We asked a few of our WordCamp speakers some questions about who they are and what they do so that yo can get to know them a little bit better.
Come along to WordCamp Sydney and ask them more questions in person!
Meet Your Speakers
Speaker Announcements: Round 4 (Final)
We are pleased to announce our fourth and final round of speakers for WordCamp Sydney 2019.
Divi 4.x and WooCommerce Changes
I will be discussing the use of Divi and Woocommerce after version 4 of Divi is released. We will look at the options and how to use the new features so we don’t need to use third-party plugins to format items, carts and account features etc.
- Divi 4.0 and new features
- Setup of global settings on Header, Body, Footers
- Setup of Blog Posts
- Setup of Products
- Setup of 404 Page
- Discussion about the inbuilt ‘Divi Help and Support Center’ – System Status, Safe Mode and Elegant theme support
Lisa Hewitt
After 20 years of working in a broad range of industries, I pursued my dream of offering practical and affordable solutions to aid business when venturing into the world of Website Design for their business.
While creating websites for my clients I found Divi by Elegant Themes and I knew this was the platform for my business.
Strategy Is Not Negotiable
This talk covers the following points:
- The importance of a business plan
- How to implement a business strategy
- The focus on your client persona and who they really are
- Marketing success and strategies
- Copy and Communications
The talk will cover a high-level of information which can be adapted by anyone who owns a business or website online.
Shikha Colwill
Shikha lives and breaths all things Web.
She provides web and digital marketing solutions for her clients at Bloom Web Solutions.
She’s bursting with creative ideas and a desire to help her clients discover the incredible possibilities of the internet.
She wants to empower her clients and loves to hear about their business success stories.
Positioning For Profit
The proposed talk is to help people understand what positioning is, why you should be using it, and how to use it to attract their ideal customer.
The talk will cover what an ideal customer is and how to work out who that is for you, I will explain what an ideal client avatar is, and how to create one for yourself.
I will then explain and show how to craft effective messaging (and perhaps even branding) to help you communicate in a way that really speaks clearly to those who you wish to attract most.
I will touch on niching (common objections and misconception) as you can not talk about positioning for an audience without covering niching.
As with the above, I will cover why you should consider niching and how to niche based on not only the standard Vertical and Horizontal niches but also based on Psychographics and personality types.
The benefits of the above helps to attract more leads, convert more leads and charge a premium rate for this.
I will finishing this up by covering basic pricing principles and how to tie that into your offer and communication to help you charge more by doing the same amount (and level) of work.
Corey Dodd
Corey Dodd is a designer with 20 years experience working with large companies such as Nova Radio, national advertising agencies and boutique design studios.
His background in working as a creative in digital and tech companies has given him a broad skill set that covers design, strategy and coding.
He currently runs Elk Creative, a small design studio from Geelong Victoria, that is focused on delivering custom branding and digital solutions for property development and commercial construction businesses.
Let’s Get Engaged
- Using social media to build relationships
- Engagement Strategies
- Using social media as a lead generator
Social Media is a powerful tool and if used correctly can be a wonderful tool in terms of engaging and build relationships. It can also be a lead generator.
Briana Graydon
Lover of all things social media! I put the social, in social media. Trust me, you’ll understand once I start talking.
Owner of Pink Cow Social – a boutique social media company bringing the fun into socials for small business owners.
Teacher of social media, as well as lover of all things social. Experience in Business and Marketing and have a background in corporate, sport and associations.
Don’t Panic: How To Troubleshoot Your WordPress Site
Basic troubleshooting for WordPress Users – learn the tricks that Happiness Engineers use to diagnose and fix problems in your own WordPress site
Do you get nervous when you update a plugin?
Break into a cold sweat when you see a ‘white screen of death’?
Learn the tips and tricks that Happiness Engineers use to diagnose WordPress problems, and troubleshoot your own site.
Jordan Gillman
Jordan currently works as a Happiness Engineer on WordPress.com – helping users build their little corner of the web. Prior to that he spent 10 years as a freelance Designer/Developer helping churches and faith-based organisations get on the web.
He lives in Wollongong, Australia with his wife and 2 daughters.
Speaker Changes
Unfortunately Cody Butler and Zohair Yousafi have had to drop out due to other commitments. This happens frequently in the conference scene.
We wish them well and hope their can return another year.
