March 18, 2019 — As someone trained in both traditional design and web, with experience as a front end developer and as the principal designer at both a freelance company and a high paced start-up, I’ve learned how important it is to bridge the gap between departments. By understanding where all of the people working on your project are coming from you can increase efficiency, decrease workplace tension, and make better sites faster. Using real life examples from a variety of design and development situations, I’ll point out some of the main areas where confusion arises and where increased communication can make everyone’s life easier.

Presentation Slides »

January 8, 2019 — (Video dark first 50 sec)

We all want to engage website visitors, bring them value and maybe even convert them into paying customers. I know I want to do all three! But if you don’t know who the people visiting your website are or what they really want, how can you do any of this? I want to give you some actionable tips and tools that will shed some light on who’s visiting your website and allow you to get the feedback you need to turn your site into something your visitors can’t get enough of 🙂

Takeaways:

Using Google Analytics to get visitor data
Using Hotjar to get visitor data
How to use that data to dictate your marketing strategy

Presentation Slides »

December 31, 2018 — How many times have you been in a situation where the client is never happy with the results, no matter what you do? How many ’emergency’ messages have you responded to because the site isn’t quite right in some new way? How many clients have you lost or fired because they honestly had no idea what they really wanted? If you answered yes to any of those questions, this session is for you!

Gathered from years of ‘learning it the hard way’ I am excited to share my knowledge with Freelancers, Agency Owners, Project Managers, Business Development professionals as well as anyone else who wants to better manage conversations.
Walk away from this talk with a better understanding of:
Project And Sales Pipeline Strategy
Uncovering Client Business Goals
KPIs vs KPIs
Managing Scope

December 29, 2018 — A website is a living and breathing piece of your overall business & marketing plan. You need to feed it! This presentation will cover why a website isn’t a “set it and forget it” entity.

Learn about content creation types, determine the need for enhanced features (eCommerce, membership, LMS), ways to encourage visitor engagement, website security and site backups and when it might be time to redesign the site itself.

November 26, 2018 — Kate will be talking us through 10 key ways you can create conversational copy that sells with our shouting and persuades without being pushy.

We all know the deal, you’ve built a beautiful WordPress website, but now you need to replace that lorem ipsum with compelling, engaging, highly converting copy.
But if writing isn’t your strong point where do you start? And if the copy you have isn’t cutting it, what changes should you make?

Presentation Slides »

October 4, 2018 — Around 45% of what is classed as UK Business have little to no web presence and even for a large percentage of those who do, they are navigating through a minefield of online tools and platforms, with no direction. I will guide you through a series of steps to help you go and grow online with WordPress as a scalable platform. I will give you top tips on the many other steps that feed into your online presence, from content, to the many forms of marketing, measuring and tracking for success.

September 20, 2018 — You have this great WordPress website and now you want to know how to use it.

Congratulations! You just launched a shiny, new website built on WordPress and you’ve logged in to the admin area to have a look around. You’re ready to publish your first blog post or edit a page but, Wowza, there are a lot of things to click on! All of those menu options is making you very uncomfortable.

What are all of those options for? What happens if you click on them? What if you click on the wrong thing?

Make sure you come prepared! Read to the end to see what you should bring and come early to make sure you’re ready to go.

You’ve probably headed out to Google-ville to find the answer to your questions. You’ve discovered that there are a kerjillion different individual tutorials out there on how to do this or that. You’ve watched videos and read the Codex but you’re still worried and confused. It seems like a really steep learning curve.

It’s not. Learning to use WordPress is not hard. In this workshop, we are going to learn all the basics of WordPress to get you using your website like a pro. Some of the things we’ll be covering:

• How to login to your admin Dashboard
• A tour of the Dashboard
• The difference between Pages and Posts
• How to create and edit a Page and Post
• Formatting text and headings
• Adding images
• Embedding a Google map or YouTube video on your Page
• Dealing with Comments
• Backups – how and why
• Keeping things updated
• Widgets – what they are and how to use them
• Plugins – what they are
• Users and User Roles
• Tools
• Settings – what not to change

This is a Workshop, not a lecture, so you’ll see WordPress in action, have plenty of opportunity to ask questions and get answers. The class size is kept small to maximize your learning.

