 Hello everyone. Welcome to another session of the art fair presentations we've got. We've had some great ones so far and we're now talking with Rachel Wynne Winchester here with me and as pilot as well. So we're so glad to have you on with us Rachel and loved your art piece at Reclaim Open and also fun fact too you were a volunteer throughout the Reclaim Open as well in our presentation rooms so that was super helpful and we are so glad that you were able to join us there as well. Yeah thanks. Thanks for letting me participate. Thanks for filling the event and thanks for letting me have this art piece in the fair. It's a really interesting concept too so I appreciate everything. Yeah absolutely. So if you just want to tell us a little bit about yourself and how you found out about Reclaim Open and what kind of sparked this idea for your presentation. Okay yeah so my name is Rachel Winchester. My nickname is Wynne because Rachel is a pretty common name. There's I'm currently working on two different projects with other designers named Rachel so just giving you a reason for why this is a helpful nickname but I've been a product designer for about four going on four years now. I took a boot camp right before the pandemic but before that I worked at art museums. I worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a couple other local art museums and galleries and my degree actually is in art history. I have a bachelor's in art history from Swarthmore so I've kind of enjoyed you know the past four years as a product designer figuring out how like my you know past history and my studies in art history has kind of blended into my work as a product designer. I really got started this way because well I had an idea for an arts website and a friend of mine told me to go with WordPress so this was right after college I started building websites as a hobby about maybe three arts websites and then at a certain point it looked like a better career for me doing websites and web design and coming up with website ideas and things like that. Still getting related saying related to things related to the arts but now getting very involved in WordPress. Now I am also the organizer for the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup Group so we are every Thursday at 7 Eastern time so join us virtually and I'm also helping to organize WordCamp US this year which is in National Harbor in August so yeah I discovered reclaim hosting and reclaim open. I guess just you know browsing through all of my interests in art and the internet online I was I think I was reviewing one of my past presentations in about internet art and just kind of looking to see what Olia Lealina was up to so I went to her website or maybe it was her twitter page but I saw that she had a keynote scheduled with reclaim reclaim open so that's how I found the event. I saw that you guys had a call for speakers and a call for art going on so I submitted something for that and I also you know just being active in the WordPress community which is an open source community I've really valued volunteering I enjoy it it's fulfilling I like giving my time but it also as a solo you know business person as a contractor it helps me network more easily and put my work out there so people know what to come to me for so I emailed you guys saying like hey I do this for the WordPress community maybe I can do something similar at Reclaim Open and I'm happy that you guys let me do that so I got to meet you guys I got to meet the rest of the team and the rest of the speakers which is awesome and my mom joined me too on the last day especially and I didn't get to meet Olia Lealina yet but she is scheduled for some future events with you guys and I mean I'm a fan so I will continue to follow her work absolutely some other internet artists and I even met a couple internet artists at at Reclaim Open so I'm gonna follow them as well yeah that's super cool yes Olia has her keynote scheduled with us for July 17th and from the teachers we've received from Jim about the keynote he helped produce that with her for the for the recording it is super cool and everybody should be here to check that out so we are excited for that awesome well cool we're so glad you found Reclaim Open through Olia's talk also Swarthmore is a domain of one's own school for us as well Swarthmore I should know how to say that I know how to say that too yeah it's all good so that's really cool too to see that you're an alum of the school so awesome so tell us a little bit about your slide deck death to slide deck in general I'm just going to scroll through as you kind of talk about it I think the design is super cool oh you need that gorgeous layout thank you um yeah the skulls I think the skull and crossbones definitely helped with the impact not to mention just an impactful title death to slide decks I listened to a lot of heavy metal so I think I think that's where the inspiration came from I can't say specifically who maybe like an album cover or something but that's that's kind of where that inspiration came from yeah um but yes this is death to slide decks this is maybe my third or fourth uh web page presentation that I've made and the second one that's on my domain so I yeah I've made a couple of web page presentations for other projects and and for clients and I just kind of learned that this format is so useful in in different cases different use cases but just for so many different reasons and and thinking about it a little bit more deeply thinking about art history especially and and visual culture I really wanted to make a very comprehensive presentation on why these make sense now going into the history like we've been using slide decks since 1600 which I mean there's so much newer technology now um we have better transitions and more lifelike imagery