This is it, the last of our super speakers for WordCamp Brisbane 2017!

With only a couple of days until WordCamp and tickets well and truly sold out, it’s our pleasure to wrap up our speaker announcements with the final three speakers to be gracing us with their presence this weekend.

Peter Shilling

Peter is a partner at The DMA, a Sydney based WordPress agency, while a developer at heart he spends more time in the business development and project strategy areas these days.

Peter was an organiser for WordCamp Sydney in 2016 & 2014 and helps organise the Sydney WordPress meetups.

Presenting: Domain Names & DNS

Everything…you didn’t know or potentially thought you knew,  but in fact you don’t really know and should.

Domain Names and the Domain Name System are some of the key building blocks that keep the internet running. Come and learn a little more about how it all works.

In this session you’ll learn about:

• the industry that keeps your domains up and running
• who regulates domain names, where to get help
• new GTLD domains like .sydney and .shop
• the basics of DNS
• Understanding how DNS can help you make a website move much easier

Michael Visser

Michael is a WordPress Plugin developer specialising in e-Commerce (that means 99% WooCommerce), his free and pro plugins have clocked 825,000+ downloads and he’s adopted an abandoned Plugin from w.org which continues to power 40,000+ stores likely without store owners even realising…

Michael has worked alongside leading e-Commerce Plugin developers and has a past in retail technology solutions. He presented at WordCamp Denmark and volunteered at WordCamp Europe in 2016, since moving back to Brisbane in February he’s attended several WordPress Brisbane Meetups and this month started the WooCommerce Brisbane Meetup. Come say hi!

Presenting: Extending WordPress and WooCommerce core

Join Michael as he shares his favourite practical WordPress and WooCommerce code snippets that can be applied to WordPress sites. Session content is aimed at WordPress site integrators and WooCommerce store owners but there’s content that new WooCommerce store owners may want to jot down for future reference. We will cover as much content as possible before switching to Q&A format.

Noel Tock

Noel is a Swiss digital nomad that loves creating products online. His typical day to day consists of WordPress, Front-End Design and Product Management. Above all, he’s also one of the three partners at Human Made, a WordPress.com VIP Partner where he oversees products like Happytables, Nomadbase and startup partnerships such as United Influencers.

Presenting: Product-Driven Websites: Achieving Results from Day One

How do you design and make decisions for the WordPress websites you build? As competition increases, the process through which websites are produced will become increasingly important. In his talk, Noel will tackle this challenge from a product-focused approach – to help you build more successful websites, quicker.

As WordCamp approaches (Can you believe it? In 3 weeks time we’ll be writing a Thanks for Coming! post!) we’re finalising locking down Shirt orders, Catering, and other Swag. If you’ve not yet got a ticket, now would be a good time to nab one of the remaining 0 tickets!
So without further adieu, here’s another 4 great presentations we’re all looking forward to!

Myles Agnew

Myles Agnew is a practicing defensive cyber security advisor to QLD Government. Previous clients include NSW Government, and several multinational companies.
He is a member of Australian Information Security Association (AISA) Leading body for information and cyber security professionals with over 9 years experience in the Information Security industry.
Passionate WordPress user since 2006.

Presenting: Cyber Security the Journey down the rabbit hole
Join Myles on his Cyber security journey of his past failures and how he has grown in to practical cyber security to reduce the fears in your client and stakeholders when making the move or starting out with WordPress.

This is live interactive presentation using a mobile phone voting platform to guide the presentation to answer the big questions and solve the big problems around securing WordPress and Cyber Security in general.

Rheinard Korf

At the age of twelve Rheinard discovered a love for programming languages and writing software for friends and family. Whilst studying Information Technology Rheinard also discovered a love for teaching programming and has done so for over a decade before turning to programming as a career.

After working with other platforms such as Drupal and Moodle, Rheinard decided to settle on WordPress in 2014; developing plugins as products and for client projects. More recently Rheinard has fallen in love with API design and development, within the WordPress space as well as other frameworks and languages.

Presenting: Finding REST: When machines talk to each other
Designing APIs for machines can be exciting and challenging. In this talk we will be exploring what it has been like to build a service for machine clients using the WordPress REST API.

