Sessions

Find out how to find the right products to sell, set up your store, get it live and how to then build your online sales and marketing.

WordPress plugin development is a million dollar business. As companies like Sandhills development report plugin sales of $2.7 million for 2018, and with the rise of large plugin development shops around the world, the requirement for skilled WordPress plugin developers has increased. So how do you stand out above the crowd and level up your WordPress plugin development skills.

In this workshop we’ll be building a plugin, but at the same time will cover a range of plugin development best practices, sharing lessons learned from my time as a member of the Codeable plugin vetting team.

Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It is a human-centered design approach to solving problems. The focus is on the people you are creating for which leads to better products and services.

Design Thinking has a five-stage process
1. Empathize
2. Define (the problem)
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Test
Participants will be taught practically about this process and carry out a class activity.

In comparison with other Social Media platforms, Pinterest is still for the most part untapped territory. 

Pinterest uses a very different approach than other social media platforms. 

Join this workshop/talk to learn how to integrate your WordPress website with Pinterest. Tips on how to optimize your profile and grow the traffic to your site. Create a Pinterest Marketing Funnel to capture leads and automate your Pinterest strategy. 

Download the Workbook and bring your laptop. We’ll be going through optimising your profile together

I will be demonstrating how WordPress can be used as a backend platform for mobile apps using WordPress REST API. I will go further and talk about how WP developers can leverage their existing web development skills together with Ionic Framework v4 to create powerful mobile apps that can be deployed to the App stores leveraging the WordPress REST API as a backend service. This workshop will be gold for WP developers who want to develop mobile apps using their existing skillset while avoiding the pitfalls of native development languages. The presentation portion of the workshop may also be useful for project managers and other business professionals who are interested in reducing development costs using WordPress & Ionic.

I’m sure you’ve heard of tools like Gatsby and NextJS that are the new in thing when it comes to websites. If you haven’t that’s alright. In this workshop, Seagyn will give us the tools and guidance required to create our very own static sites and deploy it to a free hosting provider. All code will be provided and whilst knowledge of ReactJS is beneficial, it is not required.

In this workshop, we aim to step through some basic application/system integration and automation using Zapier that can help any SME manage mundane, frustating tasks easily. The automation and integration opportunities are endless, so let’s get started.

Please note that this workshop does not require any coding knowledge!
During the course of this workshop, we’ll get up and running with creating Landing Pages that convert, without writing a single line of code.

The dawn of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Machine Learning is upon us, and WordPress is definitely not exempt! Even though AI is not set to take over peoples jobs, at least not yet, terminologies, keywords and concepts will encourage a new generation of small business owners tomake sites smarter and more automated with the help of services like IBM Watson and Microsoft Azure.
During the course of this workshop I will attempt to explain some basic AI concepts like Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing, to give you some context of whatwill most certainly begin to become a very big focus in the WordPress community. I’ll show you how to get up and running with IBM Watson and Microsoft Azure, for free, and then we’ll tie in the ClassifAI (10up)  plugin to a site of your choosing to start making posts, pages and images intelligent. We’ll then make sure that this works seamlessly with Gutenberg driven sites.
For those of you attending, I’ll also showcase a super secret plugin that Google has been working on behind the scenes to make your WordPress life even better.

In this workshop, we’ll be looking at tweaking a homepage with the newest CSS3 trends. We’ll also focus on using custom classes for blocks that you want to stand out. Contrary to the other Extreme Makeover, we cannot guarantee tears of joy.

This is a workshop and we’ll all be using the same homepage so please make sure you have Stylus (browser extension for Opera, Firefox or Chrome) installed.

With 30 years’ experience, Arnold should be a highlight for WordCamp attendees to engage with. The angle for his topic is about how to make a product and platform dependent company run successfully, with a technical focus. Realistically, Arnold is able to speak on various topics relating to building services that enable small business owners to start, grow, and run their ventures. His specialties are around how large-scale web services fit together to meet customer needs. Having deep technical skills, along with a strong customer focus, allows him to enable high impact changes using incrementally small adjustments.
Arnold can very easily align with whatever topic is preferred at WordCamp based on the needs of the intended audience.

Having worked with and in some of the leading tech companies globally, there is a clear need for greater diversity, opportunity and flexibility when it comes to not only including more women in the workplace, but also when it comes to the substance and quality of the work we deliver.

