Mark Slingsby is co-founder and Technical Director of local Internet Service Provider RSAWEB. Through his passion for entrepreneurship and technology, Mark has worked for over 11 years in a variety of technical and strategic consulting roles for various IT companies, including, RSAWEB, Even Flow Distribution and White Wall Web. RSAWEB was the first to build and release its own Cloud Computing service to the South African market in early 2010. Mark also co-founded Net Prophet, SA’s largest free to attend, Entrepreneurial Tech Start-up Conference that aims to educate people and stimulate the Tech scene in South Africa.
Session: Scaling WordPress
Time: 13:55 – 14:20
Tell us more about how you became interested in WordPress, what about it drives your continued interest?
RSAWEB hosts a lot of WordPress sites for customers and many of our own properties are built on WordPress. This allows us to gain valuable experience into WordPress and how to optimise it effectively.
Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Cape Town?
We think we’re good a speeding up wordpress sites!
What is your talk going to be about?
Scaling the average wordpress site from zero to thousands of unique visitors a day.
What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
How to deliver better wordpress websites
What is your favourite WordPress theme and/or plugin, and why?
W3-Total-Cache for obvious reasons….!
Can you share one WP tip with us?
Turn caching off at your own peril.
What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Cape Town 2012?
Keeping up with all the new developments!
Do you make money from wordpress?
Yes, from hosting wordpress sites
Is WordPress an effective platform for getting your message across?
It works for us!
Mark, you’ve co-founded NetProphet and as a Tech conference it has been a major success. You are speaking at WordCamp and on the same weekend Pychon is being held in Cape Town. What is it about Cape Town that makes it attract Technology startups?
Its gotta be in the water! Seriously, my parents said i should do ‘my own thing’ since I was a little kid, both parents are entrepreneurs, I don’t think I was wired any other way. I suspect there were others in similar positions. South Africa has the uniqueness of both some skilled individuals with a 1st world education and the rest of the 3rd world of SA mixed together, this delivers us a unique situation where the current market isn’t overcrowded as a fully developed economy like the EU is and that some people have the skills to take advantage of that uniqueness.
