Uncategorized – WordCamp Sydney 2019

This year we are introducing some hallway track workshops at WordCamp Sydney.

If you don’t know what a hallway track is, they are small sessions that take place literally in the hallway!

No big projector, maybe we’ll get a whiteboard. It’s really more of a workshop environment to network, engage and perhaps learn something new.

We’ll have a defined space for the hallway tracks to happen and they will run at the same time as the regular sessions.

So if there isn’t a particular talk that you want to attend, or don’t mind watching the video later on WordPress.tv, you can attend a hallway track.

We are looking for volunteers to suggest and run a hallway workshop that lasts for maybe 20-30 mins.

It doesn’t need to specifically be about the WordPress app, it can be related to business or design, mental health – anything you think others at the WordCamp may be interested in hearing.

Fill out the form linked below if you are interested in running a hallway workshop.

https://forms.gle/ckcGGZQs22dHeXMs5

We are pleased to announce our second round of speakers for WordCamp Sydney 2019.

The Future of WordPress SEO – What’s New in 2020

Why you should be hunting for more niche, low competition keywords, and how to build pages for those keywords (without having to create tons more content.)

Show why people search differently now vs the past
Show what types of new keywords they’re searching for now
Show how to capture and convert that search traffic

Jeff Deutsch

Jeff Deutsch is Marketing Director for Search Marketing startup Longtail UX.

He has been specialising in Growth Marketing since he started in SEO in 2009. After running a 7-figure SaaS company from 2010-15, he led the marketing for 3 funded tech companies, helping them achieve 5x growth year-on-year.

Preparing For The Flood. How Do You Conduct Load Testing To Ready Your WordPress Site For Viral Events?

So, Beyonce, unbeknownst to you, decides to wear your shirt. A paparazzi snaps her casually walking down Rodeo Drive with it.

Suddenly your site explodes and you’re getting angry emails from crazed Beyonce fans about not being able to access it.

What happened?! Was it the dreaded DDoS monster? Or did something even worse happen? You went viral…

When your WordPress site finally goes live, it’s likely that you’ve probably spent weeks or even months building, iterating and debating about it.

The last thing you’re thinking about is testing it.

But if you plan on succeeding on the most important days of your business and site, like a function room, you need to understand how many people can fit in it, otherwise you could be leaving thousands on the table when your site goes down.

Robert Li

Ex-Startup Founder, Lifelong Technologist, ANT Practitioner, WordPress Evangelist, Tinkerer, APAC Automator in Chief & Solutions Engineer for WP Engine.

WordPress Plugins – Initial Growth To Global Scale – What I Wish I Knew Before!

How do you scale a growth WordPress Plugins business from that initial growth?

This talk continues Chris’ WordPress Plugins growth story and lessons from Chris’ presentation at the 2018 Sydney WordCamp.

Where last year the OPMC story was on the initial 7 year growth phase on their WordPress Plugins division, this year will be an honest and at times brutal account of the growth to scale process – that is, where does growth lead and how fast can you scale once you’re getting the customers and the initial honeymoon period is over?

In 2018, OPMC was experiencing some growth in its WordPress Plugins division, due to a single acquisition. It transformed the priority of the business unit from a side focus to one of OPMC’s primary business units.

Since last year’s talk, we’ve undertaken 2 rounds of Plugin acquisitions, developed new official plugins for WordPress owned official WooCommerce and grown substantially from last year.

Plenty of lessons have been learned, good and bad, enough to fill a book!

This is a scaling story where our size stands above some, but we are still tiny compared to others. How do we transition to be competitive with established and dominant market players?

Join Chris for a very practical dissection of post-initial growth scaling of a WordPress plugins business, where he delivers practical tips and lessons on growth to scale, and what he wishes he had (and hadn’t) done over the past year.

Chris Bryant

Chris Bryant is Director at OPMC Group. He founded OPMC in 2003 while at University in the cold and windy capital of New Zealand, Wellington.

The business is now a 16 year old multi brand web services organisation.

The Science Of WordPress

A bit of history: The web was built for sharing science
About CSIRO (and Data61), Australia’s premier science organisation
How we use WordPress, multisite and standalone
In-house development vs External (understanding the needs of a large government agency)
The challenges and our solutions: Custom themes and plugins, administering multiple sites
The future: Gutenberg?

Andrew Wright

I have been writing HTML for 25 years with 18 of them at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, using a variety of platforms, including Vignette, Sitecore, Drupal, Plone and now WordPress.

I currently manage over 300 WordPress sites, providing site administration, theme and plugin development and support services as part of the Web Services team.

Escaping Client Hell: 6 Practical Tips To Make Freelancing Fun Again

A tale from foetal position to full fledged fearless leader – through red flag clients, horror scope creep and crippling anxiety due to chronic people pleasing tendancies, Jen will share her journey from solo freelancer to agency director and her hard won learnings over the last 10 years.

Jen Jeavons

Jen Jeavons is Managing Director of Pixel Palace, a serial entrepreneur and award winning singer/songwriter – so probably not the best person to challenge at a drunken karaoke night.

Jen founded Pixel Palace (a digital design agency here in Brisbane specialising in custom WordPress and Strategic Marketing) in 2009 and today works as the company’s managing & creative director.

Ways To Use Zapier And WordPress To Automate Your Life

There are so many tools that you use in your business to manage the day to day operations, sales, billing, research, communication, project management etc.

I bet most of those systems don’t talk to each other, and that’s where Zapier comes in, to save you a lot of time by automating the connections and data points between applications and WordPress.

See how you can use Zapier and WordPress together to automate social media posting and much more.