Topics that we will touch on include: custom endpoints vs. content endpoints; authentication; documenting your API with an API Definition Language; non-WordPress machine clients; and of course the challenges and opportunities we faced building an API with WordPress.

Paula Glynn & Melinda Samson

Paula is the search specialist at PixelStorm, a web development agency specializing in conversion focused websites. A true data nerd, paula will find ways to use data to improve any digital outcome, from PPC to website UX and conversion rates!

Melinda is the founder and co-owner of Click-Winning Content and is a Premier Google Partner with over ten years of AdWords experience. She provides consulting, training and management services to help Australian business owners maximise their investment in Google AdWords & use their Google Analytics data to improve their business performance.

Presenting: Google Analytics: Your secret weapon for conversion focused websites

In this talk, Paula and Mel will demonstrate the power of Google Analytics to win clients, and help you add value to your website projects, including:

• How to produce reports that you can give to clients
• The importance of conversion tracking & how to setup
• Lighting “How to” guide for Google Tag Manager
• Using Google Analytics data in web pitches
• Using Google Analytics to influence web design & development

Sarah Brown

Sarah Brown is a freelance web designer and developer specialising in custom WordPress websites for business and organisations, providing services to clients across Australia, supported by a network of creative freelancers in the co-working community.

Sarah is most passionate about the internet’s ability to connect people online so that they may forge even stronger connections offline. She is dedicated to helping people get their ideas of the ground and helping businesses grow through a beautiful blend of marketing and technology. Alongside her freelance career, she is also an aspiring tech communicator, and has run sessions at local co-working spaces aimed at helping small businesses better understand their needs for the web.

Presenting: User-Centered Design – front and back – with WordPress
As WordPress developers, we should aim for a true user-first strategy to design and develop customised WordPress Installations, and not fall back on ‘premium’ themes, page builders, and one-size-fits-all approaches. So many times I have taken over WordPress websites that look like the original ‘developer’ just chucked the business description into a theme marketplace and bought the first theme on the list (cafe/gym/photographer etc). While this sort of thing can be great for a small business DIYers, it should not be too pervasive in the world of professional service providers.

Sarah will explore all of what she’s seen and show how we can design for what the end-user needs and how to setup the WordPress dashboard in a way which allows your client to manage their website easily using tools such as Advanced Custom Fields and theme frameworks such Genesis.

Purchase one of the remaining 0 tickets!

With less than 3 weeks to go till WordCamp Brisbane tickets are selling fast, and it is hardly surprising with awesome speakers like this presenting for us.

Kristen Symonds

Kristen Symonds, aka kristarella, works as a Happiness Engineer for Automattic. She is a WordPress fanatic with a love for photography, craft, SciFi and Fantasy, board games, and more.

Kristen is married to Dave and has two pet rabbits named Monty and Zoë.

Presenting: How to build a website in 20 minutes
There is so much available for WordPress, how can you find what you need?

I will explain some common gotchas and give some tips on finding and testing themes and plugins.

Cath Hughes

Cath Hughes runs Phase Creative, a Sydney-based web agency specialising in bespoke WordPress sites. Most recently, she’s launched a bouncing baby web service – Live By 5 – which combines her expert WordPress skills with training DIY’ers and gets clients WordPress websites live – in a day.

She’s also a passionate member of the WordPress and freelance community, a WordPress tutor and a coach with WP Elevation.

Presenting: How To Deliver A WordPress Website To A Client
Over the time I’ve been building and teaching people how to use WordPress websites, I’ve encountered dozens of sites that needed resuscitating. So I thought it was a good time to talk about how to deliver a WordPress website to your client, the RIGHT way. In this talk I’m going to discuss WordPress, plugin licences, your responsibilities, your clients responsibilities, what files to handover, maintenance and support and how to ensure your clients sites don’t end up in the WordPress ER 6 months after you deliver them.

Warren Denley

I love WordPress and I’m passionate about teaching solo-entrepreneurs how to leverage its power and simplicity to build, manage and promote their own business websites.

Apart from WordPress, I love spending time with my wife and young son, spending time in the sun and a good coffee.
Presenting: Better Put An “S” On It
The Why, What and How of implementing SSL on your site.