Speaker Announcements: Round 3
We are pleased to announce our third round of speakers for WordCamp Sydney 2019.
Website Delivered – It’s The START Of The Relationship!
How many times have you high fived the team, woohoo our client’s site has been delivered, only to never have contact with them again?
It’s time to change this mentality and treat the delivery as the start of the client relationship.
Post-delivery we can commence a customer care program – yes NO selling!
Too many website clients are left unhappy with their websites or happy with their website on delivery, only for their initial excitement to wane as they realise it doesn’t really work for them.
In this session Jane will share some real-life stories of clients who fall into these camps, and how the website designer/developer could have better assessed the customer experience and even upsold the client to maintain a relationship in the future.
This talk is a business one helping the WordPress designers, whether sole traders or agencies, to improve their delivery of client websites and in turn make more money, scaling up their businesses.
This talk will apply to other business owners in the audience too, as although I’ll be talking about WordPress website delivery, the concepts can be mostly applied to other businesses.
Jane Tweedy
Jane is a part-time NSW Government funded Business Connect Advisor for small businesses in Western Sydney.
Through meeting 1000 clients in this role, Jane encountered story after story of small business owners having bad experiences with websites and SEO, amongst other business services.
5 Steps To Avoiding Burnout: Creating A Healthy Work/Life Balance
The freelance work/life balance is a bit challenging to get right.
Having the freedom to work at home (or anywhere) is a major perk for freelancers.
But because you’re the boss, you’re always driven to check your emails even on weekends or work until late at night to crunch numbers and keep the money rolling in.
Work can become an overwhelming presence in your personal life and you suddenly feel like you’re always “working”.
There are strategies you can employ to avoid business burnout and create work/life balance, which includes setting boundaries between work and personal life, creating processes and delegating work.
In this talk, you will learn different ways on how to manage a healthy work/life balance and relieve the stress of self-employment while ensuring a recurring income.
Haley Brown
Haley is the straight-shooting head honcho of Brand Shack. A guru in all things design and project management on a mission to create the perfect work life balance
As a first time mum she has managed to take 6 months leave whilst her business continued to manage clients needs and bring in a consistent income.
When she’s not busy designing or working with clients, she loves nothing more than travelling the globe on her quest to find the perfect pina colada.
7 Ways To Generate Your First 1,000 Customers
In business, your website only has one job … to start a visitor on a journey to spend money with you and become a customer.
The key piece is to connect your website to places where your potential customers hang out and invite them to your website.
Once they arrive, the website’s job is to get them to leave something of themselves (an email, phone number, cookie, …).
Just asking people to sign up for a newsletter doesn’t cut it these days, nor does offering the download of an ebook.
This presentation will reveal some interesting and creative ways to build your prospect and email list to really explode your business … and in ways that evoke curiosity, likability and wow with your visitors (some will even willingly share and promote for you … could this be the secret to going viral?).
Nik Cree
Web Developer, WordPress Developer, and Digital Marketing in Robina, Australia.
Nik is a veteran WordCamp speaker and promoter of the WordPress community.
Our Wild Journey Implementing A Headless WordPress Blog
Several months ago we got REALLY EXCITED when we discovered that some industrious individuals had started implementing Gutenberg for other CMS & frameworks.
Gutenberg for Laravel? Gutenberg for Drupal? Amazing!
Then we tried it ourselves. And failed, miserably.
Back to the drawing board – we needed a different way to integrate the shiny new block editor we’d already promised our favourite client with the mother of all websites.
We’re talking a custom PHP website built on a highly complex custom enterprise CMS/ERP system developed over a 15 year period. No sweat.
Fortunately for us, the latest craze in the WordPress development world – headless WordPress – came to the rescue!
Find out about our journey as we share what we tried before landing on our final solution, what we ended up with, what we’d do differently next time and what our key takeaways from this wild adventure were!
Jo Minney
Jo Minney is a WordPress developer based (for now) in Perth, Western Australia.
She is passionate about UX, data-driven decision making, cats and travel – not necessarily in that order.
She is also an ambassador for She Codes Australia, the meetup coordinator for the Perth WordPress meetup and the lead organiser for WordCamp Perth 2020.
She is easily recognisable by her bright purple hair and dorky glasses.
