10 Mistakes beginners make when setting up their websites

Michael Viller

Michael, who until a few years ago was a decade-long Joomla user, is joining us to talk about the 10 things beginners forget when setting up their WordPress website. He’ll be covering common questions such as How do I speed up my website?, My images are slowing down my website, how do i fix that?, How do I SEO?, How do I get google to visit my website? and many many more.
But are these really questions that should be asked afterwards? Not having these things done at the time of creating your website can make it harder and more costly to do later on.
This talk will lightly cover the above topics, and focus on the questions that can be asked ahead of time to reduce the pain later on, such as how to choose quality hosting, themes and page builders, WordPress settings and image compression plugins, and implementing SEO the right way from the start.

Michael has been the “Mick” of many things over the past 36 years of his life however one thing that he’s always been passionate about is building websites, He started teaching himself to build websites back in ’99 with HTML, then moved to mambo, then was an avid Joomla user for over 10 years and a very anti-WordPress person up till a few years ago, but hasn’t touched Joomla since.

The Future of the Web

Brendan Woods & Luke Carbis

Brendan & Luke are joining us to remind us that we’re living at a time in history when technology is changing at a profound rate, creating deep challenges for companies all over the world. Those with the foresight to adapt will be greatly rewarded, while those who ignore changing technologies will fall behind (aka Blockbuster). Join them and learn about the 4 major areas of change that will fundamentally disrupt the future of the web.

Luke Carbis is a trained teacher who decided to trade moody teenagers for programming. Today, he works to foster diversity, community, and possibility at XWP.

Brendan Woods works as a Team Lead with XWP, managing large scale WordPress solutions. Currently completing a Masters of Data Analytics, Brendan has a deep interest in how technology continues to shape our lives.

How to make the most of your WordCamp experience

Sally Eberhardt

Sally, a published author from the Sunshine Coast is joining us to talk about how WordCamps are a great opportunity to learn, network, and strengthen the WordPress Community. While WordCamps can be a little daunting for first timers (and introverts!) she’ll touch on the power of networking, how networking is about giving, how supportive the WordPress community is, and some self-care tips for introverts to help them maximise their experience at WordCamp without getting social burnout.

Sally Eberhardt a proud and happy introvert (although you’re forgiven for not realising this upon meeting her), has recently published her first book entitled Pain-Free Networking for Introverts.
Her first networking experiences were nerve-racking to say the least, fearing about whether anyone would talk to her, whether she’d fit in, and general lack of confidence. Turning all that around she now shares her journey with others to remove pain and maximise the rewards of networking.
She’s a lover of wild places, animals, photography, family, street-art, traveling, dining out, reading, writing, and of course, the Communities she’s Networked with on her journey here.

My Experience Building and Operating an online community and social media platform on WordPress for the disability sector

Dale Reardon & Charlie

Dale, a qualified lawyer (but he asked us not to hold that against him) is joining us from Tasmania to share with us how he’s created an online social community for the disability sector – My Disability Matters, using many of the familiar tools such as BuddyPress, Peepso, WooCommerce, and many others. He’ll cover many of the learnings based around the scaling and performance ability of different plugins and hosting. Discussion of our experience and tips for others building their community on WordPress.

Dale Reardon is from Tasmania, Australia and along with his wife, Jo, have founded My Disability Matters, a Worldwide online community for the disability sector. Dale is qualified as a lawyer but he asks that we not hold that against him. He loves everything to do with France. Wine, food, and champagne. Dale is legally blind and uses a guide dog, Charlie.
Dale advocates for accessible web-design and has a particular hatred for graphical captchas that frustrate him and so many others, he’s also a passionate advocate for equality, anti-discrimination and disability rights and equality.

WordPress as API Middleware: We’ve been doing things wrong. Lets fix it!

Rheinard Korf

Rheinard is joining us to talk API & WordPress. Having integrated several API integrations for large clients patterns have emerge. Yet each time an API project comes up he finds us reinvent the wheel – Why? Mostly because of changing team composition, but more prominently… as a WordPress community we have been doing it wrong. What if there was a better way? What if we could standardise our approach for how we integrate with third-party APIs? What if WordPress became API Middleware?

In this talk Rheinard will explore this idea. He’ll use a real case study of where they’ve started to implement this. Ultimately he’s seeking feedback from the developer community with the intent to push WordPress forward in an exciting and unknown direction.