This talk will look at:
* The importance of moving your site from HTTP to HTTPS
* Various types of SSL certificates available, and which is best for you
* How to install the certificate and force your site to HTTPS
* Problems that may occur, and how to resolve them

By the end of the talk, attendees will know how to get the lovely green bar to show up in the browser for their site, giving their visitors confidence to interact more with the site.

Steven Cooper

Sniip CTO. Payments Evangelist. Aust Web Industry committee member. LocalhostAU Brisbane Lead. Remarkable mentor. The New Garde Mentor. International Speaker/MC/Hackathon Mentor/Judge. Prev XeroDev PayPalDev

I’ve always had a passion for all things tech and pushing it to its limits. I love keeping up with the latest tech trends. Love the stage/presenting and sharing of ideas and knowledge.

Presenting: Build a WordPress ready server in 20 mins or less for free
In this talk we are going to cover everything you need to know to build a multisite WordPress ready LEMP stack thats got enough grunt to handle over 4 million hits a day. We will look at how to connect, configure and get up and running an entire website from create instance to hello world and to s3 and beyond.

Complete with self renewing SSL (Via letsencrypt) and automated repo backups this is the one of the most internet battle hardened and user ready stacks around that will get your project up and running before you can say “apt-get update”.

Also we will look at some of the latest monitoring options to track performance and load plus downtime tracking.

Have you got your ticket for WordCamp Brisbane yet, if not, why not, with a line up of amazing speakers and all the swag and fun you get for the low price of $50 you will kick yourself if you miss out.

Get your ticket here before it’s too late!

We have an fantastic line up of amazing and talented speakers presenting at WordCamp Brisbane this year, so here are some more to whet your appetite!

Nik Cree

Nik is a Gold Coast / Brisbane based WordPress web developer specialising in Digital Strategy for SME’s using WordPress & a variety of online marketing tools, he uses WordPress & the StudioPress Genesis Framework to create effective high performing web solutions.

He enjoys working to grow businesses online with the tools available and is an avid online explorer.

Presenting: How To Create Full Website Content Easily And Effortlessly in 7 Days

Whether for your own website or as a developer for client websites, writing content is often akin to pulling teeth without anesthetic, using pliers and a hammer.

The 3 step process we have developed and now use for our own projects and with clients, makes content generation a breeze (and enjoyable – just like having a conversation with a bestie over a couple of glasses, which is in fact, how we actually do it). In this presentation we’ll talk about the process and templates you can use to create compelling content that converts with less effort.

Robey Lawrence

Robey has worked in IT for 5 years, straight out of High School. Then decided to pivot to web design when he discovered WordPress in 2013. He moved to the Gold Coast in 2014 where he started attending the WordPress Meetups, and that’s where his networking and learning exploded and he’s been hooked (no pun intended) ever since.

The community around the WordPress platform has been such an encouragement for him over the last few years, having grown and learnt so much from the generosity and time of others.

Presenting: Just Do It!

Basically a story about how opportunities can open themselves up to you when you make the decision to overcome your fears and anxieties and ‘Just Do It!’

Starting from the beginning of how he got into the WordPress centred career he’s in today, by punching his fears in the face and putting himself out there.

Bronson Quick

When Bronson isn’t collecting and playing vinyl or some of his many guitars, he’s coding WordPress goodness with the wonderful team at Human Made! He has a passion for APIs, WordPress integrations, and building WordPress sites that scale. Bronson also maintains Chassis, a lightweight WordPress + Vagrant + Puppet development environment.

Presenting: How To Setup A Consistent Development Environment Across Your Team On A Per Project Basis
One of most important things for a team of developers is having a development environment that matches or closely matches the production environment.

Bronson will teach you how to use Chassis and it’s suite of extensions to create a development environment which can be used be everyone on your team so you don’t end up with different developers with different local environments for development.

Bronson will also deep dive into using Xdebug & PhpStorm to show you why you should stop using `var_dump` during development because you can save time with real time PHP debugging using breakpoints.

Tarei King and Stuart Shields

Tarei King is a WordPress engineer for Human Made based in Auckland working alongside enterprise clients to help them realise their goals and perform like rockstars in their industry. He has 4 years experience and started working with WordPress around version 3.7.