When Good Clients Go Bad
With enough experience, everyone has had clients who start off well before going rogue. They might go silent, ignore your requests for information, become unreasonable in their requests, or even refuse to pay your final invoice. With a little preparation, you can drastically reduce these incidences while improving your professionalism, reducing your financial risk and minimising your stress to boot.
In this talk I’ll cover:
- Warning signs and red flags to watch for
- Designing an awesome client onboarding process to minimise the risk that clients go rogue
- Specific words and phrases to use when you’re in the thick of a client crisis
- How to write your own policy (even if your company consists of me, myself and I) for dealing with these situations.
Regardless of the particulars of what you do, everyone in business needs to be an awesome communicator, not just over email, but face-to-face, through video and other copy. Communication is not just what you say, it’s what people hear. So we’re going to look at why people act the way they do, how we react to difficult or confusing clients, and how to better communicate so that you can reduce client friction as well as your own stress.
This is not a technical or complex talk. The target audience is for website designers who have struggled with managing clients’ expectations and want to do a better job of client communications while also reducing their risk.
Brook McCarthy
Brook McCarthy is a digital marketing trainer and business with a background in Public Relations.
Brook runs Hustle & Heart, a training college, community and worldwide movement of like-minded awesome folk who want more from their businesses. Hustle & Heart teaches marketing, Public Relations and sales skills for service professionals who want to make boldness their business strategy.
WordPress Hosting Survival Guide
Hosting is essential to every web site in the world, and getting the right fit for your needs can be daunting with all the options available out there.
In this presentation, Ricky will take you through how hosting has changed over time, what is available now to help with your WordPress site, how to get the most from your hosting, and what you should be looking for in choosing the right provider.
This talk is aimed at new to intermediate WordPress users
Ricky Blacker
Ricky is a self taught web professional who found and fell in love with WordPress, and the community behind it while looking for a CMS platform to build websites for clients.
He is a Co-Organizer for the Sunshine Coast & Brisbane WordPress Meetup Groups, as well as the Brisbane Web Design Meetup group, and was one of the amazing team who put together the Sunshine Coast WordCamp in 2016 and WordCamp Brisbane in 2017/18/19, and has spoken at WordCamps in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.
Ricky is very passionate about building the WordPress community and helping others to learn how to use WordPress and what it can do.
Building Powerful Subscription And Membership Sites That Scale
Subscription revenue models are an increasingly popular choice for a lot of different types of businesses — more and more websites are exploring partial or total subscription strategies.
Speakers Adrian O’Hagan from Crikey and Private Media, and Ben May from The Code Company share their experiences in building and migrating large complex WordPress subscription sites.
Two unique perspectives; Adrian’s experience as both product manager and developer, and Ben as a technical agency working with clients on these kinds of projects.
This talk will examine some of the common pain points experienced with scaling subscription sites, and how the pair have architected powerful and flexible subscription sites using SaaS products such as Chargify.
Ben May
Ben is founder of The Code Company, one of the few Australian engineering agencies that has over a decade of deep expertise with large-scale enterprise open source and WordPress development.
The firm works with clients Nine, Pedestrian, Business Insider and iSelect, among many others.
Adrian O’Hagan
Adrian comes from an agency background, and has been heavily involved in dozens of WordPress deployments. In 2017, he moved client-side to join Private Media to focus on Crikey, which is Australia’s longest running (and best!) independent digital news source.
In his spare time Adrian works with the community group Permablitz Melbourne, which aims to convert people’s backyards into edible spaces.
Speaker Announcements: Round 1
We are pleased to announce our first round of speakers for WordCamp Sydney 2019.
Why No One Is Reading Your Blog Posts (And How To Change That)
We all know creating engaging content is THE number one way to build trust and authority for any brand.
Writing awesome blogs establishes you as a credible expert, helps you build a steady flow of WordPress clients and gives you the opportunity to educate and help your customers.
But most blogs written these days need some serious love.
With as many 10 million blog posts are published a day, it’s vital your content is rubbed and scrubbed into perfect shape.
In my presentation, I’ll show you to build your brand and boost your website’s profile with some seriously shareable content.
Kate Toon
Kate Toon is a writing entrepreneur, as well as a popular coach, speaker, author and podcaster. Her digital education businesses The Recipe for SEO Success and The Clever Copywriting School have helped more than 8000 small business owners grapple the Google beast and write better content.
Zero To Website: From Planning To Launch In 9 Steps
As a graphic designer turned website creator, I will be covering the 9 steps I take to create beautiful WordPress websites, and quickly!
