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You are here: Home / WordPress / WordCamp Birmingham 2015: Day 1

WordCamp Birmingham 2015: Day 1

Posted: February 8, 2015 Updated: July 29, 2020 by Claire Brotherton
8 Comments

Jonny Allbut, Rachel McCollin, Pauline Roche, Kirsty Burgoine & Nathan Roberts

This is Day 6 in the 30 Day Blogging Challenge. You can read Day 5’s post here.

What’s a WordCamp?

For the uninitiated, WordCamps are conferences based around all things WordPress. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this post on why I love WordPress.

I love WordCamps too – they’re a great get-together for WordPress disciples and newbies alike and offer fantastic learning and networking opportunities. This was my third WordCamp – read about my experiences at the previous one in Bournemouth.

Morning sessions

On arrival at The Studio I received a lanyard, mug, t-shirt and a cup of tea. Workshops were a new feature added this year, and I quickly signed up for two of them, as there were limited places. I chatted with a few of the attendees, then took my place in the main hall.

Saturday kicked off with Jonny Allbut and other members of the organising team welcoming attendees to the event. After a quick survey of the audience and their reasons for attending, the conference began.

Jonny Allbut, Pauline Roche, Rachel McCollin, Kirsty Burgoine & Nathan Roberts
Jonny Allbut, Pauline Roche, Rachel McCollin, Kirsty Burgoine & Nathan Roberts

Mike Pead

Mike Pead talking about site speed
Mike Pead talking about site speed

The first talk I went to was Mike Pead’s, titled Turbo Speed Your WordPress Website. The talk was only 20 minutes long, so was delivered as fast as the title suggests. Mike explained that a load time of 2.5 -3 seconds is okay for a web page, but anything more is too long. He discussed tools to check your page speed and ways to improve load time, including caching, minification of CSS and JS and image sprites.

One question was about https. Mike said that he knew Google likes it for SEO, but it slows down pages, so he doesn’t see the benefit in terms of performance. It is a great upsell though. He charged one client £1k for a website and £450 for the ‘s’.

Jonny Allbut

Following this, I heard Jonny Allbut talk about his Theme Building Tricks of the Trade. Jonny shared his tips on theme construction, starting with turning on the debug mode in wp-config.php. The debug output can be confined to a particular user.

He also disables the edit functionality in wp-admin, which prevents both themes and plugins from being edited there – especially by unsuspecting clients.

Jonny gave a number of useful code snippets. Links to these are in his slide presentation.

  • Slides from Jonny’s talk: Theme Building Tricks of the Trade

Brian Duffy

Brian Duffy explaining what people need to learn
Brian Duffy explaining what people need to learn

Brian Duffy from WP Applied gave a talk about Training Clients On How to Use WordPress. Brian has taught over 1,000 people to use WordPress, and gives regular classes. He regularly comes across individuals who have a WordPress site but have not been trained on how to use it optimally.

The main things he teaches are:

  • Content management
  • Business development ideas – this includes building traffic, connecting with clients, lead generation, sales and measuring performance.
  • The worth of acquiring expertise

Brian has built his own e-learning system using WP Courseware, BuddyPress and bbPress. He offered the audience the opportunity to utilize his learning portal for their clients (up to 2 could enrol free).

A golden nugget of information was Brian’s suggestion that we keep in touch with all leads. He’s had people contact him a year or two after first contact.

I met up with Steph Walker, Dave Pullig, Liz Delves and Sue Fernandez for lunch at Pure Bar and Kitchen. They did a comforting macaroni cheese for £6 – well worth a visit.

Afternoon sessions

Mike Killen

Mike Killen showing us how to help our customers be profitable
Mike Killen showing us how to help our customers be profitable

After lunch, I found huge value from Michael Killen’s workshop entitled How to build better businesses for your customers.

Firstly, we brainstormed customer problems and possible solutions to these, and came up with a massive list.

Mike then told us about the concept of the cross hair multiplier.

Mike told us that price is irrelevant when customers buy. Demonstrating value to them is far more important.

You need to figure out:

  • What you need to earn per client
  • What type of client that is
  • How you can help them get results asap

A good client will have the following characteristics:

  • Existing customer base
  • Good amount of traffic to their site
  • Created a customer avatar
  • Happy to advertise

We were then advised on how to create a response funnel.

