WordCamp Birmingham UK 2015 content ideas

How to propose a session

WordCamp Birmingham UK 2015 session ideas for the running order are listed below.

New ideas for the running order can be proposed in two formats (follow the links to submit an idea):

• talks – these are 20 or 50 minute talks normally consisting of a presentation followed by a question and answer element
• workshops – these are 2 hour 20 minute sessions normally consisting of an introduction by the presenter followed by a practical session – all participants must have their own laptop, capable of connecting the internet via wifi, at the workshop

The durations shown must include all elements of the session, eg Q&A.

It will be assumed that you’re proposing to present the session yourself unless indicated otherwise.

Note to present a talk or workshop you must have a ticket for the conference and, obviously, be present for the relevant session.

Grid

Any blank sessions at the beginning of the WordCamp will be filled using a BarCamp style grid.

Idea: Tony Scott

Tags: Presenter: None

Lightning talks

A session of 10 minute timed talks on WordPress related issues.

If you wish to present a 10 minute talk, use the WPUK contact form to make your proposal by providing a title and a brief explanatory sentence with the subject line ‘WordCamp Birmingham UK 2015 Lightning Talk proposal’.

Idea: Tony Scott

Presenter: Tony Scott

Tags: presentations, talks, 5 minutes, against the clock, don’t panic mister mannering

Proposed 10 minute lightning talks:

• Front end profile editing

  Mark Wilkinson: Having worked on a project where users need control over their profile screens regularly and I did not want them in the admin, I needed a solution to allow them to do this on the front end. In this talk how will how I solved this problem through the development of a plugin and how it is used to easily give users front end profile editing functionality.

• Search engine success with WordPress

  Mike Pead: By following a few simple tips, you can boost your chances in gaining more search engine visibility. This talk will mention some best practices you can do with your WordPress website, such as why you should blog, how to incorporate your keywords in the right way, using an SEO plugin, and more.

• How customer profiling can help you to write better blogs

  Chelsea Haden: I would like to talk about a technique I use which involves customer profiling to help with the development of writing blog content for your business blog. It’s a quick and simple technique that can be used to help you to develop shareable, engaging and informative blogs.

• Implementing hreflang

  Doug Lawrence, Belinda Mostoe: Google and other search engines are making increasing use of hreflang for language and regional URLs. In this Lighting Talk we will discuss why implementing hreflang is important for international websites and how we choose to implement.

• Contributor day

  Herb Miller, Belinda Mostoe: The subject of this talk is about Contributing to WordPress leading up to the 5% giveback that quite a few companies have pledged to do.

Common room

A room where attendees can hack, rest, chat, etc away from the main conference sessions.

Idea: Tony Scott

Presenter: None

Tags: hacking, email, rest

BDD your WordPress

An intro into BDD using Behat and Gherkin. With an example of how to implement it in a WordPress install.

Idea: Iain Cambridge

Presenter: Iain Cambridge

Tags: qa, testing, bdd, behat

Improving the UX of search in WP

Making the search in WordPress a good UX for your users. Thinking about different ways searches can be used in different scenarios and ways to improve upon the out-of-the-box WordPress search.

Idea: Steven Jones

Presenter: Steven Jones

Length: 20 minute talk

Tags: search, ux

Content manage everything!

Tips and tricks on how I try to make sure that practically everything in a WordPress build is made editable by the client through the WordPress dashboard in some way shape or form.

Idea: Mark Wilkinson

Presenter: Mark Wilkinson

Length: 50 minute talk

Tags: content, editor, widgets, custom post types

Customers and the web

Customer experience on the web is really, really important. In this talk, Paul, who’s been in brand marketing for the best part of 15 years (and a good number of those involved with working with the web for brands) shares his insights on making web a better place for customers. Whether desktop or mobile, let’s make better experiences that keep customers coming back.

Idea: Paul Cherry

Presenter: Paul Cherry

Length: 20 or 50 minute talk

Tags: customers, marketing, behaviour, e-commerce, consumer, experience, shopping online, brands, promotions

Working with HHVM and Hack on your next WordPress project

With several large hosting companies now offering HHVM as a drop in replacement their has been a renewed interest in HHVM not just for it’s blazing speed but other enhancements including Hack.