In his spare time he will be BBQing, playing Kubb in the backyard or hosting lawn parties for family and friends. Tarei also co-organises the WordPress Auckland Meetup and WordCamp Auckland, he believes in helping the WordPress community however he can.

Stuart Shields is a WordPress engineer who recently joined the team at Human Made and is based in Toowoomba. He has over 5 years experience helping a full range of clients from small business to high-end enterprise and started working with WordPress since version 3.4.

When he isn’t pumping out code, he’s pumping iron at the gym and getting ready for the next big race. He also enjoys drinking Scotch and Coffee when he’s not on a health kick.

Presenting: Throw away the commute: Stories of two remote workers.
Remote working often conjures images of beaches, laptops and cocktails, but for some – remote working can be as simple as swapping the office, for a space at home.

Stuart and Tarei discuss some of changes, challenges and benefits when working from home as WordPress engineers for a distributed WordPress agency.

These discussions are for the freelancers, remote workers, digital nomads, misfits and those who are interested in potentially making the move to remote working.

Get your tickets now

There’s less than a month remaining until WordCamp Brisbane, and with only 0 tickets remaining (We’ve sold over 200!) – that means WordCamp Brisbane is going to sell out, if you’ve been putting off buying a ticket get it soon before it’s too late!

Purchase tickets

It’s that time of the day again – time for more presentation announcements! If you’ve been following along at home, this makes it 14 announced presenters, which is exactly half of our lined up speakers!

James Banks

Through his agency, Web3, James Banks specialises in generating more revenue for businesses through online lead generation and websites built to convert traffic into profit.

Over the last half decade, he has helped hundreds of local, national and international organisations succeed with their online strategy.

James has spoken at WordCamps all over Australia and is passionate about helping people in getting the most out of WordPress. He also loves working together with other online marketing and WordPress consultants to deliver excellent results.

Presenting: From One To Many: How To Scale Your WordPress Consulting Business

In this presentation, James is going to teach us:

1. The power of process – how to reclaim your time through effective procedure creation delegation and management
2. Building your Team – How to plug your skills gaps by finding, recruiting and retaining talent.
3. Lead acquisition and sales process that consultants can use to go from having to do all the work, to being able to afford a team to do it instead.

Peter Bui

Peter Bui has been building websites since early 2000 and has never looked back. Working closely with other partners, he and his team at PB Web Development have created and supported a ridiculous number of websites over the last decade.

Peter previously use to be a WordPress Meetup organiser in Sydney, and WordCamp organiser. Also a podcast presenter and previous Community Leadership Team member for the Joomla project. He isn’t afraid to say the word Joomla at a WordCamp.

Presenting: Working with off shore developers to help grow your business

We all get those emails and phone calls. Well at least Peter does, just about every single day of the week.

This presentation is about how you can actually make them work for you. He’s been travelling back and forth between Australia and South East Asia for the last two years on what people seem to thing is a really long vacation (Just take a peak at his Instagram feed), but in reality, He’s been working with his off shore development team, training them up, getting to know them better, understanding how they best work so that they all get the best outcome possible in regards to leveraging the skills of developers from South East Asia.

This presentation will go through how to find a developer, how to set up processes to get them working, how to transition yourself from being a solo business person to having a great team around you helping you grow your business.

Anthony Hortin

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

Presenting: Developing for the WordPress Customizer

The WordPress Customizer allows you to update various WordPress settings and theme options, all while providing you with a Live Preview of your changes.

Anthony plans to show you how you can add Customizer functionality into your theme (or plugin). He’ll cover creating Customizer Panels, Sections, Settings and Controls, including making use of the default Core Controls, and also creating your own Custom Controls.

He’ll also show the various ways in which you can update the Live Preview for your Customizer settings, and lastly, how to make use of your Customizer settings in your theme.

Get your tickets now

There’s less than a month remaining until WordCamp Brisbane, and just over 100 tickets remaining (We’ve sold nearly 200!) – that means WordCamp Brisbane is going to sell out, if you’ve been putting off buying a ticket get it soon before it’s too late!

Purchase tickets

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