Ben Maden

A prospective client calls us wanting work – Yay! They get into complaining about their existing web developer. They’re a good dev, we know them. Where did it go wrong? Is the client crazy? This is a classic problem that happens the world over to web designers/developers. It causes us (and the clients) pain and stress.

Ben will talk about this common problem and address some questions such as:

• How can we get it right?
• Why do clients cause us pain?
• How bad can this pain get? (Including a confession or two from Ben).
• How can we take control of our lives?

Ben can teach you how to create a plan and compare our industries business model agains other professional services that handle client service relationships, instructions, variations and billing such as builders, lawyers, accountants and plumbers. There’s a lot we can learn from this!

At the end of Ben’s presentation you’ll leave with the following take aways:

• An action plan to solve your issues.
• You’ll make sure you’re never the designer or developer that clients whine about!
• Make sure you have your docs and contracts in order.
• You’ll learn how to reach out for help from your peers!

Ben Maden founded Matter Solutions in April 2000 and remains the lead web consultant today. While Matter Solutions originated in London, UK, the company took on Australian clients when Ben emigrated to Brisbane in November 2006.

Ben does lots of different things… roughly in order of frequency the tasks he performs include…

• Working with clients and prospective clients to plan projects.
• Communicating plans with team members and project managing progress.
• Coaching team members.
• Coding – Headphones on and coding funky (mostly back-end) stuff.
• SysAdmin – Keeping the infrastructure humming along.
• Blogging – Writing about stuff that happens and how to do things.

You can follow Ben on Twitter.

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Helena Denley

We just keep bringing you awesome speakers! So here’s another inspiring speaker, Helena Denley! Helena will be teaching you how to leverage your existing skills to create an online course.

Are you a freelancer who is at capacity with clients but aren’t earning the income you would like to be? Are you a freelancer looking to expand your reach beyond the one on one client work? If you answered ‘Yes’ to either or both of those questions then this is a must see talk for you!

Helena will help you plan your first online course by helping you with following tasks:

• Do you have a list? If not start building one now so you can survey your list to find out what they may want.
• Can your current skills, the ones you use in your freelance business with one-on-one clients, translate into an online course?
• Skills assessment.
• Target market – who are you be able to teach your skills to?
• Creating your course – delivered live or pre-recorded?
• Minimum viable product and iterate as you go or at each release.
• Fitting course creation amongst current work.
• Cut back on one-on-one work to make time to deliver the course.
• Specific launches or Evergreen course.

Helena’s presentation will leave you with the following key takeaways:

• Do you have skills that would convert well into an online course?
• There is never a good time to take a break from client work to create a course. Make a plan, set a date, make it happen!
• Options for creating course content.

In between un-schooling her 6 year old son, Helena is the co-owner of http://www.diywebsitecoach.com & http://thenewsolopreneur.com­ (with her husband Warren).  They help new solo business owners get started with their first website and learn how to manage the daily tasks involved with running a business online and being a solo entrepreneur.

You can follow Helena on Twitter.

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Peter Wilson

Once again we bring you another experienced developer who is also a very active speaker in the Melbourne web community. Peter Wilson has spoken at Web Directions Respond 2015, WordCamp Sydney 2014, WordPress Melbourne Meetups, Melbourne’s Be Responsive Meetup, SydCSS & MelbCSS Meetups and Web Directions WDYK Melbourne!

Peter will be teaching you how to get a page speed score in the 90s!

There’s no doubt about it, performance is becoming a more important part of day-to-day web development. Why?

Users hate waiting.

Users hate waiting at their desktop, they hate waiting on 3G. Users hate waiting for Open Sans when Arial is adequate. If users hate it, Google hates it; performance has become an important metric in PageRank; they’ve introduced a new tool – PageSpeed – to measure it.

Spend a few minutes learning how to increase the PageSpeed score of your WordPress powered site. Find out some of the rules you have to follow, and some of the rules you have to break to get there.

