Humanising your digital experience

Jen Jeavons

Jen, an award winning singer songwriter and love of storytelling, is joining us to talk about how to design for humans (User Experience) and humanising your brand online through a case study of their successful WooCommerce store Coffee Beans Delivered. She’ll show how they’ve improved the User & Customer experience to improve the brand and usability of the website through her 16 years of experience in the web and digital space.

Jen Jeavons is a Brisbane-based digital designer, Creative Director, serial entrepreneur and award winning singer/songwriter – so probably not the best person to challenge at a karaoke night. Jen founded Pixel Palace (a digital design studio here in Brisbane) in 2009 and today works as the company’s managing & creative director. With a successful creative career path spanning the music industry, fashion, web & digital design and now a blooming coffee empire, her colourful life-path has had one common theme – human connection through storytelling.

Know your numbers, increase your profits, and stress less

Ben McAdam

Ben, a Virtual CFO is joining us to talk about just how few business owners in the WordPress space really understand their numbers – let alone how to use them to improve their businesses, earn more profit, and sleep better at night. In this talk, Ben will cover 5 quick ways to increase profits in the next week and the top 5 numbers to keep an eye on to make sure a business survives and thrives. Come prepared to take lots of notes!

Ben has been fiddling with WordPress and with numbers for many years now, though he’s much better at the latter! He’s a Virtual CFO, which is like an accountant that helps business owners to understand their financial numbers and grow their businesses and profits. He’s previously grown his own agency, so understands the challenges from the inside and not just as an outside adviser.

10 Ways you can improve your website copy to drive more conversions

Kate Toon

Kate will be talking us through 10 key ways you can create conversational copy that sells with our shouting and persuades without being pushy.

We all know the deal, you’ve built a beautiful WordPress website, but now you need to replace that lorem ipsum with compelling, engaging, highly converting copy.
But if writing isn’t your strong point where do you start? And if the copy you have isn’t cutting it, what changes should you make?

Kate Toon is an award-winning SEO copywriter and SEO consultant with almost two decades of experience in all things advertising, digital and writing.

Originally from the UK but now based just outside Sydney. She has worked with many big brands you’d recognise and is the founder of The Clever Copywriting School and organises Australia’s first copywriting conference, aptly named The Copywriting Conference. She’s a co-host on the Hot Copy Podcast and the host of The Recipe for SEO Success podcast, not to mention she’s also published her own business book <em<The Confessions of a Misfit Entrepreneur.

WordPress as a Static Site Generator

Leon Stafford

Leon, the Author of the WP Static Site Generator plugin is joining us to talk about static websites and the myriad of ways in which you can keep using WordPress as a great CMS but reap the rewards of static site hosting.

He’ll be covering a few questions such as What is a static website? and Why would I want a static website? along with covering some of the many different solutions including specialised hosting platforms, plugins, REST API powered websites and the old-fashioned manual methods.

Whether for security reasons, increased page load speeds or saving on hosting costs, you should come out with a better idea of the pros and cons of static website hosting for your WordPress powered site and a taste of the exciting world of static site generators in general

Leon has worked around the globe in technical roles the past 15 years. He has a passion for low-resource computing and doing more with less.

My year on the front line, cleaning infected sites

Stephen Rees-Carter

Stephen has been working with the Wordfence Site Cleaning team part-time since early 2017, Fast-forward to the middle of 2018 and he’s recently stepped back from cleaning to join the Wordfence team full time as a developer, so now it’s time for him to tell us his story.

He’ll share stories from the more memorable sites he’s cleaned, revealing his all-time favourite WordPress malwares, and the epic tale of the persistent attacker that almost thwarted them completely.

Scattered throughout will be tips and ideas to help protect your site from compromise and keep everyone (except the bad guys!) happy.

Stephen has been a PHP developer for many long years and still loves working with PHP each day. He joined the security industry back in 2012 and has been working on security products, large SaaS applications, and spent some time cleaning infected WordPress websites. Now he’s a senior developer at Wordfence/Defiant, working hard to secure your website.

Using WordPress to set up an internet radio station

Richard Scherer

Richard is joining us to discuss the pleasures and pitfalls of setting up web streaming from a WordPress site, including equipment, licensing issues, and adventures with Gutenberg.

Websites are now expected to be media rich as well as responsive – but how do you use WordPress to present and maintain such content, beyond embedding YouTube files? Richard will be answering this, and much much more.

In mid-2018 Richard co-founded Living Arts Canberra, a not-for-profit WordPress website, set up particularly for the arts and community sectors. It features interviews which are available both as podcasts and from a internet radio stream. While its focus is primarily local, its reach is worldwide.

Richard began his professional career in media as a newspaper journalist before moving into communications for a number of federal government departments and agencies. His first website, in the mid-1990s, was hand-coded, but for more than 10 years he’s used WordPress as his CMS of choice to design websites for community and not-for-profit groups.

How we handle 90% of our annual traffic in 5 mins

Phillip Johnson

Phillip works in the music and festival space, and they see the majority of the traffic within the first hour after the lineup announce. 18 months ago we launched a new WordPress site at 8am for the lineup announce only to have it drowned in traffic and crash instantly… for 6 hours.

He’ll talk about the codebase they’ve worked on for all their websites, so that they can be launched instantly without any fear of the site failing. He’ll cover how they have utilised OOP PHP with MVC in their WordPress environment to cope with high server load while maintaining low hosting costs.

Phillip is a passionate web developer with experience in all areas of multimedia. Originally hailing from Brisbane, He now work out of Melbourne with a specialty in music touring and festival websites.

To Eight Zeroes and Beyond: When WooCommerce Gets BIG

Ryan Fitton and Ben Rollins

Ryan and Ben will be joining us to talk about what happens when your client’s WooCommerce business grows from around a million dollars in sales to well over $20 million in a very short period, and how your development skills and processes can face a wholly new set of challenges.

Come join them in asking the question of “will it scale?” and find out how you can very quickly get answers you don’t like.

Ryan is the Co-founder of Punch Buggy and is passionate about the digital and helping brands innovate with unique experiences. When he’s not optimising customer journeys, you’ll find him mountain biking, surfing or spending time with family.

Ben is the Head of Development at Punch Buggy, and has worked in development, in one form or another, for over twenty years. He likes good wine and running stupid distances through the mountains, but hasn’t yet found a pleasant way of combining the two.

Contributing Back to WordPress – Getting Involved in the Community

Wil Brown

Wil is joining us to talk about the many ways to contribute to WordPress – Many people think that the only way to contribute to the WordPress project is to be a core developer, but that’s not the case at all! There are many ways you can use your skills to contribute and be a community rock star.

One of the many ways Wil explains you can contribute, includes Volunteering at WordCamp Brisbane!

Wil hails from Sydney where he lives his life as a Dad, WordPress Consultant, Developer, Conference Organiser and Speaker.

10 truths learned from a career of Freelancing

Samuel Levy

Sam will be joining us to talk about tips, truths, and lessons learned from his 7+ career of being a professional freelancer.

Sam is a Freelance Web developer who has worked in development for over 12 years, and has freelanced for the last 7. He’s done everything from server management to front-end development, but is most happy solving ugly problems with elegant solutions.