more compelling ways of presenting content and interacting with content hence web page presentations so yeah I wanted to put this together number one it was really fun to put it together I built this with Elementor and I've been using Elementor since yeah since I graduated college so it's I'm kind of fluent with the tool so it was it was kind of just fun making this enormous web page it's very very long web page um and then number two it was fun to you know do what I do which is um give presentations and and be a public speaker but also do you know be a product designer and make web page WordPress websites I was gonna just say that this is super impressive I've tried to do things with Elementor and yes you are so powerful that's incredible it's a fun tool it's a fun tool Elementor has I'm happy that that um Gutenberg and some other um you know drag and drop editors are learning from Elementor and and how user-friendly it is um everyone at who asked me like why am I still using Elementor when am I going to stop using Elementor because in the WordPress world like the Gutenberg editor is now native you have the no-code drag and drop tool right out of the box um so when am I going to switch over and then there's also the question that um uh what's his name um Brian uh the other speaker at the conference brought up with hacks the WordPress killer like there are some other solutions out there that might gain traction um as better alternatives to Elementor and or WordPress so um I I love the tool but I also like what the tool is teaching me as a visual designer a web designer um and and yeah I guess I could I would recommend it but I would also say um there's a lot of tools out there to think about I um used Elementor recently for a non-profit website that I've been building outside of outside of Reclaim and I love the tool but I've also spent several hours trying to troubleshoot things but it's a good learning experience in general um so this is all super cool I'm I'm going to scroll back up because I love this piece with the video and as you drag your mouse the monitor moves with you um that is super cool yeah it's um that is the beautiful city of Philadelphia or have you guys had a art fair at previous previous Reclaim opens we did we um ran um it's Ben won um in the physical spaces that we ran in domains 17 was our first one um so we kind of had that idea um off of off of that one into domains 19 um we were in Raleigh um Raleigh Durham area for the domains 19 conference and in person um we introduced the art piece itself um art fair itself so that other schools could bring in their um similar projects that they've been working on to showcase throughout um the the school year or anything like that outside of the presentations that were shown so a good portion of the time um schools would have like a student project they'd bring in to talk through um and Mary Washington in particular brought some students with them and um St. Norbert College was another good one they brought some some of their student tutors to talk through some projects um so that was super cool um on that side so I'm awesome okay we're gonna pause for a second pilot are you good yeah I'm sorry about that my computer crashed no that's okay no worries you're hopefully good for now okay um so I I'll just cut um this piece out I got your message yeah as well so we should be good um yeah yeah okay so I finished scrolling through okay all right I'm gonna pick it back up with um yeah questions okay all right so we've looked through the site Rachel and I am really curious to see if you had any specific um challenges within building this page or anything that like stood out to you in particular that was really fun to create yeah so I realized obviously the page was very very long and it had a lot of media on it there's um I mean I haven't counted the number of images but there's also I think one video and a handful of gifts um so yeah I realized that like you know I was actually working with Elementor pretty well within my site on my host and and um yeah I guess I'm happy that I have a static website um and I kind of got through that uh tech I guess it wasn't a tech barrier I I'm um uh I moved my website to static I think just last year and I've definitely noticed a lot of difference um editing the site using Elementor and letting the site load on the front end especially something like this I I feel like on my previous host uh with you know a typical dynamic site um either the page wouldn't load completely or some of the photos wouldn't or it would take forever then I'd have to look into different caching plugins and different ways of um adding the media to the page which could affect how other browsers download the page so um yes I was I was thinking that one of the things that's super impressive is that you have this Elementor can be a very heavy plugin but the way that you've set things up you have this really quite large involved complicated page that has lots of different blocks and lots of different sections and lots of content and images like you said but it's so fast it's really fast it's your system is very cool because it totally bypasses one of the biggest troubles I've had working with Elementor which is that the more complex a page you make the longer it takes to load yeah yeah I'm very happy that I discovered static sites I think I mentioned um actually I don't think I mentioned in my in my uh intro that I did work at a hosting company last year and that was I mean first of all working for them as a designer with just an art history degree it was really like you know going headfirst into the deep end so I learned a lot of technical stuff very quickly um and I mean I didn't learn everything obviously um but I'm very happy that I that I was was able to figure that out um now there's I mean it's been a year