This talk will go through setting up HHVM on your server and demonstrate some of the interesting things you can do with Hack.

Idea: Tim Nash

Presenter: Tim Nash

Length: 20 or 50 minute talk

Tags: hhvm, devops, server stuff

Building a business by using WordPress as an application framework for universities

We’ve worked as a service led agency for 5 years and did so with WordPress – but service is hard. We decided to try creating software-as a-service for universities. This talk explores the why we chose WordPress and the business and technical challenges – from making WordPress work in real time using node.js to utilising multisite to build a solid infrastructure.

Idea: Nathan Monk

Presenter: Nathan Monk

Length: 20 minute talk

Tags: business, application framework, node.js, realtime, heartbeat api, saas, case studies

Catering for WordPress

The catering/restaurant industry has very few tools to help them create/store recipes, plan menus and work out costings that can be shared with members of staff and other branches of a chain.

This talk would cover one solution to this, showing how WordPress has been used as an intranet for businesses in the restaurant/catering industry. Features include working as a tool to itemise ingredients, a stock take facility including the monetary value of stock, help plan and budget dishes and menus, work out costings for bulk recipes down to individual portions and include other factors such as VAT and a variable gross profit.

All of this has been set up using a combination of WordPress MU, custom plugins, custom post types, custom fields and a bespoke theme with all of the necessary maths functions built in. People should come to this if they are developers who are interested in how to take WordPress further than a standard brochure/blog website. There will be some knowledge of PHP, theme development, plugin development and jQuery assumed for this talk.

Idea: Kirsty Burgoine

Presenter: Kirsty Burgoine

Length: 20 or 50 minute talk

Tags: theme development, plugin development, wordpress mu, bespoke theme

Turbo-speed your WordPress website!

Don’t frustrate your visitors with slow page loading speeds. Learn how to make your WordPress website load faster with a few speed optimisation tips. This talk will teach you how to test your loading speed; why and how you can cache your pages; how to reduce the number of files loaded on each page visit; and other tips and tricks.

Idea: Mike Pead

Presenter: Mike Pead

Length: 20 minute talk

Tags: speed optimisation, cache

Managing your WordPress site now and for the future

This workshop is aimed at WordPress users who have already created a site and started adding content to it. It will be a practical session aimed at helping you develop the skills you need to manage your site and make sure it’s robust, fast and regularly updated.

During the workshop there will be some input from the workshop leader but you’ll spend most of the time doing practical work on your own site, with guidance from the instructor, as well as being able to ask questions and discuss practical aspects of running a WordPress site with the rest of the group.

By the end of the workshop you’ll be able to:

• keep your WordPress installation updated and secure
• install and run plugins to automatically back up your site and restore it if things go wrong
• install and configure plugins to help make your site perform better, increasing speed
• install and configure a plugin to enhance your site’s SEO
• link your site to your social media accounts
• create a schedule for yourself to help you keep your site’s content regularly updated and respond to comments if you have them switched on

As this is an interactive workshop numbers are limited.

Idea: Rachel McCollin

Presenter: Rachel McCollin

Length: 2 hour 20 minute workshop

Tags: users, SEO, site management, intermediate, content management

How to market and sell more WordPress websites

WordPress has much to offer to clients but sadly many web designers struggle to sell enough websites to build a sustainable business.

In this fast-paced workshop you’ll learn how to make sure your marketing and sales messages really hit the mark.

You’ll learn things like:

• the 3 key things that all marketing messages MUST have (if any of these is missing your results will be poor)
• how to properly turn features into benefits that your prospective clients will want to buy
• a simple marketing copywriting formula that will increase response from your marketing messages
• measuring your marketing efforts to ensure you’re spending time and money in the right areas
• a simple, but highly effective, referral strategy that you can switch on and off like a tap
• 2 simple (but rarely used) ways of overcoming price objections
• How to pitch WordPress as the obvious choice for the client’s website

After this session you should have enough knowledge to put together a solid sales and marketing plan that will enable you to successfully grow your client base and your business.