Peter Wilson has been a front end developer for almost two decades. After spending his early career working with tables and spacer gifs, Peter developed a love for CSS.

Peter has provided coding and web management services for a for some of the country’s largest and smallest businesses.

He currently spends his days working on enterprise grade contract management software.

You can follow him on Twitter.

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Lucy Bloomfield

We’ve got another fantastic speaker for you to add to the WordCamp Brisbane lineup. Lucy Bloomfield will be speaking about modern design. Lucy will cover processes and workflows that allow her to rapidly prototype on projects that has a team spread out across the planet. She’ll discuss the importance of sketching but also the importance of iterating quickly, scrapping bad ideas and jumping as quickly as possible into designing in the browser.

She’ll discuss the importance of building for the mobile device first, as well as what happens when you don’t (warning: it gets ugly) and Lucy will also discuss how to utilise data to improve designs.

The audience will hopefully walk away with a better idea about how to improve their prototype workflow, how to build and design things quickly as well as how to build for mobile first and to scale designs.

Lucy’s presentation will cover the following topics:

• Modern design is awesome (why’s, job examples)
• Sketching (it’s really important and why)
• Holding on to your designs (why it’s bad and how not to do it)
• In browser design (how, why you should and key tools)
• Mobile first (how, why you should and when it goes badly)
• Rapid prototyping (building things quickly, iterating for improvements)
• Data-centric design (how to do it and how cool it is)

Lucy is a UI/UX designer that got sick of doing the usual 9-5 in agencies and decided to go out on her own. Over the last year and a half, she’s set up a one (wo)man agency that handles a variety of different projects – anything from writing programming courses for London-based QA to leading the re-brand and re-structure of Boston-based startup, Security Innovation. Oh… and she’s only 22!

Currently Lucy is the lead designer on a team within Security Innovation for an application security product called TEAM Mentor. This product allows her the freedom and privilege of getting to try her hand at basically everything she could ever want – from iconography, digital strategy and programming to design, information architecture, user testing and product management.

She has a lot of experience designing in browser specifically, with a focus on mobile first. Much of her process revolves around coding and because of that, she’s had a lot to do with the way her designs are created, which is something many designers aren’t able to do.

You can follow Lucy on Twitter.

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Anthony Hortin

We’re happy to announce another speaker and another WooCommerce talk. I’m sure after your appetite has been whet about WooCommerce after Jen’s WooCommerce Case Study you’ll be have all sorts of ideas of products and services you can sell online with WooCommerce. Anthony will show you how you can build a membership site using WooCommerce!

Anthony’s presentation will show how you can create a membership site using WooTheme’s WooCommerce plugin. Although there are a number of membership specific plugins around, WooCommerce brings with it a number of benefits. First and foremost, WooCommerce is a trusted and well supported plugin, which is easy to setup and use. It’s currently estimated to be powering approximately 28% of all eCommerce sites. Other benefits include the number of available extensions, and in particular, payment gateways, which are ideally suited for membership sites. On top of that, if you want to sell products to your members, you automatically have the ability to do so, nice and easily. Anthony will outline the benefits of using WooCommerce, over dedicated membership plugins. He’ll also discuss which plugins (along with WooCommerce) would be required and how to go about setting them up.

During Anthony’s presentation he will covering the following areas:

• Benefits of using WooCommerce
• Benefits of WooCommerce over other popular membership plugins
• Plugins required (WooCommerce plus others)
• How to set up and configure the various plugins

Anthony runs a boutique design & development studio in the South-East suburbs of Melbourne. Maddison Designs works with a wide range of clients, from micro businesses through to large corporates, specialising in custom WordPress sites and WooCommerce stores.

Anthony has been developing for the web since the late 90’s. His love for WordPress was realised back in 2005 and he’s been happily using & coding for it ever since. He’s passionate about giving back to the WordPress community and has contributed to both the WordPress Theme and Plugin Directories and can be frequently found on the WordPress support forums.