After years both designing and building websites with WordPress I’ve refined my process over and over, making it as tight and smooth as possible for both myself and my clients – and this is the process I teach my eCourse students too.
This talk is perfect for beginners, as well as more advanced web designers & website creators who want some helpful tips for refining their process.
Emma Patterson
I’m a freelance graphic designer turned website creator, WordPress lover and design nerd.
After running a freelance web & design business for more than 10 years, I now teach graphic designers the ins and outs of the web world so they can build WordPress websites themselves and outsource less.
Pre-Selling A Premium Plugin With WordPress
How we set up a WordPress site to accept pre-sales (and sales) for a premium plugin.
This talk will include the theme / plugins we used, the method of validating License Keys, key decisions we made about the “Upgrade Path” UX, and how we manage a premium and free codebase.
Luke Carbis
Luke Carbis is a self-deputised open-source emissary and vigilante plenipotentiary for WordPress proletariat affairs.
He works closely with WordPress based startups (like Block Lab) to fast-track their growth and inspire beautifully written code.
Goodbye Themes, Hello Elementor – Beyond Creating Basic Websites
How using a page builder helped me create websites, especially ones using custom fields, dynamic content and single page templates.
I’ve spent the last 15+ years relying on templates and themes and to create websites by swapping changing the content because I can’t code to save myself.
Since finding Elementor, I’ve been able to create websites without themes by building them from scratch. What I like best is being able to make more advanced sites with custom fields and single post templates.
- My story
- Introduction to Elementor
- Key features I like
- Beyond the basics by using custom fields and single post templates
- Some example site ideas you can create
Michael Viller
Michael, who until a few years ago was a decade-long Joomla user, he is now a passionate WordPress user focused on helping beginners succeed with WordPress.
How Outsourcing Can Allow You To Thrive
Rosie Shilo, reveals the hottest tips on how you can easily start outsourcing including
- How to determine what you should outsource
- How to let go and trust your contractors, and
- How to choose and build your virtual team.
Rosie Shilo
As the owner of Virtually Yours, Rosie has inspired and mentored hundreds of VAs to run their own successful businesses.
As a true advocate for the industry, Rosie not only guides VAs to deliver exceptional client services, but also works with business owners to show how they can benefit from using a VA.
Gutenberg Block Editor Tips & Tricks
Love it or hate it, Gutenberg (aka the WordPress block editor) is here to stay.
This talk will cover off tips, tricks and workflows to make working with Gutenberg a breeze.
Cath Hughes
Founder of Phase Creative and Live By 5, Cath is a Sydney-based UX / UI designer currently working for 4mation Technologies.
Cath has spent the last 6 years working as a WordPress consultant and WordPress tutor and most recently she has been running a WordPress course at Sydney Community College.
How To Create An Automated Marketing Funnel For Your Business
Join us to learn how to create an Automated Marketing Funnel to CAPTURE, NURTURE and Convert leads into SALES!
-Create an abundance of prospects eager and excited to buy from you?
-Start generating QUALIFIED leads DAILY, on autopilot?
-Create a MARKETING MACHINE working for you 24/7, even while you sleep.
Well you can!
There are only 3 moving parts to a highly successful marketing machine and they are…
ATTRACT – Attract highly qualified prospects daily.
ENGAGE – Engage and nurture prospects with content that WOW’s them while creating TRUST and DESIRE.
CONVERT – Convert Prospects into clients and then clients into RAVING FANS and Advocates who promote for you!
The best part is 90% of this can and should be automated.
A great marketing system not only has the ability to produce 10x revenue, it also creates time and lifestyle freedom.
I’ll share the knowledge required to…
-Build an effective In-Bound, Attraction Marketing MACHINE.
-Engage, Nurture and WOW prospects through Marketing Automation.
-Create DESIRE and ENTHUSIASM for your products or services.
-Create IRRESISTIBLE MESSAGING that connects DEEPLY with prospects and magnetically draws them towards you.
-Develop the WINNING Marketing Mindset.
Cody Butler
Cody Butler is a #1 International Best-Selling Author of “Got Attitude – The Difference That Makes All The Difference” and “The Definitive Guide To Generating Consulting Clients”.
Cody’s clients range from Sporting Stars to Celebrity Marketers to Billion Dollar Corporations.