Idea: Karl Craig-West

Presenter: Karl Craig-West

Length: 2 hour 20 minute workshop or 50 minute talk

Tags: marketing, sales, win more business

Why it’s time to stop using Photoshop for web design

Adobe’s Photoshop has long reigned supreme when it comes to designing mockups for websites. However, neither it nor its sibling Illustrator are particularly well suited to the task of designing user interfaces – especially now in the age of responsive web design. Worse still, both products are terrible from the perspective of helping developers to take a design and bring it to life.

Enter Sketch 3 and InVision. This talk will focus on how web designers can design responsive websites quickly and accurately – even sites based on the latest frameworks such as Bootstrap and Foundation – help developers to create those sites far more efficiently than they can from a PSD, and how combined with InVision, Sketch 3 can deliver accurate, interactive mockups to clients before a single line of code is even written.

Idea: Ben Furfie

Presenter: Ben Furfie

Length: 20 minute talk

Tags: web design, photoshop, illustrator, sketch 3, invision

How to value price websites

You’ve probably heard about value pricing. But while the theory is great, putting into practice can be quite difficult. How can I work out the value of a website? How much is the website worth to the customer? How can you use options to increase the amount a customer will spend on on their website? Will customers choose me if I’m not the cheapest option? How do I set an anchor price? Does value pricing even work in the UK?

Getting paid what you’re worth is one of the biggest problems those who work with WordPress professionally face every day. I’ll share my journey so far into value pricing and how you too can adopt the approach to increase the amount of money you make from building websites.

Idea: Ben Furfie

Presenter: Ben Furfie

Length: 20 minute talk

Tags: web design, web development, pricing, the business of wordpress, business, value pricing

Training clients on how to use WordPress

A lot of WP developers struggle with training their clients on how to use WordPress. Not just how to use it, but how to grow their business with it.

There’s nothing worse than seeing a beautiful site die on the vine due to a lack of fresh content or poor site management.

Furthermore, some developers are unknowingly hurting their own by businesses by keeping clients in the dark with regards installing plugins and site maintenance etc.

As a freelance WP designer as well as a college lecturer who specializes in teaching WordPress to end-users I would love share my experience in empowering wp end-users to quickly learn how to get the most form their websites and why this can be very beneficial to wp developers and the wp community as a whole.

Idea: Brian Duffy

Presenter: Brian Duffy

Length: 20 or 50 minute talk

Tags: training, learning

Real-time WordPress

This will be a more fleshed out version of the smaller technical talk I did at the Birmingham meet-up. Exploring ideas of using Real-time data within WordPress using technologies as node.js and socket.io.

Fundamentally showings ways to tie the services together using the WP HTTP API for instance.

Idea: Josh Hillier

Presenter: Josh Hillier

Length: 20 or 50 minute talk

Tags: web sockets, socket.io

Theme builders workshop

Building upon my presentation, we will look much further in-depth at some of the tricks & techniques I use all the time to build efficient, easy to manage bespoke WordPress themes for clients. Learn ‘the WordPress way’ of doing things and also how to catch (and fix!) errors early in your code.

During the workshop you will have time to experiment with some of these techniques with guidance and help available from myself and one or two additional expert theme coders.

This workshop will appeal to both beginners and intermediate WordPress theme builders – please bring your laptop with a local install of WordPress along to the session if possible (or sit next to someone that has!) It’s not essential – a notepad and pen will also do for those that don’t have this!

If we get through all of the material and have time, there will also be an opportunity for a short Q&A session to point you in the right direction regarding issues you may have with building themes.

Idea: Jonny Allbut

Presenter: Jonny Allbut

Length: 2 hour 20 minute workshop

Tags: themes

WordPress in local government

We have been using WordPress as content management system Warwickshire County Council for the last two years.

In this talk I will share challenges faced and lessons we have learn in this process beginning with the outcomes of a design review we carried out last year.

