WordCamp Wellington 2018

Meet the wonderful world of seniors blogging for personal reasons. I’ve just run a survey of older bloggers, hoping to find answers to these questions.

• How do they blog?
• Why do they blog?
• What usability and accessibility problems affect them?
• Could blogging be used to help isolated older people? And if so, how can we make it dead easy for everyone?

The General Data Protection Regulation presents the greatest overhaul of data laws to Europe in 20 years, however its effect will be go beyond the borders of the European Union. Not only is the landscape of data law changing, but with data breaches from Equifax and Facebook, it’s now more important than ever that businesses remain careful and trustworthy data stewards.

This talk will provide an overview of the major changes brought in by the GDPR, what businesses need to know in order to comply, and why data privacy is becoming an even greater issue in the minds of consumers.

Intended Audience: Business owners, product owners

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.

Let’s explore diversity in the WordPress community!
There is lots of positive chatter about diversity in the tech space, and with that chatter comes lots of questions.

Is there much diversity in the WordPress community currently? What role do we play in encouraging diversity as WordPress users, developers, employers, and contributors? How can we improve diversity?

In this talk, we will identify what you can do to attract diverse talent as well as 3 ways you can personally contribute to diversity in the WordPress community.

Intended Audience: All

Starting a journey is a single step. When we took those first steps in 2015, little did we know that we would be creating the core features that would one day turn into WordPress-ception. A WordPress website that creates new WordPress websites. Learn about the process and tools we’ve used to automate bespoke WordPress theme design and development entirely. We’ve refined the process down from what used to take weeks, to a matter of minutes.

Intended Audience: Designers, Developers, Business

How do you turn your WordPress expertise into a sustainable income? What do clients want to hear from you? How can you make your freelance business run smoothly? During this presentation, you will learn how to promote your services without being pushy, the easiest ways to manage your finances, how to find new clients, the 4 formulas for calculating your business success, and dozens of online tools you can use to make a successful freelancing business.

Intended Audience: Freelance WordPress professionals and amateurs

When we hear the phrase ‘remote working’ – there are imaginings of beaches, cocktails, coffee shops and remote locations ruffling through our minds. What these images actually embody are ‘freedom’.

Freedom from the 9-5 office life, freedom to be autonomous and to work in a more sustainable manner.

This talk visits a few continents, but more so – it explores the excellent; and the realities of remote working as a WordPress engineer for a completely remote company.

Intended Audience: General really

SEO is just as much a communications function as it is technical.

Using case studies and examples, Peter Mahoney will demonstrate how proper SEO can revolutionize your visits AND engagement.

WordPress, fortunately, makes the whole process pretty streamlined, I’ll also give suggestions for using WP as an ideal platform for making search engines happy.

This is the story of how I became involved with WordPress, and the WordPress community, and also how attending WordCamp Sydney 2014 changed my life. It will give examples of how giving back to WordPress can be beneficial in many ways, and also hopefully inspire those just embarking on their WordPress journey to follow their dreams, and maybe even some tidbits for seasoned WordPressers.

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 Blacker will take you through how hosting has changed over time, what is available now to help with your WordPress site, and what you should be looking for in choosing the right provider.

Intended Audience: New to intermediate user.

Regardless of its size, the most critical pillar of maintaining and growing your business is going to be servicing clients. For some of us, this is one of the most invigorating parts of what we do, for others, it can be one of the hardest.

In this talk the speaker will propose answers to the following questions:

1. How do you keep sensible boundaries with your clients?
2. How do you say NO without ruining your relationship with your client?
3. How do you make your client an ally instead of feeling like they’re an interruption?
4. How will really serving your client actually serve you?

In the whole gamut of clients, from solopreneurs to international global corporations, one thing is constant, you need your them more than they need you. How this often plays out is that you find yourself bending over backwards to keep them happy… sometimes to your own detriment.

In this talk, you’ll learn how to make yourself indispensable to your clients, without becoming a doormat.

Intended Audience: Freelancers, Business Owners, Anyone with clients.

The new WordPress editor is coming, and it’s quite a departure from the classic “text in a box” mode that we’re used to.

In this talk, we’ll discover hidden features and workflow tips to help optimise our writing flow. We’ll also discuss editing and layout trends enabled by Gutenberg, to help our content stay fresh and engaging.

Do you know how people are using your website? If not you’re unlikely to be meeting your audience needs, and making the most of your content. Audience data from analytics packages like Google Analytics is so important, and Lana Gibson will get rid of your data fear and confusion. She’ll talk about using analytics in a practical way to make successful digital content, including:

• beginnings in GOV.UK – starting with user data
• misconceptions about analytics, and what works
• how small content changes can have significant impact
• creating a data culture in your organisation
• Te Papa and Radio NZ case studies

Intended Audience: People who manage and work on websites