Sessions
There are slots for 20 speakers to deliver their presentations. Presentations should be 20 – 25min long and there will be a short Q&A session after each talk.
Panel Discussion Topic
WordPress is a part of many modern businesses, as either the platform for their web presence and marketing, their development platform or sales channel. As amazing as WordPress is, you need more than a WordPress website to start, run and grow a successful business.
Many startups fail and not every great idea is destined to be transformed into a profitable business. Our panel will discuss how they started, funded and managed their businesses from startup idea to successful enterprise.
Mark Forrester
Mark Henderson
Riaan Knoetze
Allen Jaffe
Joe Botha
Ashley Shaw (Moderator)
Scaling WordPress
WordPress was never initially designed to handle high volume websites and systems, through first hand experience with customers trying to scale wordpress, RSAWEB learned a lot about the potential pitfalls, how to avoid them and actually improve on wordpress’ delivery performance.
Session: Scaling WordPress
Time: 13:55 – 14:20
Pushing Your Blog into the Social World
Today more and more people are relying on social media as a source of information of all categories. As a blogger, you need to get personal with your readers and expected audience but also careful enough not to end up looking like you are spamming them.
My talk will discuss ways to get your blog deeply connected with your readers using social media channels, how to choose which channel to use and how to use each channel to ensure you get maximum reach.
It will cover blog aggregators, common social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, other blogging communities and email subscriptions.
Session: Pushing Your Blog into the Social World
Time: 12:00 – 12:25
How to Highjack a Themeshop
Starting a WordPress theme shop today is extremely tough – mostly thanks to the sheer number of established competitors in the market. In addition, you require some pretty amazing skills to make a dent, these include:
- Top notch design;
- Amazing PHP / WordPress / MySQL development skills
- Guru marketing skills
- A sales channel with an online shop
- A lot of hope and luck that your WP products get noticed
“How to Highjack a Themeshop” will address the issue of developing childthemes for commercial purposes by individuals and small companies. Specifically, it it will focus on:
- Clients vs. Products
- Identifying a Themeshop to Highjack
- Ticking off a Checklist of Needs
- Design / Development Implications and Decisions
- Selling Online
- Low-Budget Guerilla Marketing
- Highjacking the Highjacker – Themeshop Opportunities
Finally we’ll conclude the talk with a practical example of how Tiny Giant Studios has transitioned (or rather is in the process of) from a strict agency setup with one-off clients, to a company that develops WordPress products for profit.
Session: How to Highjack a Themeshop
Time: 09:30 – 09:55
The Best Tools for the Job
Whether you are using WordPress as a platform for your business, blog, or building website or applications for your clients, you need to use quality tools. This talk aims to showcase some of the best tools for each area of a WordPress site so that you can run your WordPress powered business successfully. I’ll be running through themes, plugins, SaaS platforms, and general guidance in order to choose the best tools for you.
Session: The Best Tools for the Job
Time: 15:15 – 15:40
Optimizing WordPress on the frontend
WordPress is a great CMS, but start adding plugins, use a big custom theme with lots of built in options and before you know it, you’re loading 10+ javascript libraries and files, 4 or 5 stylesheets, custom fonts, etc. These all play a massive role on how quickly your site loads, and has an effect on your viewers/users, search engines and your hosting infrastructure. The aim of this talk is to take you through some optimization methods, plugins that you can use, as well as where to find and fix problem areas.
Session: Optimizing WordPress on the frontend
Time: 14:25 – 14:50
Midgets On Unicycles, Steve Hofmeyr & Elvis In Tableview (KEYNOTE)
In last year’s WordCamp talk I spoke about online communities, and why they’re important. I also unpacked some key ways to build a profitable community.
This year, I’m going to talk about the single most important factor within building a community.
The most successful teams, individuals, businesses, employees, entrepreneurs, managers, publishers, blogs, leaders, visionaries, programmers and disrupters, all share this factor – it is the common thread that binds them in their success.
Whether you’re a writer or a coder, a publisher or a technician, I’m excited to share my findings in a focused presentation.
Session: Midgets On Unicycles, Steve Hofmeyr & Elvis In Tableview
Time: 10:50 – 11:25
How many drummers does it take to build a website?
In my day, when we had a gig, we hand-drew our own flyers, copied them using the drama teachers pass-code on the college photocopier, and they were distributed by whoever had the afternoon off. We passed around badly recorded demos on cassette tapes, and only Gordon Gecko carried a cellphone.
These days most artists or bands worth their salt make use of the never-ending supply of Social Media sites out there to promote their wares. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and their like are fantastic promotion tools, but why send all your fans to other sites for Mark Zuckerberg to punt them viagra when you can build your own central hub for all your various social media. With the same level of technical know-how as playing the riff from “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the cost of a new packet of bass-guitar strings (you’re going to turn the bass player down in the mix anyway), you too could possess your own website combining all the greatest hits of the social media world in one place (viagra punting optional).
Session: How many drummers does it take to build a website?