At the age of twelve Rheinard discovered a love for programming languages and writing software for friends and family. Whilst studying Information Technology he also discovered a love for teaching programming and has done so for over a decade before turning to programming as a career.
Rheinard has a passion for frameworks, programming languages and APIs. His most ambitious project he has worked on recently is Tide – a WordPress code quality and review ecosystem written primarily in the Go programming language. Now he is at it again, dreaming big and exploring the future of WordPress in an API dominated world.

Going Against The Grain: Insourcing In ICT

Maddison Selleck

Maddison, the Chief Business Development Officer at VentraIP Australia is joining us to talk about their story of rapid growth and difficult decisions that came with that. Like many companies in the ICT industry, VentraIP Australia went through a period of rapid growth and was met with the difficult decision of whether to invest in their local staff or build a team of outsourced technicians to meet the increased demand.

Hear what Chief Business Development Officer Maddison Selleck and the Leadership Team at VentraIP Australia has learnt since making this pivotal decision and discover the many hidden benefits of going against the grain by insourcing in ICT.

Greenfields or die: Modernising publishing for 2018

Peter Wilson & Ben White

Peter & Ben are joining us to tell us a story they started back in 2017, when one of Australia’s largest media companies embarked on a high risk technical project – to replace their proprietary CMS with one based on WordPress.

They’ll be covering the technical process to build an enterprise-ready CMS from both the side of the client (Ben) and the Agency (Peter). Together they’ll tell their story of what went right, what went wrong, and where their stories differ – all in the hope that their experience will help you avoid mistakes in your own projects.

Peter Wilson is a Senior WordPress Engineer at Human Made and committer to WordPress core. Peter has worked on the web for twenty years on everything from table based layouts in the 90s to enterprise grade CMS development. He’s a big fan of musical theater and often encourages his WordPress community colleagues to join him for a show or two in New York or in the West End.

Ben White is the CMS Engineering Manager at Fairfax Media Australia, and has been utilising WordPress at scale with media publishers since 2011. He likes keeping things simple and automating things that are not, so he can have more time to spend with family and play video games.

It’s not all about you – How to take an audience first approach to connecting with your customers online

Paula Glynn

Paula will be walking us through how to take an audience first approach to designing your website, and not focusing all on yourself. She’ll walk us through how to find what questions your audience are asking, what you can do to ensure your site is answering them, and not to keep them coming back for more. You’ll walk away with actionable plans and tools that you can implement on your website right away with minimal changes.

Paula Glynn is the lead Search Specialist at PixelStorm and an experienced Pay per Click Guru. For the last decade Paula has been living, breathing and dreaming PPC and digital strategy. When not optimising client’s accounts, she is reading the latest industry case studies and trends.

Podcasting with WordPress

Tony Cosentino

Tony, a podcast host from Sydney is giving us an overview of what equipment & software is needed to get started in podcasting, what services & digital assets you can use and then how to bring it all together on a WordPress website as the hub of the podcast.

Tony has been developing & building with WordPress for 10 years now in the SMB space as a freelancer based in Sydney. He attended his first WordCamp in New Zealand in 2011 and quickly followed it up by WordCamp Melbourne the same month – he was hooked! With the rise in voice technology he’s turned his mind to podcasting and hosts his own show ‘The Tony Cosentino Show’ about his and other peoples passions and obsessions including WordPress and Podcasting.

Building a community using all.the.tools

Mandy Weidmann & Paul Dunstone

Mandy, Australia’s ‘Fundraising Whisperer’ is joining us to tell us about the lessons she’s learnt building communities. She’ll share some of the best plugins she’s used, discuss her distaste for ‘funnel’ marketing and pressure tactics, and speak about how providing free content has made her happier and her business stronger.

Joining Mandy is her web developer, Paul Dunstone from OSE who will briefly cover the more geeky elements of customising a WordPress site to within an inch of its life. He’ll also share the pain of what it’s like to have an app addict as a client!

Mandy Weidmann is Australia’s ‘Fundraising Whisperer’ – publisher of the Fundraising Directory and author of the Practical Fundraising Handbook for School and Club Volunteers. Mandy believes that parent volunteers shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel all the time and is passionate about providing resources to make fundraising easier (and more fun). She is also a self-confessed app addict!

Paul Dunstone is the founder and Managing Director of OSE Digital. Paul has over 15 years experience in web design, development and digital marketing and leads a team of experts who work to deliver WordPress and WooCommerce implementations on a daily basis.

Packaging your web design service to save time and make more money

Jane Tweedy

Jane is joining us to explain to us how to package your web services to make you more money, while at the same time saving you time. She’ll explain the hows and whys of offering tiered packages, how to determine what to include in packages, how to market the upsells to higher packages, and why your top package is probably what you currently offer as your entry-level!

