Speaker Spotlight: Shanta Nathwani

Shanta R. Nathwani is a Web Design and Information Architecture Consultant as well as an Instructor in Web Design and CCIT Capstone at Sheridan College, located in Oakville, Ontario, Canada which includes teaching WordPress. The ICCIT program is a joint program with the University of Toronto at Mississauga. She teaches students and small businesses how to use their websites and social media to increase their online presence leading to increased revenues and improved customer service. She has assisted companies to incorporate social media in the real estate, financial, non-profit, education and technical fields to name a few. She is from Toronto, Ontario, but now lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Follow @ShantaDotCa on Twitter.

Shanta will be giving a talk titled “Posts vs. Pages & Categories vs. Tags“.


What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

Implementing Theme Customizations. Makes it so much easier to make small changes to your themes without learning how to code.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I missed the deadline last year and wasn’t going to miss another. Been years since I’ve been to Montreal and miss the city.

What is your talk going to be about?

Content Architecture helps find the focus of your website as well as how to lead visitors through your website to find what they seek.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

A starting point for organizing your content. It may not solve everything, but this will help you to narrow down what should be on your site and what shouldn’t. This is a spiritual journey in many cases and you won’t solve it in one sitting. This stuff takes time. You’ll walk away with a lot of post-it notes!

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

Al Davis inspired me to do my WordCamp Tour last year and this year. Now I’m crowdfunding my way across the continent! The other person that I really enjoy seeing is Mendel Kurland. He’s easy going and is supportive of everyone in the community, no matter who they are.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

I would love to have WordPress be capable of becoming a full-blown LMS for academics, not just single students here and there. Long shot I know, but not impossible for WordPress.