Time: 16:15 – 16:40
WordPress to manage Mxit Apps. Really?
One evening in July, four friends sat at a restaurant in Greenside talking about the recent start of the Olympics. There was such as a vibe from Cameron van der Burgh’s gold medal, the friends wondered if the news of his medal had spread to the whole of South Africa, or just those watching satellite TV?
The group decided to put an App on Mxit specifically around how South Africa was performing at the Olympics.
The first case study for mxPress was born, and 4 hours later they had launched the “SAGold” Mxit app, using the mxPress Plugin for WordPress.
WordPress was the natural choice, as one of the friends was a Journalist with experience in using WordPress , and Mxit was the ideal audience as it reaches more than 9 million active users in South Africa, and one of the friends had recently launched the mxPress Plugin. Over the next 3 weeks, four journalists contributed to the Mxit App via WordPress, posting news and SA medal standings.
mxPress is an Open Source (BSD-3 license) plugin created by Kazazoom (Pty) Ltd, a Joburg based Mxit 3rd party Design & Development House. The Plugin gives you the ability to integrate an existing or new WordPress site, as an App on Mxit. Kazazoom provides the Plugin for free (and open source license) and builds their business around maintaining the Plugin and associated Mxit Apps for corporate clients. So far, one commercial client (top financial institution) and one community project (SAGold) operates on Mxit using this technology, with many new organisations and developers recently having started experimenting with the Plugin.
Attend this talk if you want to find out more about what WordPress’s potential is for Content Management beyond that of a BLOG or Website.
What have you NOT thought of yet, that you could do with WordPress in your business?
Disclaimer: Eric has asked us to declare up-front that he is not a WordPress technical expert and would like to apologise for any non geek speak he might utter…..
Session: “Open Source mxPress Plugin”
Time: 09:00 – 09:25
Speaker SpotlightSchedule mxPress webste mxPress plugin mxPress SVNKazazoom
Monetizing Your WordPress Website – Treating Your Blog As A Business
How do you make your website work for you? You have the audience, but your website does not meet its objective to generate sales or leads for you.
In this session we will discuss various strategies and techniques to monetize your website:
- Can I make money from my website? Changing your mindset has a lot to do with how you look at your website
- Your audience psychology: Understanding your audience and giving them what they need. Using Analytics and other free tools to better understand your website visitors
- Top 5 ways to monetize your website. Explaining the various advertising networks and how they can add value to your website.
- Banner ads vs Contextual ads. Explaining the difference and what is best for your website
- Tracking you success and optimizing for better results. Everything on your website can be tracked and you will learn how to use the statistics to optimize your website for better conversion ratios
- Learning from other websites: Simple case studies to show you how
- Explaining 7 simple steps to get your audience to act.
- Getting your “call to action” right
- “Thinking out of the box”
- Essential WordPress plugins to assist you to monetize your website. Plugins the “gurus” use and why they use it.
The session has a lot of examples and case studies. It is really a “fun” topic and my goal is to get the audience to be more creative than just putting banners on their websites and wait for response.
Session:Monetizing Your WordPress Website – Treating Your Blog As A Business
Time: 10:00 – 10:25
Are Social metrics really affecting SEO?
Social media is slowly finding it’s roll in a broader digital marketing strategy but how does social media affect SEO or does it at all? Neil Pursey will discuss his research around this topic. He will suggest a few techniques and WordPress plugins that will help you to grow your website’s social presence. The social plugins he’ll be discussing are Yoast’s WordPress SEO, Social Metrics and Social Slick Share. How to use Facebook debugger and how to interpret it.
Session: Are Social metrics really affecting SEO?
Time: 11:30 – 11:55
Site Speed = Success! – Optimising WordPress from the Server up
How to Find Site Performance from the server up to WordPress itself. This session will look at how some good performance gains can be made in tuning MySQL, Installing and Tuning APC and then getting the most of out W3 Total Cache.
MySQL performance is a common bottleneck with busier WP sites, I’ll lay out some recommended settings for single app server/single DB server sites and some recommendations on scaling MySQL/Point to how to do it with WP sites in particular and useful plugins and resources.
APC can provide huge gains to WP performance if configured correctly, I’ll take you the install process for common environments (Centos/RedHat, Cpanel & Debian/Ubuntu) then through a recommended configuration that should work for “most” people, then address some common issues that most often hit people and how to solve them.
With W3TC I will provide some recommended configurations (not the default settings!), starting with single server setups and will briefly touch on the differences when using multiple servers.
Session: Site Speed = Success! – Optimising WordPress from the Server up
Time: 13:35 – 13:50
Shifting the WordPress Mindset
We’ll be taking a look back in time at the evolution of WordPress core, themes and plugins, comparing to present day and forecasting possible evolutions for the future.
We’ll be exploring how the mindset and needs of WordPress users helped to craft the evolutionary path WordPress and WordPress products are on and the ecosystem that has grown around WordPress.
Session: Shifting the WordPress Mindset
Time: 15:45 – 16:10