Your instructor has been designing websites using WordPress for over 7 years. She’s also taught this material many times, so you know you’re going to come away from the class knowing how to use WordPress.

Note: this is a beginner level workshop for bloggers and business owners who use WordPress and isn’t intended for developers.

COME PREPARED!
For this workshop you will want to have the following:

Laptop (or tablet big enough for you to work on)
A working self-hosted WordPress install or we can create a temporary site on pooply.life

Presentation Slides »

September 20, 2018 — You have this great WordPress website and now you want to know how to use it.

Congratulations! You just launched a shiny, new website built on WordPress and you’ve logged in to the admin area to have a look around. You’re ready to publish your first blog post or edit a page but, Wowza, there are a lot of things to click on! All of those menu options is making you very uncomfortable.

What are all of those options for? What happens if you click on them? What if you click on the wrong thing?

Make sure you come prepared! Read to the end to see what you should bring and come early to make sure you’re ready to go.

You’ve probably headed out to Google-ville to find the answer to your questions. You’ve discovered that there are a kerjillion different individual tutorials out there on how to do this or that. You’ve watched videos and read the Codex but you’re still worried and confused. It seems like a really steep learning curve.

It’s not. Learning to use WordPress is not hard. In this workshop, we are going to learn all the basics of WordPress to get you using your website like a pro. Some of the things we’ll be covering:

• How to login to your admin Dashboard
• A tour of the Dashboard
• The difference between Pages and Posts
• How to create and edit a Page and Post
• Formatting text and headings
• Adding images
• Embedding a Google map or YouTube video on your Page
• Dealing with Comments
• Backups – how and why
• Keeping things updated
• Widgets – what they are and how to use them
• Plugins – what they are
• Users and User Roles
• Tools
• Settings – what not to change

This is a Workshop, not a lecture, so you’ll see WordPress in action, have plenty of opportunity to ask questions and get answers. The class size is kept small to maximize your learning.

Your instructor has been designing websites using WordPress for over 7 years. She’s also taught this material many times, so you know you’re going to come away from the class knowing how to use WordPress.

Note: this is a beginner level workshop for bloggers and business owners who use WordPress and isn’t intended for developers.

COME PREPARED!
For this workshop you will want to have the following:

Laptop (or tablet big enough for you to work on)
A working self-hosted WordPress install or we can create a temporary site on pooply.life

August 17, 2018 — Small businesses make up around 97.5% of all the registered businesses in Australia.

As such, they’re a market that shouldn’t be completely ignored. They do often need more help to get a website that works for them, and that’s where this session comes into play.

Jane developed her own website brief after finding many business owners were not given or talked through a proper brief by their website designers/developers.

They were left with sites that don’t work- they don’t attract leads, and don’t convert to sales once there.

There are also common frustrations around the handover of the site (or complete lack of), and where web developers can stay involved without taking over.

In this session, Jane wants to step you through how to develop a website brief with a small business client, how to correctly manage their expectations, deliver a website so they get a great result, and both parties walk away happy.

Lessen frustration and miscommunication and earn five star reviews! Key takeaways – Key questions to ask your client to help the website connect with their clients – Clients you should probably avoid – How to reduce frustration, miscommunication and rework – Getting great reviews – Handing over the site – Retaining the client.

Presentation Slides »

August 9, 2018 — How To Deliver A WordPress Website To A Client

Over the time I’ve been building and teaching people how to use WordPress websites, I’ve encountered dozens of sites that needed resuscitating. So I thought it was a good time to talk about how to deliver a WordPress website to your client, the RIGHT way.

https://2017.brisbane.wordcamp.org/session/how-to-deliver-a-wordpress-website-to-a-client/