Jane Tweedy is founder & lead-trainer of FAQ Business Training, with a mission to educate and empower small business owners to DIY or outsource with confidence through accurage and topical training. She’s also a part-time Business Connect and BEC Australia Approved Business Advisor for Western Sydney Business Centre, the NSW Government funded program has allowed Jane to help over 800 small business owners on an array of topics.

WooCommerce REST API Integration

Andrew Duncan

Andrew, a WooCommerce plugin developer is joining us to talk about how to seamlessly integrate their online presence and their offline business applications to reduce data entry and streamline your business processes for online orders.

WooCommerce is one of the most popular eCommerce platform on the web, and has become the de-facto eCommerce option for WordPress. In this session Andrew will demonstrate how you can use the WordPress and WooCommerce REST APIs to sync WooCommerce Orders to your internal CRM, sync Products and Images from your CRM of choice into WooCommerce, and receive instant notifications of new WooCommerce orders.

Andrew Duncan is the CEO/Owner of Databuzz, a FileMaker Business Alliance partner based in Sydney, Australia. He has been developing FileMaker solutions since 1992 and has been working with APIs for over 15 years.

Andrew speaks regularly at the Sydney FileMaker Developers group which he convenes, with a particular focus on FileMaker integration.

Zero to Website: From planning to launch in 9 steps

Emma Patterson

Emma, a graphic designer turned web designer will be covering the 9 steps she takes to create beautiful WordPress websites, and quickly! After years both designing and building websites with WordPress she’s refined the process over and over, making it as tight and smooth as possible for both herself and clients – and she’ll be sharing it with all of us!

Emma’s a graphic designer turned web designer on a mission to teach others how to build beautiful & professional websites with WordPress. She’s been freelancing since 2011, and working with WordPress since 2012. Although she specialises in building beautiful branding and websites for change-makers, She’s also a project manager, coordinating the services of copywriters, web developers and SEO geeks to build strong online brands for clients. Outside of work, she is obsessed with sausage dogs, nature, wine, and Mexican food.

Do what you do best and outsource the rest

Gal Baras

Gal, an online marketing consultant for small businesses from Brisbane, will talk about how a lot of people think that WordPress is so easy to use that anyone can do it, and while true, only up to a point. Most people can get a site going, but it won’t be nearly as good as a site created professionally, with a solid technical foundation (caching, backups, etc), a smooth user experience, tight security, search engine optimisation and more.

Gal is a Brisbane-based online marketing consultant working with small/local businesses and several business websites. Every Website he builds are based on WordPress and he provides “the full suite” for them: domain, hosting, web development, SEO, conversion optimisation, moral support, maintenance, backups and more.

Before venturing into the world of WordPress & business, he was in corporate IT for years working on large systems for very large organisations, which has given him a large-scale methodical perspective on website setup and operations. Having been “just a number” all those years, he’s used his experience to provide smaller clients with the personal touch and care thats appreciated by all.

A Crazy Lady’s Beginner’s Guide to WooCommerce

Toni Livesey

Toni, a self-confessed “Crazy Lady” is joining us to give us her take on a Beginners guide to WooCommerce, she’ll be covering many of the questions new-comers to WooCommerce will be asking such as How do I start?, How do I get paid?, What shipping options exist? and many many more.

Based in Harvey Bay, Toni started with her first website over 20 years ago in 1996 with nothing more than Notepad and a couple of HTML tutorials. Much more recently she’s written a training manual for a training course in WooCommerce delivered to indigenous startups by the QLD government.

She’s worked with clients in all types of business; including online stores ranging from large fishing tackle sites that sell tens of thousands globally to small local businesses selling disposable nappies.
Never saying no to a challenge and always solving the problem, has lead to the fond nickname ‘Crazy Lady’ from her family – in her spare time she’s a wife, mother and step-mother to 10, and grandmother to more kids than she can count on all her fingers and toes.

Your First Twelve Plugins

Scott Huntley

In this talk, Scott draws upon inspiration from his WordPress classes at the local community college and his most asked question: “Which WordPress plugins do you think are essential?” Scott will run through twelve plugins you should install when starting off your new site, how to use them, and why. Scott will also give some good advice for how to find that one plugin needle you need from the 56,000 plugin haystack on the WordPress.org website.

Kenneth Scott Huntley (please call him Scott) is an Instruction Designer for the Student Management Services Program Project at TAFE NSW. Scott also runs a number of WordPress workshops a few weekends every year at the local community college in Parramatta.

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.