Freelancing is easy. That is, until you rely on it to pay the bills. Whether your a seasoned agency owner or a just-starting-out freelancer, having the right tools and systems in place to manage your projects and handle repetitive tasks is sink or swim important.

I’m going to take you through some of the tools I use, including Trello, Mix Max, Google Apps and Zapier, and the ways I use them to run my business.

If you’re in the space of building WordPress sites and getting paid for it, this session is for you.

Having a good development environment is crucial to pump out good code consistently and efficiently. You will find a multitude of “How To’s” for developing on Mac but not so Much on Windows, even those do not fully utilise all Windows has to offer, like Hyper-V. Let me show you how to build a complete WordPress and Web dev environment, running in a Hyper-V Linux VM on Windows in less than 30 mins.

This talk will cover some things I’ve learned working customer support for WordPress.com. These things include:

• when you need to get in-your-face
• domains are hard
• never reply upset
• kill with kindness
• when support informs development

In this session you’ll discover how Australia’s largest outdoor festival, the Woodford Folk Festival, used indepth ideal customer profiling, their blog and Facebook ads to sell 1.6M in tickets with $30K ad spend in the leadup to their 30th Anniversary event. I will walk you through my exact strategy step-by-step so you can replicate it in your own business/blog.

It is important to not just think of SEO, content marketing or social media independently of each other, but rather how they need to be a part of a whole. The importance of creating content people search for is huge. With this in mind I intend to show techniques such as the use of keyword analysis tools to create valuable content. But once that content is done, what do you do?

Being smart about social media and choosing the ones that work for your business is key. Knowing where your audience is, is vital for your business. Sometimes just one social media platform is what you need, and that platform might not be the one everyone raves about. That’s fine. You need to be having the right conversation, with the right people, at the right time and place.

The presentation looks at the current social media marketing trend (which is here to stay) – video marketing (included throughout the presentation are statistics and case studies). I look at how video marketing can help you achieve your bigger business goals. I look at current and projected statistics of video marketing and what every business can do now to get ahead. I look at how search (Google) will be affected by video and why we MUST have video content on our website. I look at how social is being affected by video and ways to maximise efforts in this area (including how to amplify the content, how to repurpose video to reduce content creation time and how to leverage video within different social media networks to increase brand presence). I also have a list of tools and plugins for WordPress users to make the process simple.

This talk is about the importance of end-to-end testing, and not treating UX as something separate from programming. Promoting the idea that UX problems are fundamentally engineering issues, not design flaws that can be fixed later. This is aimed at a technical audience (plugin devs, designers, site implementors) but is not highly technical – includes examples of UI and error handling failures in general and from WP sites.

The thing about speed is that people only notice when it’s absent and this absence affects every metric you care about. + Bounce rate + Search ranking + Conversion + Page views + Customer satisfaction + Revenue Learn the top tips and tricks in order to speed up your website and increase satisfaction.

The presentation would cover utilising task managers such as Grunt & Gulp in theme development workflow. It would cover what task managers are and what led us to utilise them in theme development. How to get started and how we incorporate it into our development. What we have seen as the major benefits and the typical type of modules we’re using and why. It would also cover some helpful hints, mistakes that we’ve made, and also management and version control.

Whether we’re representing ourselves, our business, or being paid to represent another business, we all have an online “voice”. This voice is one of the most important tools we have to reach our target audience in a meaningful way, and convert our online chattering into tangible results. In this presentation Talia will share with us how to develop our online voice, how to change it to suit our business or blog, and what tools to use to match our online voice.

How to grow from a one-man-band into an agency. Taking the leap and loving it.

• Building a team, how, who and what to look out for
• Attracting and retaining great clients
• Selling professionally and effectively
• Avoiding bad clients
• Managing Projects effectively
• Developing a culture
• Celebrate the wins
• Learn from the mistakes

When you digging into WordPress’s action and filters sometimes it can be difficult to find out what data is being passed to different actions and filters, how many queries are run on a page and which scripts are being enqueued and dequeued. Bronson will teach you how to setup your local development environment so you can debug WordPress in real time so you don’t spend hours tearing your hair out trying to create a new plugin for your clients or customers. Bronson will show you how to use Xdebug, PhpStorm, WP Debug Bar and Query Monitor while you’re developing your plugin to increase your speed so you can ship your work faster!

Why the Panama Papers leak should never have happened.

Who wants to get into your website? It’s not about what you have, it’s about what they can leave behind. Security is about making life hard for hackers. The biggest lie in WordPress security – automating your security will not keep you safe. Security is a mindset – it’s all about doing simple things, over and over again.

Download & Setup of Instant Articles, Adding Facebook Ads, Google Analytics (via 3rd party plugin and directly within the plugin itself) and basic run down of Rules.

At Matter Solutions, we recognised that there was a need for cheaper custom themes out in the marketplace. Currently, the only way to build a theme really quickly is to download or purchase an existing theme and begin modifying it… remember this is done by creating a child theme (shame on those who don’t). We decided to innovate by creating a fully implemented design and development framework into a base WordPress theme, complete with Sass for styling that allows for rapid customisation of branding elements and is highly extendable. The result is something that matters, something we think is worth releasing open source. We built a custom WordPress theme in 10 minutes. And we have a screen-capture video to prove it.

