 Mike now, yeah, okay perfect Well, I guess I could still say good morning. It's almost afternoon My name is Lisa been Margie, and I'll be talking to you about the topic of templates and well working with them Let's start this talk and basically The first thing that I would like to talk about is where to begin Many of us work with WordPress. Haha. We're at a WordPress conference but my My main point here is that I work with other platforms, and I'm a designer I don't think about the platform I work with I think about the client I'm working with and their clients so their end users and more often than not my work is to think about Getting the idea from one or more person's minds and organizing it into a concept. So My work is just basically organizing ideas into something that we could discuss. It could be a picture. It could be a diagram and Through that then we work towards a shared understanding of what we're going to actually be actually be creating So when I talk to clients, I'm the first person to talk to a client usually is What are we doing and why are we doing it and these two questions are really difficult for some clients to Answer Many times they answer what they suspect they need to do so And my job is to actually discuss with them Why they're doing it and then go on towards Thinking about why the the for example a site-readed design has been commissioned or Why they're what they're trying to accomplish with it and then the final and the big question is how are we going to accomplish this? now when we When I approach any problem, I kind of think of modular design and and to me that's a mindset. It's not a I would say it's not a way of working but a way of thinking and In so doing in the end what we basically are working towards when we're working with a WordPress project is to create a bunch of templates reusable elements repeatable elements and But before we get there we usually have to think about and figure out what exactly we are building and And to do this I tend to take what is now very renowned known way of do working content first approach and How I see this is that I analyze basically all the content that a let's say a current site has or the content that will be coming on to a into a service and When I think about this I think about it as basically delineating all the whole architecture and architecture is not usually a word that designers get to use but I use it a lot and It's because I work a lot with developers and I'm not the person who makes an idea and then doesn't get to see it through I work up very closely with developers and Basically for me when you think about content and you think about the text Images videos the tweets The quote that you're gonna get from a Facebook post so we're talking about content in a very functional manner you start thinking about the building blocks of what you're gonna be creating and Then you get to the how so I don't like to go to the how and say we need template x y and z Usually I like to think about what we're creating for quite a long time before we get to discussing the how and Finding patterns in the content is really The main my main work. I feel I'm looking for patterns. I'm discussing what the client is trying to do and then establishing these patterns into some sort of Modules elements and working from The bottom up so instead of always working from the top down and saying we have to have a marketing website Let's say I kind of forget about that and then I start looking at what exactly the person or the company or the client is Trying to communicate and how they're having a dialogue with their their clients. So the end user so here are some examples of projects where modularity in my opinion is essential and These are not the only projects that are around but these are quite a lot of projects where a modular Kind of way of thinking would be beneficial to everybody. So you hear the we need a new website I love that because it's kind of like what what does that mean actually? that's just a means to an end but we need a redesign of our current website and or our current service and that means that there is something existing and you have to really work at reorganizing things and then we are changing our brand and are looking to create a new Identity and this is probably one of the worst ones because then you're talking about People are really in limbo about their content. Usually at this point a client is trying to formulate Who they are as well as what they are and how they're going to do it But in my opinion the main problem here is the Finding that balance between being holistic so looking at things from a really big picture and staying in this high-level Concept and then delving into the details. So looking at that one little piece of user interface how we're going to Manifest let's say contact info and that can that is a really big challenge for me as a designer And I don't do this by myself the basic the biggest thing that I actually think about when I'm thinking about this balance of holistic versus details is that the solution really lies in designing for two interfaces and Basically the first one, which is the most typical one is the public-facing service So the user interface that we call user interface everybody calls that But for me what I have come over come to accept as a reality and Possibly sometimes the bane of my existence The admin user interface so this user interface is actually really important And it's basically what everybody who's a developer in this room is Creating and they're not creating always the end user Interface they're you creating an admin user interface that this administrator of the service can then input content and then Well, all of a sudden we have user user interface and This marriage for me is really important and I find that it's basically figuring out the dependencies As early as possible and figuring out your template structure and the repeatable nature of modules It comes when you work between these two so the public-facing service here really is what most designers think about they think about Navigation they think about What is let's say where is the Twitter feed going to be or? How can I get in a contact in? Form here, and we're not really many of us Not myself included anymore but many of us very interested in this side and this is a real big problem because the Architecture actually happens on this side and you have to think about you're also the person who's creating the content and inputting the content and So when we do this we actually design for all the all the users and not just this customer of this client and This is a real. This is a very big challenge. I find and I Was just going to go through this because I have a limited amount of time I wanted to take one example that I have found to be a very good example that shows how Something can Be something so simple can become so complex. It comes becomes complex every time I look at this So contact info within a service so WordPress is is pretty amazing in as an as as it's grown into a CMS and the Possibilities that are available to us to make dynamic content and looking up content and having one Specific database where we could put for example con contact info so you can create a template that lists all the contact details and this template can be reused multiple times and include a subset of contacts, let's say and Then you can go to the point where you're discussing But what happens when you notice that there might be a need to embed some of this contact information into let's say outside the traditional contact info page so you don't just have this one place you have business cards that you want to embed in other pages and They should be displayed differently in different cases So the modularity here is that the data is the same the content is the same But we're gonna completely blow it out of proportion and make the business cards on one page look like Fancy and have a picture a name and title and phone number But in other places we might even have a quote saying I'm like employee of the month or something so there's all kinds of different ways of displaying this information and my Biggest question nowadays is how will this affect the admin user interface because I work with those clients who will be inputting the content into this system and they have usually a disconnect between The actual end user interface and their admin user interface They don't usually understand how they are connected So for me as the person who's usually discussing things with the client and trying to open these issues up at as Early as possible. I have Discovered the pair work save the day I know it sounds really cheesy and simple and simplified But I kind of like to simplify things for myself and really what I've noticed is that Fleshing out ideas at an early stage and sharing between the designer and developer if we want to put ourselves into those categories Is essential and I have a disclaimer there if you are the designer and the developer in your team You are the one and the same I Suggest you go find someone to talk to because you cannot do this by yourself many times We assume we can do things but just having a sounding board somebody you can talk to it just changes things dramatically and you should spar with people and then Hold sanity checks and I have trademarked this now for myself I call them sanity checks because frequently I ask questions like wait, what if I do this or? What if I make this contact info kind of Something that would only show up in the mobile view of this template 9 p.m. Let's say because that's where we want people to call this person. So these ideas are to Get some idea of how things feel and work, but not to crush them and This is where the developer really shines and can really be a partner to The designer and not the other way around actually Always keep in mind how the public user interface translates to the admin user interface and vice versa And this is very very important because these are the moments when you kind of get the disconnect Now when I say work with a developer and designer I don't mean this so I'll give you a moment to read it. It's one of my favorite comics and these are the kinds of things that happen when you kind of expect somebody to have all the answers and Expect them and you don't do sanity checks This should have been done a long time ago. I I totally recommend you guys reading the blurb for this I'm finishing up on my time. So I'll just go forward so basically in the end pragmatism is what What I would suggest for any kind of modular design or modular project be transparent with your team and your client And that's one thing that I have noticed very often is the client is missing from the team Show your client the relationship between the end user interface and the admin user interface. Don't be afraid to actually expose this to them that there are relationships between the two and why or how something can be done and Last of all while not all problems can be solved at once nurturing Working practices that naturally uncover problems as early in the process as possible is really the way to go so That was my 12 and a half minutes. I went over time. Thank you