Transcription

MARK:   Okay, hello.  Can you hear me?  That’s better.  Right so just one or two notices.  Welcome to track B this is the last talk before lunch.  So a few notices before we start.  Anyone in here who is a meet up organiser, then there is a meeting at 12.30 and I have forgotten where it is, that is in the activities room which I think is just downstairs.  If you do organise a meet up and you want to attend that I am not sure what they are discussing and thinks it might be good to get together to discuss it.  Big thanks to the sponsors for this event.  Without them we would not be able to have this event take place.  Lot of stalls, please have a wander round in the rocket and in this building and see what they have to offer.  Lunch after this talk which is in the same place as yesterday which is just round the corner.  So if you want to head that way after this talk.  So we have got what looks like a really interesting talk coming up from Dave the WordPress cartoonist, Dave is a freelance cartoonist based in Essex.  And used WordPress to create cartoons since 2005.  And he draws a weekly cartoon for the church press newspaper.  A round of applause (Applause).

DAVE:   Hello everyone, I am Dave, a cartoonist and an incredibly enthusiastic WordPress user and I hope to convey this in this talk.  My first time doing this sort of thing.  Please be kind.  Laugh out loud even if my cartoons are nonsensical et cetera.  My slides will be on speaker deck and should appear on my website halfway through this talk.  I can’t see how that can possibly go wrong.

So who will this talk be useful for?  I have drawn a picture.  First of all anyone using or think of using WordPress to run a creative business, I will be showing you how I came to use WordPress, why I love it and how I use it and some of the things that I have got badly wrong that would have been useful to know at the start.  Next, coders, developers and other people doing highly technical things.  I am hoping that whilst I am unlikely to provide you with brand new insights into the inner workings of WordPress a users perspective will be useful.  A case study and a guinea pig and if I don’t talk about the aspect that interest you do talk to me at question time or afterwards.  And latecomers, those who turned up to the wrong room et cetera I will be showing cartoons I hope you enjoy them I have only drawn an audience of three and the dotted lines are a lazy trick for drawing everyone else.

Firstly disclaimers I am not going to teach you how to draw cartoons in case anyone does want to know.  This is the cartoon creation process simplified version.

Disclaimer 2 never take technical advice from a cartoonist.  I had a lot more hair when I drew this cartoon.  It is not that I am not technically competent I am a cartoonist not a WordPress specialist.

A third and final disclaimer, this talk is not to say look at me aren’t I brilliant, look what a success I have made.  Whilst I have had some successes I have also made a lot of mistakes and I will be telling you about some of those two later on in the talk.  So a few examples of my work.  Which might help to understand what I am talking about later on.  So this is one for freelancers.  Locations of this year’s tax paperwork.  (Laughter) and this is how I organise my desk.  So just to give you an idea of where I keep everything on my desk.  I do a lot of cartoons of a church theme and this is one that I did for the newspaper I draw for called the hierarchy of biscuits.  Hopefully it makes sense even if you are not in that particular world.  So the gold foil wrap double chocolate deluxe.  And then the digestive and the chocolate chip cookie, bourbon and ginger nut.  The pink wafer, the Nice biscuit and the rich tea.  I trough about all sorts of different topics.

Some more serious than others.  This is one I did about food banks, this was in 2013.  Perhaps we need to ask why this is happening.  And to give another example of one on a topic this is a climate change cartoon about those who are most responsible least vulnerable, versus those least responsible most vulnerable.  That gives you an idea of the kind of work I do.

How did I start using WordPress?  My story begins in 1996.  Oasis at the top of the charts and I was starting to draw cartoons at a college in Dorset.  This is my room in the college.  I would post the cartoons I had thrown on my door and people would stop and read them.  This for me was my pre-Internet example of a website I would post them on the door, people would stop and look at them.  To give an example of the cartoon quality.  The art work is a bit flakey.  Suddenly he pulled the chord on his ejector seat.  So at the time I had a car.  This is the best photo of me taking in the 1990s.

