, but it would take different amounts of time, and in most cases, the time is negligible.

    The session was supposed to show one perspective, using Gutenberg as the tool. If you wanted me to show you something like how to use Gutenberg, it could take me a whole day.

    Showing you how to use images and video, also could be a session all to itself. It was more important for me to show you the components that were necessary instead of showing you how to use each piece, since each person might have different needs and you can find that far more easily online, than one source of advice on what to use in the first place.

  • Speaking at WordCamp Ottawa 2019

    Chris and I pondering at WordCamp Buffalo 2019 – Photo Credit: Kiera Howe

    I’m not giving one talk. I’m not even giving a talk and a workshop. I’m going to be giving a talk, a workshop AND on a panel!

    If you’re planning on coming to one of my solo sessions, and you don’t have your own site, or you’d like to have one to play around on (a sandbox), you can sign up for one in one of my courses at DragonTeach.com, and select either Create a 3 Page Website in 30 Minutes (my talk on Saturday), How to Organize Your Content Through Navigation and Wayfinding, (the workshop on Sunday) or one of each! Please don’t take more than one each.

    A big thanks to Kiera Howe of Wiley Solutions for hosting these sandboxes for my courses. Her product, DragonTeach, helps instructors teach WordPress, including marking systems. Tell her I sent you! Full disclosure: I’m not making ANY money from this! She’s just a great friend and she has an awesome product. While she isn’t sponsoring WordCamp Ottawa this year, she is sponsoring WPCampus the following week.

    If you want to become the case study for the workshop, you can complete the form on this page.

    Don’t forget, tickets are still available for WordCamp Ottawa. Get yours now! If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Look forward to seeing you there!

  • CPT’s vs Gutenberg Templates at WordCamp Hamilton 2019

    Fantastic time this year as always! Some great discussion around this and continual learning. Here are my slides from today’s presentation. Looking forward to more discussions. As soon as I get the video, I’ll update it here.

    WordCamp Hamilton – CPT’s vs Gutenberg Templates from Shanta Nathwani