The system works for low and high budget clients because a developer can focus effort on the changes the clients wants to pay for and give them an “out of the box” (still great) design on the rest. This means using this framework can have a direct significant impact for clients and developers businesses. We’re using this at Matter Solutions to empower lower-budget clients with a basic website that they can upgrade later, if they want, knowing that futures works won’t bring “technical debt” because we all know “tacking something on” can bite you later on.

The websites using this system are fully responsive, load faster than the popular purchased themes and are SEO friendly. And the best part? We’re open sourcing it (ETA late April). Link to the repo on github coming soon.

I built my first WooCommerce plugin out of necessity 2 years ago, and have been building new ones almost weekly every since. While WooCommerce extensions start off just like other WordPress plugins, there’s still some things to keep in mind that can make your life a lot easier. I’ll take you through every step of building your first WooCommerce extension, providing you with the knowledge and skills required to bend WooCommerce to meet all of your needs, from altering product pages to modifying the checkout flow.

It was the Greek Philosopher Heraclitus who said “There is nothing permanent except change” and another, perhaps more well known American philosopher, Billy Crystal who, said “Change is such hard work.” Both of them though millennia apart recognise two existential certainties, change happens and navigating change can be difficult.

We as WordPress users and developers are navigating an ecosystem that’s rife with change, Matt Mullenweg counselled us in the last State of the Word to Learn Javascript deeply, the REST API is changing the game in terms of what’s possible with WordPress… Furthermore, it’s almost as if every day there’s some new framework, toolkit or productivity hack that could ‘totally change your workflow’. Quite frankly, it’s overwhelming.

Such looming changes may fill you with either excitement, or dread, so in this talk Dee will be discussing the kinds of ways you can adjust your trajectory, and your mindset to confidently navigate large scale change as it approaches.

Search engines love it. Social media platforms have embraced it. Your audience can’t get enough of it. Online video is everywhere, but how is your brand using video?

Too often businesses approach video in entirely the wrong way, they invest in production but just fail to see the results. In this presentation, I’ll walk you through my 7 Elements for an Effective Online Video Strategy and introduce you to the importance of developing a clear strategy that works seamlessly with your overall marketing strategy before you even think about rolling the camera.

Introduction to the Customizer, what it is and does, and what options are available, followed by a tutorial on how to add your own settings to the Customizer and how to see them in the live preview. This will include code snippets in the slides, as well as a demo of it in action on a local site.

Cath Beaton (Phase Creative) and Troy Dean present their ideas and experiences of how they have developed and grown as individuals in their respective businesses by being prepared to get out of their comfort zone.

The amazing online community spirit that is synonymous with WordPress has allowed them to feel supported whilst they navigate the tricky terrain of growing up as business owners. WordPress truly is unique in that it unites people and allows niche communities to develop very quickly. This sense of belonging fosters collaboration and nurtures relationships which quite often result in new friendships, business partnerships and enormous self-development. Their talk will inspire other WordPress users to find support in their own online communities so they too can evolve and develop in whatever field they choose. They will also touch on some of the technology behind this growth (BuddyPress and bbPress).

This presentation is a case study of an innovation in our business, our ‘website in a day’ product that initially came to life when we kept on encountering businesses with next to no budget for their website, and kept having website projects we were working on blow out to weeks, months and even years – not good for us or the clients! Some people called us crazy to offer this service. Others regularly tell us ‘it just isn’t possible to create a website in a day’.

Most people take 4-6 weeks minimum to build websites and there is always scope creep! Startups, SMES on a limited budget and people needing a website in a hurry for a tight deadline are our perfect audience and we’re going to share what we do at WordCamp!

Have you ever had a light-bulb moment? Whether you’re a business owner, blogger, developer or dreamer, you probably know the feeling. Product ideas can be gold – if you know how to use them. WordPress can help you get there. In fact, thanks to new features like the REST API, there’s never been a better time to use WordPress as a platform for your product projects.

Luke will outline his framework for taking your product idea from conception through to reality, with his tips on experimentation, validation, user engagement, hiring, branding, and monetisation.

This talk offers an insight into the methods we use at Conetix to determine the root cause of a hacked website. This will include examples of some of the more common exploits seen and what they look like in the log files.

Determining the root cause is important in order to ensure you’ve blocked the hacker from returning. Finally, some tips in order to greatly reduce the chances of the site being hacked in the first place. Developers through to businesses will hopefully see not only the importance of keeping a secure site, but what needs to be done when it’s too late.

One of the hardest ‘Good Intentions’ in business is to send a regular client email newsletter. How many times has a business started a newsletter only to lose energy and stop after 2 – 3 times? Why? Because it can take 3 – 5 hours to create a newsletter, write the content, source images, and send it out… and business owners and their staff ‘don’t have the time’.

With WordPress’s in build ‘Press This’ feature and the Tribulant Newsletter Plugin any business can create a client newsletter in less than 17 minutes. No writing, no image sourcing, no formatting, no hitting the send button, no problem in no time at all. This is one of the simplest, easiest ways to communicate regularly with clients, generate leads and sales in less time that a normal one-to-one business presentation takes.

Tracey will take you through the essential elements of promoting a local business – from planning and building your website to SEO and marketing.

• Tips on how to plan and structure a local business website and how to avoid some common mistakes
• Inspiring trust in potential customers
• Developer tips (that business owners don’t need to know how to do, but should ensure their developer does)
• Ways to attract new customers and keep existing ones loyal
• How to leverage SEO and social media to build your business locally

Tracey’s talk is aimed at small business owners and those making websites for them.