LIGHTNING TALK WITH SOME SLIDES

A story of learning and failing and learning more and succeeding with building websites, delving into the world of Pay Per Click advertising, and all the analytics that go with it.
The first time a website went down and how I handled it.
My first online shop and learning how to build it.
The world of free vs paid themes and my experiences with it (hint: I am leaning towards free).
The importance of persistent and consistent action and monitoring in Google Ads campaigns in order to improve their performance.
Highlighting the fact that I’m not a “web developer” (not even a WordPress developer), but I am still able to teach myself how to fully craft a functional website, and get better and better at it as a “WordPress website creator”. I like to think of myself as a technology consultant. Jack of all trades, Master of some. I also still like my day job and the Microsoft products I work with there, hence not going full time into the side hustle. In fact, I am a proponent of having a full-time gig that funds the majority of my needs, and having side hustles and personal passion projects, as many as I please, purely for the fun of it.
Lastly, a short checklist of things I do when I first create any WordPress website, including some particular settings I prefer, as well as the few plugins that I install on every single site (Wordfence, YoastSEO).

I’d like to touch on being a woman in a male dominated industry and how even though going it on your own can be scary, it is well worth it. How, if you have the courage, the rollercoaster of life just puts you in the right place at the right time – doing the thing you should be doing.

I could also talk about the world we live in today and how much things have changed in the last few decades. How companies have had to move with the times or get left behind and how we have to get going on our ideas too.

Some key takeaways on the use of photographs both in the design and optimisation of websites.
How photography influences the design and layout of websites. Effective use of images. Workflow for taking, editing, optimising and uploading photographs. Different ways of using images in the design. Optimising images and load times.

Taking the eCommerce plunge: my ups and downs as an entrepreneur

I’d love to share on brand building and the importance of understanding how, and why, to approach branding for any business. I think it is super valuable for business owners (and freelancers) to have a holistic understanding of what branding really is, what it encompasses, why they should pay credence to it, and how they can go about doing that.

If I was to outline the talk with a blurb it would be something like this:

“When we think of branding we almost always immediately think of the visual representation of a brand. The logo, the typography, the stationery. Obviously, the visual representation is a major part of it but a brand is so much more than what can be seen. It is essential to understand the importance and power of what branding does for a business and why you should care about yours a lot more than you probably do.

No matter what sector you’re in or what audience you are trying to reach, your branding matters. And not just a little bit.

In this presentation, you’ll find out what branding is and why it impacts everything you do in business.”

Talk Description: Sometimes it’s not as easy as just running Google ads, Facebook ads and Instagram ads to drive traffic to your website. Regulated (and sometimes unregulated) markets offer gigantic challenges for modern-day digital marketers, but it also leaves huge opportunities open where the average marketer can’t compete. Ruan will be giving us some first-hand examples of “marketing the unmarketable”, providing insights and actionables that can be applied to any digital marketing strategy. After all, he breaks these barriers on his own website so that he can apply the same strategies for his clients.

Corporate life versus the entrepreneurial journey: the lessons I have learned along the way as an executive in tech companies, a freelance journalist, author and app developer. What entrepreneurs moving into the corporate space should know, and vice versa.

For those of you who have read the ebook, you’ll know exactly what this talk is about and like me, you’re constantly looking to not limit yourself to time. If you’re a freelancer or business owner and find yourself constantly having to do more hours in a day to pay bills, then this talk will hopefully help you out. On top of that I’ll take you through learnings and strategies I have picked up over the years trying to move away from selling my skills per hour (not-scalable) and selling my skills by the collection of my experience (scalable)

Leading distributed teams can be complex, when looking from the outside. With the future of work being a distributed work culture, leading teams across the globe is now more relevant than ever before.

I’ll share a few principles, tips, and tools I’ve used while leading distributed teams since 2011, as well as starting points for applying a distributed leadership culture to your team and/or business.

When I first set out to launch my online store, I was really excited and dived in without really thinking about the practical aspects of it. This ended up costing me a lot of time as I often had to go back and correct the mistakes that I had done initially.
Some of the key lessons that I have learned through this experience include:
1) Drawing a concept of your store on pen and paper to get an idea of how you want the store to look, this also helps to find the right theme.
2) When choosing a theme, simplicity is key. Flashy themes might catch the eye but they can also become overwhelming to your customers.
3) Testing your theme demo on different size screens to see how it looks before settling on it – some themes might look great on large screens but look totally inappropriate on mobile.
4) Making sure that the theme has the key features that you’re looking for (ie: sidebar locations, menu location, overall layout) – it gives an idea of what needs to be done and saves time having to fix it or change it afterwards.
5) Using good professional pictures – your product might be excellent but if the images aren’t sleek enough it can create a dull first impression
6) Start developing a social media presence concurrently – building a social media presence takes time. Don’t wait until the store is ready to create your social media profiles, start interacting with prospective clients.
7) Knowing which plugin does what on your store – while setting up your store, it’s easy to lose track of the plugins that you’re using and before you know it, you have a huge list of plugins but you’re not sure about their roles on your site. You might decide to “clean up” one day and delete an important plugin which will leave you in a state of panic when your store doesn’t look the same anymore.