The talk will touch on points such as:

• agile working
• User centered design
• WordPress as a CMS for local government

Idea: Nivaria Morales

Presenter: Nivaria Morales

Length: 20 minute talk

Tags: local government, responsive design, user centered design, multisite

Crowdfunding WordPress plugins – The case of QPress

I have been conducting research into crowd-funding of WordPress plugins, which has resulted in many publications. This talk would present a case study of the crowd-funding of QPress, an almost complete WordPress plugin. The study has looked at various geographical factors in the advertising of crowd-funded projects, finding that advertising should be fixed to locations where clicks on adverts are not done to raise funds for the websites they are displayed on. It finds clearly that crowd funded projects need to be agile – built in several stages – and involve contingent working – where people only work on it when funds exist.

Idea: Jonathan Bishop

Presenter: Jonathan Bishop

Length: 20 minute talk

Tags: plugins, q-methodology, research, agile programming, contingent working, crowd-funding

Theme building tricks of the trade

I’ve been building WordPress themes since 2005 and have learned a lot of useful things along the way. I’ll be sharing some of the most useful things I’ve picked up to help you build and customise themes like a pro!

Idea: Jonny Allbut

Presenter: Jonny Allbut

Length: 20 minute talk

Tags: themes

Content is king

Your WordPress site needs to be well coded and look good, yes, but when it comes down to it the most important element of your site is the content.

In this talk I’ll look at:

• how content has grown to dominate over design in recent years and why
• what sort of content strategy you need to adopt for your site and why
• how you can ensure your content is relevant, up to date and (whisper it) SEO friendly

Idea: Rachel McCollin

Presenter: Rachel McCollin

Length: 20 minute talk

Tags: content, bloggers, users, beginners, intermediate

How to be a brand and not a commodity

Do you want to to stand out and profit in your WordPress business? The days of blending in with other web designers is over. Having a well executed branding strategy will allow you to cut through the noise and establish yourself as the go to expert in your niche. Petra will show you how to find your ‘sweet spot,’create demand for your business, and speak the language that your ideal audience craves.

Idea: Petra Foster

Presenter: Petra Foster

Length: 50 minute talk

Tags: branding, branding strategy, marketing, wordpress, profit

The confidence and tools to charge more for your WordPress sites

I promise that by the end of my talk, you’ll have the confidence and practical tools to charge higher prices for your WorPress websites.

Most businesses undercharge massively for their services, and frankly they’re already producing work that should cost more.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a step by step process to learn how to charge more, find customers that are willing to pay more and add the confidence to become more profitable?

Mike wants to provide the step by step system he uses to help WordPress business charge more for their services.

Idea: Michael Killen

Presenter: Michael Killen

Length: 50 minute talk

Tags: profit, pricing, cost, confidence, marketing process

How to sack off low value customers

We’ve all had low value, time wasting customers.

I want to show you how you could focus on JUST high value customers with the right budget. And how you can sack low value customers (even if that’s all you have) all within 20 minutes.

Taken from our best selling webinar series ‘The Cerberus Method’, we teach you in under 20 mins how you can stop dealing with customers who waste your time and don’t make you any money.

And how you can only find customers that are cool and lovely and profitable to work with.

Idea: Michael Killen

Presenter: Michael Killen

Length: 20 minute talk

Tags: profitable, qualification, cerberus, low value, high value, customers

Automate and integrate WordPress with other applications

Need to connect WordPress and plugins to other applications to share data with them? How can you automate tasks so that WordPress communicates with other tools?

I will demonstrate how a local advice website used the Gravity Forms plugin to enable the public to ask them questions, then used Zapier to automatically turn those enquiries into support tickets in Freshdesk, the third party helpdesk application used by their advisers.

Then we will discuss other ways that Zapier and similar tools can be used to send data to and from WordPress.

Idea: Jason King

Presenter: Jason King

Length: 20 minute talk

Tags: gravity forms, zapier, integration, automation

Get your Git on

How can Git successfully be integrated into a WordPress development workflow: What should be in the repo? How should you deploy? What should be deployed? I’ll also be reviewing the plugins I can find that enable WordPress updates to work with Git.

Idea: Matt Radford

Presenter: Matt Radford

Length: 20 minute talk

Tags: web development, git, version control

Mind your language! A practical guide to implementing ‘proper’ language encoding on multilingual WordPress websites

Google and other search engines are making increasing use of hreflang to provide more targeted search results for international web visitors. This talk will discuss the important of hreflang and give examples of its implementation.