Anthony is the author behind the highly popular Easy WP Guide an easy to read WordPress manual for end users and WordPress consultants.

Back in 2013, Anthony was a co-organiser for WordCamp Melbourne and each month he helps organise the WordPress Melbourne meetups.

You can follow Anthony on Twitter.

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Troy Dean

We’re very pleased to announce another speaker for WordCamp Brisbane 2015! You might know Troy Dean from his WP Elevation Podcast, if not you should definitely subscribe and catch up on the past episodes as Troy interviews both WordPress focused business owners as well as digital business entrepreneurs and thought leaders in the tech space.

Troy will walk you through a simple framework to help you build recurring revenue into your business so you can stop trading time for money.

Most WordPress-based businesses already have plenty of opportunities to create recurring revenue. During this presentation you will learn how to identify your recurring customers, how to package what they are already buying into a recurring revenue model and why recurring revenue really is the holy grail for you and your clients.

Troy Dean is co-founder of Video User Manuals and WP Elevation.

His past clients include QuickBooks, IBM, F1 Grand Prix, The Ashes, Westpac and Jessica Watson.
He is also host of the WP Elevation podcast which consistently ranks in the top 3 in iTunes for his category.
In his spare time he is a rock god in several bands.

Make sure you follow Troy Dean on Twitter.

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Jen Jeavons

We’re happy to announce yet another speaker to our lineup. Jen Jeavons from Pixel Palace will be giving a WooCommerce case study.

Coffee Beans Delivered is Pixel Palace’s very own eCommerce project. Conceived after years of building online stores for clients they thought it would be fun to put our money where our mouth is and try it for themselves. In the presentation they’ll cover the business concept, branding and design, SEO and WooCommerce set up plus tips and tricks they’ve learnt along the way and insights from a client/user perspective on running an online store that as developers you may not consider.

In our presentation Jen will cover:

• How they named the business for SEO purposes
• The business model
• The SEO techniques and results that have seen the site sit at #1 / #2 (under wikipedia) for “coffee beans” in Australia.
• Branding and site design aesthetic (which has seen it featured on numerous design blogs).
• WooCommerce plugins and extensions we’re using (including follow up emails, cart messages etc).

Jen Jeavons is the director of Brisbane based digital design studio – Pixel Palace. For more than a decade, Pixel Palace has been specialising in handcrafted custom online solutions. Jen heads up a small but crazy clever team from their Kelvin Grove office servicing a broad range of clients worldwide. Clients include well known local businesses such as Shingle Inn and reach as far as America with clients including high end LA fashion labels and celebrity stylist and Harpers Bazaar spokesperson Anita Patrickson. Pixel Palace specialises in custom WordPress sites and WooCommerce setups.

You can follow Jen on Twitter.

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Charlie Carter

We’re excited to announce another speaker for WordCamp Brisbane 2015! Charlie Carter will be talking about how to make WordPress accessible.

Following on from Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Charlies’ talk will discuss the many options that developers can do to improve accessibility within the WordPress platform. His presentation aims to offer practical insight and advice into making your WordPress more inclusive without the bloat.

Charlies’ talk will include the following topics:

• WordPress intro
• Making WordPress Accessible Initiative
• WordPress Accessibility plugins
• Tenon.io and Access Checker
• CAPTCHAs
• Colour contrast
• Captioning

Charlie is the Founder / Director at Webbism. A web accessibility consulting business that aims to make the web a more inclusive place. Charlie is the founder of the Brisbane Web Accessibility & Inclusive Design Meetup in Brisbane, Team Lead for Accessibility at the Emergency Wiki 2.0 and member of Universal Tux, a group that aims to enhance accessibility within Linus and FOSS (free and open source software). Charlie is a founding member at The Loft Project and lives on the Sunshine Coast.

You can follow Charlie Carter on Twitter.

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