Five lightning talks about different aspects of running your business.
Sunday 22nd March
2:30pm
Track 3: The Henry Thomas Room
How not to give appalling user support
Franz Vitulli
Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/franzvitulli/how-not-to-give-appalling-user-support
More and more developers are using WordPress to build and sell online products (web apps, SaaS, etc.), and providing excellent user support is a skill certainly not to be taken for granted.
The talk will touch on the benefits and challenges of a great user support and training. I’ll share the most common problems I encountered whilst dealing with support. It will also look at how I give the best support I can and the tools that enable me to do so.
This session is aimed to WordPress developers, marketers and product managers whose goal is helping their customers/users enjoy and get the most out of their product.
WordPress for Good
Tom Greenwood
Last year at WordCamp London, David Lockie of Pragmatic gave a presentation on how WordPress can save the world. By democratising publishing, it gives good people doing good things a platform for communicating important messages and engaging audiences in good causes. He ended by calling for the creation of a dedicated online showcase of WordPress being used for good, to honour those making the world a better place and inspire others to use WordPress to do good.
So we teamed up with David Lockie to make it happen, and now it is online at www.wpforgood.org. This lightning talk with present the history and motives for the project, showcase a few “good” WordPress sites and inspire others to use WordPress for their positive projects and submit them to the showcase.
Forging a Career with WordPress: the Possibilities
Rachel McCollin
Are you new to WordPress and considering what you can use the platform for? Have you been using WordPress in your employment and are thinking of going it alone as a freelancer? Or are you considering branching out into new ways of using WordPress and wondering how to make it work?
In this interactive talk I’ll inspire you to think again about the career options open to you with WordPress, and bust some myths about the kind of person you need to be or the kind of background you need to have if you want to make a living from WordPress.
So if you think that there’s only one or two available career paths with WordPress, think again! After attending this talk you’ll have your eyes opened to more possibilities and will be able to make the right WordPress career path work for you.
Smart tips and tricks for managing freelancers
Annabel Kaye
“Freelancer is the ‘new employment’. Most organisations use freelancers for some tasks but some even build an entire business model on using freelancers.
It’s not all ‘legal free’. Freelancers in the UK have a whole range of rights – and some, despite their label are not really freelancers at all but turn out to be employees. How do you plot your way through this territory and arrive at profitable and reliable relationships with the freelancers you pay – with no nasty surprises from the tax man?
In this talk Annabel explores the status of freelancers, how labels can be deceiving and suggests ways to approach hiring freelancers that will protect your business from harm.
5 ways to get better customers and sack the low value ones
Michael Killen
If you’ve ever gone to a meeting with a customer only to find that they have a £500 budget. Or if you’ve ever had to work with a difficult customer, or maybe you don’t get paid on time. This talk shows practical ways to be able to stop that.
If we had a net that we could drag through the ocean, that only caught the prime 300lb blue fin tuna, and let the small, difficult and low value fish pass by, we’d instantly be happier.
We need to do this with customers, we need to only target the nice friendly customers with a decent budget. I want to talk about how even small ‘1 person working out of their bedrooms’ businesses can do that.
- no more negotiating on price
- stop feeling like a bedroom business and look like a professional service
- stop low value customers even getting through to you
- how to feel more competitive towards other businesses
- the responses you need to give to difficult customers