Meagan Hanes is the Technical Project Manager for Maintainn at WebDevStudios. She is responsible for managing ongoing development across a wide range of projects and ensuring Maintainn clients receive top-quality support and communication. Her experience in relating client needs and developer technicalities in order to produce elegant solutions has been valued by clients and partners alike throughout her 15+ year career.
She has been on the WordCamp Ottawa organizing team since 2014 and was Lead Organizer for the 2016 and 2017 events. You can often find her volunteering, speaking at or mentoring a WordCamp across Canada and the United States. Some of her talks are available to watch online. She has taught and volunteered with Canada Learning Code, as well as providing private WordPress instruction and instructor support.
When not on a computer, Meagan enjoys a variety of visual artistic crafts, including painting and embroidery, and is on an eternal quest to complete her Pokedex. Meagan resides in her hometown of Ottawa, Canada.
Meagan will be speaking at 10:00am on Saturday, July 13th in the Manotick room. Her talk is entitled, Update Smart: Using a Staging Site!
Performing theme, plugin and core updates on your site can be intimidating and overwhelming, especially for older and more complex sites with many interconnected plugins – WooCommerce, I’m looking at you!
The solution is simple: use a staging site – a private copy of your site where you can safely test updates and resolve problems before your users ever experience an issue.
I’ll guide you across a number of ways to create a staging site depending on your specific needs, performing these updates, and then applying these updates to your main site. You’ll leave with a concrete plan for how to set up your own staging site, and will fear the update process far less!