Idea: Doug Lawrence, Belinda Mostoe

Presenter: Doug Lawrence, Belinda Mostoe

Length: 20 minute talk

Tags: multilingual, international seo, google webmaster tools

Easy, lazy SEO for WordPress sites

You’ve been creating WordPress sites for some time now, but need something that offers just a bit more of an edge? This talk will focus on introductory level SEO theory and techniques to help your sites rank better without costing you impossible amounts of time and money.

We’ll be looking at how search engines rank sites, the data sources that can help you make good SEO choices and WordPress-only SEO shortcuts that can make things even easier. While this talk is aimed at entry level SEO techniques, we’ll have time for questions built into the talk. Bring your most challenging SEO questions to share.

Idea: Jessica Rose

Presenter: Jessica Rose

Length: 2 hour 20 minute workshop

Tags: seo, digital marketing

Extending WordPress using the Advanced Custom Fields plugin

A look at the Advanced Custom Fields plugin from Elliot Condon and how to integrate it into your WordPress theme to add new functionality and options.

This workshop assumes you are comfortable with WordPress theme development, PHP and possibly some jQuery as welll.

Idea: Kirsty Burgoine, Nathan Roberts

Presenter: Kirsty Burgoine, Nathan Roberts

Length: 2 hour 20 minute workshop

Tags: theme development, acf, advanced custom fields

How to build better businesses for your customers

If your customer’s business and website is profitable, your business is profitable.

This workshop (which we’ve delivered to The Princes Trust, BiP and to our customers), lets you map out with your customer, how they can have a profitable, focused and in demand business model. Both for and behind their website.

We (WordPress builders/designers/businesses) are often seen as internet and website gurus. We’re also asked to fix printers and do social media. However wouldn’t it be awesome if we had a series of tools that let us build better and more profitable businesses for our customers.

Mike wants to give you a step by step process and template for you to be able to sit down and consult with your customer. You could charge for this separately. You could use it as part of your discovery process.

We’ve seen WP businesses take this consultation model and use it to qualify leads. We’ve also seen people use it as part of their sales process.

What you’ll get is a gameplan for your customers to build a profitable website. A blueprint for how you can consult, charge for consultation and build in this process into your design/sales process.

Idea: Mike Killen

Presenter: Mike Killen

Length: 2 hour 20 minute workshop

Tags: profitable, wordpress, website, customers, clients, template, blueprint

How to use WordPress to set up a membership site and create an income from your skills, knowledge and expertise

It is very likely that somewhere, someone in the world is looking to learn what you know. Rather than try to make a living promoting someone else’s product, why not take the knowledge, skills and expertise you have and teach people how they can do it themselves?

In this talk I will go through the tools you need to set up a membership site and create online courses using WordPress. As well as the technical side, I will share what I learned from my experiences having a membership site, my method for creating video courses and some tips and tricks for providing a good customer experience for your members.

Idea: Amelia Briscoe

Presenter: Amelia Briscoe

Length: 20 or 50 minute talk

Tags: membership sites, e-courses, plugins, online income

WOW plugins 2015

A rundown of great plugins and an open discussion with the audience to dig out any plugins that people are using and love.

Idea: Kimb Jones

Presenter: Kimb Jones

Length: 50 minute talk

Tags: plugins

Hands-on introduction to WordPress

A hands-on interactive introduction to WordPress.

Where you can try out WordPress on a practice site you get keep for 30 days after the workshop.

You’ll learn the basics of creating content with words and multimedia, when to use posts and pages, all about menus and widgets, and an introduction to themes and plugins.

Idea: Mike Little

Presenter: Mike Little

Length: 1 hour 30 minute workshop

Tags: beginner

WordPress for small and not for profit enterprises

Most small and NFP enterprises and charities want an inexpensive website they can manage themselves and the WordPress platform seems the most popular choice right now; this talk by Pauline and Ted from RnR Organisation is about their experiences of using WordPress including at social media surgeries.

Idea: Pauline Roche, Ted Ryan

Presenter: Pauline Roche, Ted Ryan

Length: 20 minute talk

Tags: non-profit, small enterprise