The local community around 🇦🇺 WordCamp Sydney 2019 (120 miles):
Surry Hills, New South Wales, Australia
Mona Vale, New South Wales, Australia
Bella Vista, New South Wales, Australia
Kingswood, New South Wales, Australia
Mount Hutton, New South Wales, Australia
Liverpool, New South Wales, Australia
Bonnells Bay, New South Wales, Australia
➡️ Do you know of any other WordPress folks in this area? Please encourage them to add themselves!
Dion Hulse
Getting Involved With WordPress And Its Community
Come along and find out all the different ways that you can get involved in the WordPress project and the huge community that surrounds it.
Give your Five for the Future back to the project.
James Carmody
Beaver Builder
Come along to find out more about what the Beaver Builder page builder can do.
Meet other Beaver Builders, ask and answer questions.
Panel of Experts – Q&A – Page Builders
Everyone and their dog seems to be using a page builder just now and there are many on the market all working a slightly different way.
If you have a burning page builder question, you can post it to the #WCSyd hashtag on Twitter, ask on our Facebook Page or the form below.
This Q&A session is sponsored by Elementor.
Jordan Gillman
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.
Have the confidence to track down and fix issues with your WordPress site.
Briana Graydon
Let’s Get Engaged
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.
Panel of Experts – Q&A – Business Ops
Our speaker submissions this year were overwhelmingly business focused so it seems right to have a panel of experts in business operations for you to ask questions of.
If you have a burning business operations question, you can post it to the #WCSyd hashtag on Twitter, ask on our Facebook Page or the form below.
Zohair Yousafi
Wil Brown
ACF | Advanced Custom Fields
Advanced Custom Fields, ACF, is a plugin that extends the native custom field on post types.
I’ll give you an introduction on how it works, pricing and some of the features it has.
Meet other ACF users and ask some questions.
Gravity Forms
Having issues with Gravity Forms or you haven’t seen it in action before?
I’ll give you a quick intro to what Gravity Forms can do and help field some questions too.
Meet other Gravity Forms users and share some tips.
Speed Networking
The ultimate way to network with lots of people in a small amount of time.
Speed networking is an ideal opportunity, in a safe environment, to practice your elevator pitch for your business.
Your elevator speech should be brief. Restrict the speech to 30-60 seconds — that’s the time it takes to ride an elevator, hence the name. You don’t need to include your entire work history and career objectives. Your pitch should be a short recap of who you are and what you do.
You need to be persuasive. Even though it’s a short pitch, your elevator speech should be compelling enough to spark the listener’s interest in your idea, organization, or background.
For more info on elevator pitches read The Balanced Careers blog post. or this fun video on elevator pitches.
I’m New To WordCamp
If you haven’t been to WordCamp Sydney or any WordCamp’s before, turn up to this hallway track and network with other newcomers.
This is a great chance to meet new people, spark a friendship and get to know other attendees.
Perhaps you can go for dinner later on or meet up for a few drinks at the party.
I’ll cover some points that will help make your WordCamp conference the best experience it can be.
Code of conduct applies as always.
Corey Dodd
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.
Helping people understand what types of businesses and people are the best fit for them and how they can attract more of those clients, to be happier and have a higher profit margin.
Shikha Colwill
Strategy Is Not Negotiable
This talk covers the following points:
The talk will cover a high-level of information which can be adapted by anyone who owns a business or website online.
To learn the importance of research and strategy before implementing an online presence.
Lisa Hewitt
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.
The simplicity of Divi and WooCommerce now.
Adrian O’Hagan
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.
How to think about building more advanced subscription powered WordPress sites with external billing engines.
Ben May
Panel of Experts – Q&A – Business Ops
Our speaker submissions this year were overwhelmingly business focused so it seems right to have a panel of experts in business operations for you to ask questions of.
If you have a burning business operations question, you can post it to the #WCSyd hashtag on Twitter, ask on our Facebook Page or the form below.
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.
How to think about building more advanced subscription powered WordPress sites with external billing engines.
Ricky Blacker
Panel of Experts – Q&A – Page Builders
Everyone and their dog seems to be using a page builder just now and there are many on the market all working a slightly different way.
If you have a burning page builder question, you can post it to the #WCSyd hashtag on Twitter, ask on our Facebook Page or the form below.
This Q&A session is sponsored by Elementor.
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.
Knowing how hosting impacts on your site, and how to confidently choose the right hosting for your unique situation.
Brook McCarthy
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:
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.
How to better on-board your clients.
Jo Minney
Panel of Experts – Q&A – Page Builders
Everyone and their dog seems to be using a page builder just now and there are many on the market all working a slightly different way.
If you have a burning page builder question, you can post it to the #WCSyd hashtag on Twitter, ask on our Facebook Page or the form below.
This Q&A session is sponsored by Elementor.
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!
Nik Cree
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?).
Creative and interesting ways to grow your prospect database quickly using WordPress Plugins that engage and WOW your visitors.
Haley Brown
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.
Tips on creating a healthy work life balance.
Jane Tweedy
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.