This consists of 4 parts:

1. The light bulb moment

Create a free report and give it away in exchange for an email address. Use a headline like “How we benefit (industry) with (report name)” to get a high opt in rate.

2. Splinter product

Devise a low value product to sell for a few dollars or pounds to your leads to convert them to customers. It’s a lot easier to sell a cheap product off the bat than an expensive one.

3. Core product

Have an email autoresponder sequence set up to email your splinter product customers. Let them know about the next step in your product sequence, the core product. Sold at a higher price, this is when you start making profit.

4. Profit maximiser

Your most engaged customers may be interested in your highest value offering, the profit maximiser. A membership site like Amazon Prime is a good example of this. This kind of product can be a profit powerhouse.

Mike now runs Sell Your Service, a business that helps service providers build and sell marketing funnels.

Kimb Jones

Kimb Jones shares his Wow! plugins
Kimb Jones shares his Wow! plugins

Kimb Jones did his annual plugin talk, WOW! Plugins 2015. I had a sense of deja vu here, as it was largely a retread of his 2014 talk from Bournemouth. In the lightning talks session he demoed a few new plugins of interest:

Bulk Page Creator – allows you to create many pages quickly, even parent & child pages. [No longer updated. The Mass Pages/Posts Creator plugin does a similar job.]

Content Expire Scheduler – set an expiry date for posts and a message to display once this date has passed. [No longer updated.]

Duplicate and Merge Posts – creates a new draft of a post to edit. You can merge the changes back into the original post later. [No longer updated. Yoast Duplicate Post copies posts of any type.]

Autoptimize – merges multiple CSS or JS files into one to improve site speed. You can exclude individual scripts or styles.

I missed most of the other lightning talks as I went for a long tea break, and chatted to Nivi Morales about her work in local government.

Evening

After the day was over I went out with the UK Genesis crowd for dinner at Wagamama – I’d “gatecrashed” their meetup on Friday evening. Following that we all went to the main Friday night social at Café Costes. It was fun to chat to a variety of attendees. I did make the mistake of having way too much caffeine, though (another lesson learned from a most informative day).

Claire talking to Chelsea Haden at the Saturday social, Photo by Gary Jones.
Claire talking to Chelsea Haden at the Saturday social. Photo by Gary Jones.

Read my account of WordCamp Birmingham Day 2.

Did you attend WordCamp Birmingham? Please leave a comment – especially if you attended any of the sessions I missed.

Related

Category: WordPress Tags: 30 day blogging challenge, Birmingham, marketing, plugin, theme, wordcamp

About Claire Brotherton

Freelance web designer and front end developer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. I love WordPress, code, learning and blogging.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Wendy Tomlinson says

    February 9, 2015 at 7:52 am

    Really interesting to hear about Wordcamp and thanks for sharing the tips from your time there.

    Reply
  2. petra foster says

    February 9, 2015 at 5:15 pm

    I’m glad you documented wordcamp. This was my first one I had so many takeaways

    Reply
    • Claire Brotherton says

      February 13, 2015 at 4:49 pm

      Thanks Petra. You did a great talk and I had no idea it was your first WordCamp, you were so professional. Hope you’ll be back for many more.

      Reply
  3. Anupama says

    February 10, 2015 at 7:08 pm

    interesting to learn about wordcamp! was not aware! thanks for sharing.

    Reply
  4. Chelsea Haden says

    February 13, 2015 at 10:45 am

    Hi Claire! Lovely to meet you. I enjoyed our chat despite it being in a noisy environment. I’m glad Garry got the back of my head ! 😉

    Great round up of the WordCamp, I’m looking for links for my blog so I’ll include yours.

    Many thanks

    Reply
  5. Claire Brotherton says

    February 13, 2015 at 4:53 pm

    Thanks Chelsea, appreciated. I need to make time to read your blog too. 🙂

    Reply
  6. Richard Senior says

    February 19, 2015 at 4:17 pm

    Sadly, I couldn’t make it to Brum. I am even sadder now after reading your write up. It looks like I missed a great WordCamp. 🙁

    Reply

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