We’re excited to announce another group of speakers for WordCamp Brisbane 2017!

We’ve been impressed by the wide range of topics presented by our speakers and there’s none better to highlight it than this next group of speakers.

Harley Oliver

Hailing from Geelong, Harley is a web developer specialising in custom WordPress solutions.

He has been working in WordPress for a little over 5 years, starting off editing child themes to now building customised solutions from the ground up.

Presenting: The roller coaster journey of WordPress Development

A brief insight into how I started developing with WordPress, from editing child themes with next to no idea about what I was doing, covering all the way up to the way I develop with WordPress today.

Covering the pitfalls and ‘ah-ha’ moments that I’ve experienced learning about how WordPress works, and what resources I’ve used to learn more about WP development over the last 5 years. This includes build tools, IDEs and coding standards, learning that doing work without a local dev environment is a terrible idea and how the WordPress community can help immensely.

Also looking into the future for WordPress and how the REST API opens doors for more than just WordPress development, and what it means for current developers looking to up their skillset but aren’t sure where to start.

Geoff Powell

Geoff a web designer, photographer, and teacher from Noosa on the Sunshine Coast. He is one of the organisers of the Sunshine Coast WordPress meetup Group and spends his time, building and maintaining WordPress sites for small business, shooting and teaching photography, and learning how to be an online entrepreneur.

Presenting: Creating Online Courses with WordPress

In this talk, Geoff Powell will be talking about the rapidly growing world of e-learning and online courses, and the tools and approaches you can take using WordPress as the platform.

Kate Toon

Kate is the founder of The Clever Copywriting School and The Recipe for SEO Success eCourse, as well as co-host on the Hot Copy Podcast and presents the Write for Business show for the Dale Beaumont’s Business Blueprint channel.

She has worked with big brands such as eHarmony, Curash and Kmart. And she’s helped countless small businesses produce great content and improve their copywriting and SEO.

Presenting: How To Make Google Love Your WordPress Site

In this presentation, Kate will tell you the tips, techniques and tactics that she uses to help make sites 100% Google lovable, including:

• The impact of hosting and domain choice
• Integral set up steps that boost SEO friendliness
• My top 10 Plugins to improve SEO
• Easy peasy content formatting
• What to consider when offering on going SEO packages

Melanie Surplice

Melanie has gained more than 15 years international marketing and communications experience in the technology, media, publishing, health and wellness sectors; in global public companies, SMEs and start-ups, including Dow Jones, TechnologyOne and Endeavour College of Natural Health.

Melanie has been blogging since 2005, developing her own self-hosted WordPress sites for the last three years. Passionate about natural health and sparkly rocks, she is also a shamanic crystal healing and Reiki practitioner. In early 2016, she left full time corporate life to start her online crystal retailing and healing business, A Surplice of Spirit. Since then, she has built a thriving community of crystal lovers around Australia, and now has customers in Europe and the US.

Presenting: How I created my online business and a community of 20k crystal lovers with WooCommerce and Facebook

In this presentation, Melanie will discuss how she built her online retailing and healing business, A Surplice of Spirit, using the powerful combination of WordPress, WooCommerce and Facebook. Since its launch in January 2016, A Surplice of Spirit has grown from zero to thousands of dollars in sales each month, driven almost entirely by their Facebook page.

WordCamp Brisbane 2017 is expected to sell out, if you are hoping to attend we encourage you to get tickets as soon as possible.

Purchase tickets

We are pleased to present our next group of speakers for WordCamp Brisbane 2017.

We would like to extend a big thank you to everyone who submitted a speaker application. Applications have now closed. We were inundated with more than 70 applications and are currently still deciding on the last of the sessions to fill, such has been the high calibre of applications.

Without further adieu, here are our newest speakers to join us for WordCamp!

Dee Teal

Dee has been using WordPress for nearly 10 years, starting out as a blogger before moving into web development. She has recently joined Human Made as a project manager working with enterprise clients.

Dee is a WordCamp veteran, travelling all over the world from New Zealand to Austria.

Presenting: Project Management Principles to improve Life, Work, and your Mental Health

There are some great principles in Project Management that can be applied not only in the workplace for any scale of product/project development but in ordinary life to make delivery of the things you or need to do a much smoother process. This talk will deliver some easy to implement principles you can use in across the board facilitating more efficient, transparent, delivery of your ‘projects’, whatever they may be.

Vladimir Roudakov

Vladimir is technical lead, software developer and web educator. He also works on various web projects as well as contributing to education, testing and rapid prototyping research.

He is also heavily involved in the Drupal community, regularly presenting at meetups and has been an organiser of recent Drupal conferences.

Presenting: Testing any day: guide to end to end test driven WordPress projects

Do you get notified if some crucial functionality on your website was changed or broken? Is automated testing part of your daily routine or deployment process? If not, then you are risking of losing parts of your website or even entire project. Testing is no longer developers realm and everybody should get involved and get the benefits of test driven development.

Luke Carbis

Luke leads Product at XWP. He works with some of the world’s leading WordPress developers to innovate the future of publishing.

Presenting: WordPress Best Practices in 2017

WordPress development has changed quite a lot over the last few releases! The WordPress REST API prompted us to rethink the way we use AJAX in our themes and plugins. The Twenty Seventeen theme reminded us to take advantage of the latest Customiser updates. Improvements to the way WordPress handles language has had a big impact on the way we implement internationalisation. This talk will look at these examples, and propose some updated Best Practices for the modern WordPress developer.

Mel Kettle

Mel Kettle is a communication and social media expert, speaker, author, trainer and mentor. She works closely with CEOs, thought leaders, associations and businesses to help them communicate effectively and authentically so they attract, retain and engage their customers and clients.

Mel has over 20 years’ professional experience, a Master of Business (Marketing), a Master of Public Health, and she is a past Board member of the International Association of Business Communicators (Queensland) and The Queensland Choir.

Presenting: Creating compelling content that cuts through the clutter

With the average attention span shorter than that of a goldfish, it’s important we know how to cut through the cluttered social media space of today. Mel will show you how to create compelling and useful social media content that cuts through in a crowded market.

Tickets are flying out the door, make sure you get yours before it’s too late if you want to see these outstanding speakers and more.

Purchase tickets