Learn how to create a customer care program and gain more work from the client:
George Pappas
The Healthy Baker – Flipping the Brief
We were engaged by leading agribusiness Manildra Group to transform their flour product – The Healthy Baker – into an eCom solution.
We did some initial discovery and flipped the brief, prompting the solution to change from a ‘box moving’ solution to one that focused on rich, engaging, resourceful recipe-style content.
That collaboration with client is key… and we should always be solutions-orientated.
Jasmine Andrews
Planning Your Website Roadmap: Why Every Website Project Needs One To Save It From Expensive Mistakes
Take a walk through the main stages of a website project. Understand the tasks to be completed and the decisions to be made.
Learn who does what, and how to ensure everyone communicates well, for a successful project that launches on time and on budget.
Client education on the roles and responsibilities on a typical website project.
Shaan Nicol
Panel of Experts – Q&A – Business Ops
Our speaker submissions this year were overwhelmingly business focused so it seems right to have a panel of experts in business operations for you to ask questions of.
If you have a burning business operations question, you can post it to the #WCSyd hashtag on Twitter, ask on our Facebook Page or the form below.
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.
We will look at a few ways that you can automate basic tasks to and from WordPress in order to make your life easier.
Jen Jeavons
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.
You’ll learn techniques for managing clients and projects through real life stories and insights I’ve gathered over the last 10 years of growing a WordPress focused agency and team.
Andrew Wright
The Science of WordPress
WordPress has a role in large organisations, but their requirements may be different to what you are used to.
Chris Bryant
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.
How to scale recurring revenue with a growth WordPress plugins business.
Robert Li
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.
This talk will cover a history of load testing, why it’s important, and a live demonstration with an open-source and free tool that everyone can access right now.
Jeff Deutsch
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.)
Teach the audience why they should be hunting for more niche, low competition keywords, and how to build pages for those keywords (without having to create tons more content.)
Cath Hughes
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.
The new Gutenberg block editor presents a learning curve, particularly if you’ve been using the classic WordPress editor for years.
This talk aims to help with a smoother transition (or starting point) to the new editor, whilst revealing some lesser known tips and tricks to working with content effortlessly.
Rosie Shilo
How Outsourcing Can Allow You To Thrive
Rosie Shilo, reveals the hottest tips on how you can easily start outsourcing including
How you can use outsourcing to better leverage your time, money and efforts.
Michael Viller
Elementor Support Session
Meet other Elementor users and ask questions.
Panel of Experts – Q&A – Page Builders
Everyone and their dog seems to be using a page builder just now and there are many on the market all working a slightly different way.
If you have a burning page builder question, you can post it to the #WCSyd hashtag on Twitter, ask on our Facebook Page or the form below.
This Q&A session is sponsored by Elementor.
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.
How to make more advanced websites using custom fields, dynamic content and single page templates and the Elementor page builder.
Luke Carbis
Panel of Experts – Q&A – Page Builders
Everyone and their dog seems to be using a page builder just now and there are many on the market all working a slightly different way.
If you have a burning page builder question, you can post it to the #WCSyd hashtag on Twitter, ask on our Facebook Page or the form below.
This Q&A session is sponsored by Elementor.
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.
Tips for selling a premium plugin .
Emma Kate
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.
You’ll learn the 9 steps I take to creating WordPress websites, from goal-setting and gathering content from the client, to designing, building, the approval process, then wrapping it up before launch with on-page SEO, security, backups and more.
Packed full of time-saving tips and resources to help with designing, building, gathering content and client management, you’ll want to make sure you have a pen and paper handy to note down all the game-changing tools and apps I use that make building websites a breeze.
Kate Toon
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.
In this talk I’ll cover:
Understanding your content and how other humans consume it.
These are the people that make this event happen. They work tirelessly for weeks and months to plan, coordinate, and execute the best event possible. If you get a chance to thank them, please do!
Briana Graydon (+ add me)
Mitch Menghi (+ add me)
Kristen Symonds (+ add me)
Peter Shilling (+ add me)
James Carmody (+ add me)
Wil Brown (+ add me)
No restaurants or bars have been recommended for this event.
No attractions have been recommended for this event.
No accommodations have been recommended for this event.
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After successful 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 conferences, WordCamp Sydney will be happening again in 2019. This year we will be holding the conference in the warmer months of the year, right before the fabulous Australian summer.
We are happy to announce that WordCamp Sydney will take place at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) on the 16th and 17th of November 2019. We expect this to be the biggest WordCamp Sydney conference with over 300+ attendees, 30 speakers, and a wider range of sponsor exhibitions than ever before.
We invite anyone interested in WordPress to attend for a fun, friendly, and fantastic 2 days of learning and meeting like-minded people in the community. Whether you are a developer, business owner, avid blogger, or anything in between, there are no exclusions for who can attend. Keep an eye out on our socials for more information and the latest updates.
The WP World is generously supported by:
WordPress® and its related trademarks are registered trademarks of the WordPress foundation. This website is not affiliated with Automattic, Inc., the WordPress Foundation or the WordPress® open source project.
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