Like everything else this year, our annual conference is going online. It’s open to both users and developers in 2020, and it’s free to attend.
Mark your calendars
We’ll be hosting this year’s conference completely online in a series of sessions over two days. All sessions will be presented live; institutions that register will have access to recordings of most sessions for viewing later.
December 8 and 9, 2020
1pm - 5pm Eastern
10am - 2pm Pacific
Attendance is free
In an effort to make our conference accessible to as many of our customers as possible, we’re offering this year’s conference free of charge.
Yep, the conference itself is totally free for attendees. For those that want a little more, we have an optional LiveWhale Community Package, which includes our annual conference t-shirt, access to our private Slack channel, and some other goodies. And if you’d like to be able to view recordings of the sessions after the conference, we offer that access with an institutional registration.
In any case, please register to let us know you’re coming!
What we’ll cover
Topics this year will be applicable to both LiveWhale Calendar and LiveWhale CMS clients. Please join us for one or all of these sessions: you’ll learn from us, and we’ll learn from you.
Day One (Tuesday, December 8)
Jason and Tonya will facilitate a general introduction and conversation, to get everyone acquainted (or reacquainted) and prepare for what’s to come.
Who should attend? Everyone!
We’re a design firm as well as a CMS company, and we want our products to be the most design-friendly available. There are great tools for theming in both CMS and Calendar that will help bring to life anything you can dream up.
Who should attend?Designers, developers, communications teams, content managers, and anyone who likes looking at great webpages
USER TRACK
We’ll start with a refresher on events editing and best-practices in LiveWhale, and then open it up to your questions about being a super calendar manager.
Led by: Jason and Karl
DEVELOPER TRACK
Learn more about customizing the LiveWhale back-end to fit your needs, as well as other software integrations and the LiveWhale API.
Led by Naomi and Alex
Every year we add exciting new stuff to LiveWhale; this session is our chance to tell you all about it. We’ll walk through many important features of the new version, that you should know about before you take on your next big website project.
Who should attend?There’s something new in LiveWhale for almost everyone.
Day Two (Wednesday, December 9)
We’ll walk through some new accessibility-related features in LiveWhale, and have an open forum to discuss your own experiences with making your sites and content accessible. We’ll also talk about measuring success— the tools that you use, that we use, and that the Office of Civil Rights uses to determine whether sites are accessible.
Who should attend? Anyone who’s concerned about making their sites more accessible.
USER TRACK
The pandemic has fundamentally changed human life (even for those of us who did a lot of Zoom conferences before 2020). It affects the higher ed web, and how schools use it to communicate, in lots of ways. We’ll show you some work we’ve done (including new features in LiveWhale Calendar for online events) —and talk about how LiveWhale can help you meet the challenges of the moment.
Led by: Jason
How can you use words and pictures to make your news and events irresistible to visitors? This session focuses on clear communication and attention-grabbing headlines that will benefit any content editor.
We’ll be going over best practices around image choice, headline and event titles, summaries, and captions—and overcoming common challenges.
Led by: Tonya and Sacha
DEVELOPER TRACK
Stay up to date with the latest tips from the LiveWhale developers. You’ll learn all the shortcuts we use on a daily basis that make working with LiveWhale(evenmore of) a breeze.
Led by: Naomi
Widgets are the connecting links between the content you manage with LiveWhale and the pages of your website. There are hundreds of ways widgets are used across the LiveWhale and LiveWhale Calendar ecosystems.
This year there’s a new tool in the toolbox. Widget templates will let you create a single file that contains master settings for important widgets used on the sites. They make updating several widgets at once— or updating your site with a new design— a breeze.
Led by: Naomi and Karl
Jason and Tonya will close our conference with a discussion of what we covered, a question and answer session, and some thoughts about where LiveWhale’s headed.
Who should attend?Everyone!
Costs and Registration Links
Individuals
Conference pass: Free (requires registration)
LiveWhale Community Package:
Includes T-shirt, access to our private Slack channel, and a few other surprises. $30 per person
Colleges and universities that register for LiveWhale 2020 as an institution receive access to recordings of conference sessions for viewing later. (Open discussions will not be included in archived recordings, so that attendees will have the opportunity to speak more openly.)
Institutional registrations are $300 and include unlimited individual conference passes and five LiveWhale Community Packages, and access to our private Slack channel.
And now for something we’ve never done before in the nine year history of the LiveWhale Developers Conference: we’re revealing this year’s T-shirt design!
It features flying whales, crashing white ocean waves, a laptop screen— you know, everything one needs for an exciting weekend. All on a single shirt! (And we’re printing it on a nice soft tri-blend shirt that’s extremely comfortable and wearable.) Everyone who signs up for the Community Package gets one.
