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!

Slides: Wil Brown – Contributing Back to WordPress – Getting Involved in the Community

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.

Slides: Leon Stafford – WordPress as Static Site Generator

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.

Slides: Sally Eberhardt – How to make the most of WordCamp

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.

Slides: Andrew Duncan – WooCommerce REST API Integration

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?

Slides: Kate Toon – 10 Ways You Can Improve Your Website Copy To Drive More Conversions

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.

Slides: Phillip Johnson – How We Handle 90% Of Our Annual Traffic In 5 Mins

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.

Slides: Dale Reardon – My Experience Building and Operating an online community and social media platform on WordPress for the disability sector

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.

Slides: Scott Huntley – Your first 12 plugins

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.

Slides

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!

Slides: Emma Patterson – Zero to Website: From planning to launch in 9 steps

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.

Slides: Tony Cosentino – Podcasting with WordPress

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.

Slides: Rheinard Korf – WordPress Middleware

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!

Slides: Ben McAdam – Know Your Numbers, Increase Your Profits, and Stress Less

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.

Slides: Brendan and Luke – The Future Of The Web

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.

Slides: Samual Levy – 10 Truths Learned From a Career of Freelancing

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!

Slides: Mandy Weidmann – Building a community using all.the.tools

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.

Slides: Mick Viller – 10 Mistakes

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.

Slides: Ryan Fitton & Ben Rollins – PunchBuggy – To Eight Figures and Beyond When WooCommerce Gets BIG

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.

Slides: Stephen Rees-Carter – My Year on the Front Line Cleaning Infected Sites

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.

Slides: Richard Scherer – Using WordPress to create an internet radio station

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.

Slides: Toni Livesley – WooCommerce Beginners

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.

Slides: Jen Jeavons – Humanising The Web

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.

Slides: Gal Baras – Do what you do best and outsource the rest

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.

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

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.

Slides: Maddison Selleck – Going Against The Grain

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!

Slides: Jane Tweedy – Packaging Web Services