Speaker Announcements: Round 3

We’re excited to announce another group of speakers for WordCamp Brisbane 2017!

We’ve been impressed by the wide range of topics presented by our speakers and there’s none better to highlight it than this next group of speakers.

Harley Oliver

Hailing from Geelong, Harley is a web developer specialising in custom WordPress solutions.

He has been working in WordPress for a little over 5 years, starting off editing child themes to now building customised solutions from the ground up.

Presenting: The roller coaster journey of WordPress Development

A brief insight into how I started developing with WordPress, from editing child themes with next to no idea about what I was doing, covering all the way up to the way I develop with WordPress today.

Covering the pitfalls and ‘ah-ha’ moments that I’ve experienced learning about how WordPress works, and what resources I’ve used to learn more about WP development over the last 5 years. This includes build tools, IDEs and coding standards, learning that doing work without a local dev environment is a terrible idea and how the WordPress community can help immensely.

Also looking into the future for WordPress and how the REST API opens doors for more than just WordPress development, and what it means for current developers looking to up their skillset but aren’t sure where to start.

 

Geoff Powell

Geoff a web designer, photographer, and teacher from Noosa on the Sunshine Coast. He is one of the organisers of the Sunshine Coast WordPress meetup Group and spends his time, building and maintaining WordPress sites for small business, shooting and teaching photography, and learning how to be an online entrepreneur.

Presenting: Creating Online Courses with WordPress

In this talk, Geoff Powell will be talking about the rapidly growing world of e-learning and online courses, and the tools and approaches you can take using WordPress as the platform.

 

Kate Toon

Kate is the founder of The Clever Copywriting School and The Recipe for SEO Success eCourse, as well as co-host on the Hot Copy Podcast and presents the Write for Business show for the Dale Beaumont’s Business Blueprint channel.

She has worked with big brands such as eHarmony, Curash and Kmart. And she’s helped countless small businesses produce great content and improve their copywriting and SEO.

Presenting: How To Make Google Love Your WordPress Site

In this presentation, Kate will tell you the tips, techniques and tactics that she uses to help make sites 100% Google lovable, including:

  • The impact of hosting and domain choice
  • Integral set up steps that boost SEO friendliness
  • My top 10 Plugins to improve SEO
  • Easy peasy content formatting
  • What to consider when offering on going SEO packages

 

Melanie Surplice

Melanie has gained more than 15 years international marketing and communications experience in the technology, media, publishing, health and wellness sectors; in global public companies, SMEs and start-ups, including Dow Jones, TechnologyOne and Endeavour College of Natural Health.

Melanie has been blogging since 2005, developing her own self-hosted WordPress sites for the last three years. Passionate about natural health and sparkly rocks, she is also a shamanic crystal healing and Reiki practitioner. In early 2016, she left full time corporate life to start her online crystal retailing and healing business, A Surplice of Spirit. Since then, she has built a thriving community of crystal lovers around Australia, and now has customers in Europe and the US.

Presenting: How I created my online business and a community of 20k crystal lovers with WooCommerce and Facebook

In this presentation, Melanie will discuss how she built her online retailing and healing business, A Surplice of Spirit, using the powerful combination of WordPress, WooCommerce and Facebook. Since its launch in January 2016, A Surplice of Spirit has grown from zero to thousands of dollars in sales each month, driven almost entirely by their Facebook page.

 

WordCamp Brisbane 2017 is expected to sell out, if you are hoping to attend we encourage you to get tickets as soon as possible.

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