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.