it was kind of trendy before but now it's trending even more and I think there's there's kind of a lot of arguments for you know in favor of static websites especially thinking about you know the future of the web and the just the energy it takes to build or really to view to have a have visitors for an Elementor builds dynamic WordPress site and all that so it's definitely helpful you know to everyone listening like look into static if you haven't yet um there's I just know that I was gonna say that I know at least two people who since the conference um who've said oh I'm going to I think I'm gonna flip my website from WordPress to a static site or who've already done so I think Kathleen Fitzpatrick did that recently I was just gonna say that too I was reading her blog um she just posted um about 11 t um that um site and she mentioned in her blog post that um she was shifting her main domain to a Jekyll site um through github and so that was pretty cool to look through um which I think is like I I barely like have scratched the cert like barely have scratched the surface with um 11 t so that's kind of interesting um and now two people have blogged about it in the reclaim sphere um from here so I'm definitely interested to see what um static sites can do I think that that's something that I've seen within reclaims customer base too that they've shifted away from that um away away from um sites like WordPress or something um so there's there's definitely something to be said about both and their specific tools um so it's really interesting to see like how many actually like languages or programs you can yeah setting a trend but you can like also build your site with too which is really interesting yeah yeah I mean it's still I should mention it still takes a while for the editor to load especially in the web page like this it still takes forever for the web page to load inside the editor when I'm editing it but you know once it's once it's loaded it's loaded but still on the front end for my visitors that's kind of where um where the impact really is um but um what was I going to mention yeah Elementor has a whole bunch more use cases I'm currently using it to build just a prototype so it's only it's going to stay on a static static environment no domain or anything but um just having that kind of ability to customize so much on the front end um and and then still building it I don't know if I'll put this on a static or a dynamic site but um yeah Elementor has a lot more uses that I'm discovering absolutely cool any other follow-up thoughts or any additional comments um because this has been awesome so I just want to give everybody a chance to add their resources into discord too we'll post a lot of these as well and I'll even grab um Kathleen's blog post for y'all um because that would be really cool I was going to ask um about specific projects that you're considering for the future and maybe what not showing not necessarily showing us like what you've made but just talking through sort of a sneak peek of what you're interested in mm-hmm um well let me think this is going to air in in five days so let's see I mean I have a project I mean there isn't a huge reveal scheduled yet um and it's not like a huge secret but um yeah this summer I have an intern um from Swarthmore he's working with me for a 40 hour project which you know just one work week technically um but we he's helping me build a parody website where we kind of uh poke fun at university not just universities but I guess um places that give out certificates and general uh authorizing institutions within education uh so essentially everyone can learn anything on YouTube now and post COVID we know everyone can learn anything online so this site is uh gonna be a pretty involved ongoing project that I might I think I'll kick off in the next couple weeks um so look out for that um and yeah that'll be built with Elementor and yeah I don't see why it can't be static so it'll probably be a static site as well um so that's just a fun one yeah make sure to share it in the discord I'm gonna want to see that yes I definitely will um and then aside from that I have this prototype uh that I'm building for a startup a non-profit startup um so that's that's fun just kind of cool to think of you know just building a prototype with that's all that people don't normally build prototypes with or you know I'm curious how many Elementor users um have used it in this way um and then aside from that I think just another site mock-up and wireframe stuff like that normal product design stuff yeah that's super cool um awesome well thank you so much Rachel for joining us for a little bit to talk about your slide decks our debt to slide deck presentation super cool and we really appreciate um taking the time to um talk about it and we'll keep chatting in discord for the other Rest of Reclaim open online and we will talk soon yeah thank you so much when this is freaking really cool yeah thanks again thanks for having such a cool event I love the the combination of like just really important themes you know the history of the web the future of it the technology that supports it and how to keep it open and keep everyone involved and and engaged and connected and online because you know as so many people had mentioned during the conference like it's about people and it's about it's about how we live our lives and and all that so um I love how the conference just kind of came together to reinforce that point um and I look forward to to next year and and uh the rest of the virtual event and I guess everything else you guys put on I'm sure you guys anything else you guys do I'm sure I'll love yeah sounds thank you awesome yeah cool all right well let's keep watching in discord and catch the next session when we can see you soon see you see you