Now I no longer needed a car.  I had a friend who had a computer and no longer needed it, so we swapped.  So with my new 14 K modem I connected with the internet and I learnt HTML and put a website on geo city.  So I was able to put cartoons and other nonsense online.  Fast forward to 2002 I met lots of brilliant creative people, one of whom become a friend Chris Taylor from Yorkshire and he and I started a community blogging site.

This is my earliest example of blogging.  This all still pre-WordPress.  For me at the time this was an amazing technological advancement.  My cartoons were becoming a bit more popular, seen online.  And to cut a long story short I sent some off to a newspaper who agreed to publish them so I had a way into being a full-time cartoonist.  So just to give an example I was drawing a lot of church themed cartoons at the time.  Here is an example of one, entirely nonsensical if you are not in that world.  The art work had still not really improved that much.  This is about Bishops standing in a corner.

So around this time I heard about a new piece of software called WordPress I began a new CartoonBlog using it.  And this is my early WordPress website in approximately 2005.  It went on to be absolutely central to the way I made my living.  I will say a bit more about that in a few moments.  First of all I want to say why I love WordPress.  It is always tricky to know if you have new material if you are a band with a new song, do you play it at the beginning or save it up and will the crowd like it.  So a brand new cartoon nobody has seen apart from Ross my proof reader.  It is 20 panels.  I will run through it quite quickly 20 reasons to love WordPress.

It is easy to learn, fairly easy.  There is no need to edit code.  A community built it and keeps it going.  You can install it in five minutes.  Search engines love it.  It is great for mobile phones.  These always somebody to help with problems.  You can use plugins to do lots more.  Over 25% of all websites use it.  It does a lot more than just blogging.  You don’t need to be an expert to update your site.  There are many brilliant free themes.  You can update your site from anywhere.  People can comment and interact.  Your data is on a site you own.  It is great for pictures audio and video.  It updates ow automatically for security.  You can have multiple users.  You can impress your friends with a beautiful website and it is free.  And this is my 20 reasons to love WordPress cartoon I will shortly put on my website.

Now I want to show you how WordPress is central to the way I made my living as a cartoonist, this a pie chart my accountant wants to see every year.  This is an approximate break down.  I do cartoons for regular clients I have built up over the years I do for all the time.  Then I have got one off commissions people who have seen my work on one of my sites.  Licence sales, I will explain in a minute what that means.  And then book advances and royalties, so the books are on my site, and sometimes the people who commission the books have seen me online.  And then merchandise.

So how does this work in practice?  Now I have five ways a cartoonist can use WordPress I hope it will be applicable to other creative industries as well.  There may well be more than five these are the ones I thought of.  I have only used three and a half of these five methods I am going to demonstrate each one with one of my own websites where applicable.  First of all blogging; this is my CartoonBlog.  I have had a blog on WordPress it has contained a mixture of serious news, cartoons about serious news.  The latest work I have been doing, competitions an a certain amount of messing around as well.  The benefits of the blogging approach it puts you in the centre of like minded people whilst enabling you to show off your work.  There is a lot more I can say about it, that is another talk.

My main advice for bloggers be interesting in whatever way.  I don’t do so much now, but blogging has been absolutely central to what I have been able to do.  Secondly, using WordPress for a stock image site and this is something I do.  So this is CartoonChurch.com my cartoon licencing site.  Every local parish church has something called the parish magazine an A4 photocopy booklet with a pastel coloured cover and I supply cartoons to make parish magazines more interesting.  So having done weekly cartoons for 12 years I have built up a back catalogue.  Selling licences is one of the ways I make my living.  I have been using word press to do this since 2005.  The Advent of membership plugins has made it easier.  I can automate the process of sending out renewal emails to people and that has made a huge difference to me.  I will talk a little bit about membership plugins in a few moments.

Example number 3 is a portfolio website.  And this is my example, it is not the most shiny example of a brilliant design.  But this is a site I put online a few years ago to show case my cycling themed cartoons.  And social media and particular facebook has been a vitally important, very important in the success of this venture and I good talk a lot more about social media, but again this is probably a separate talk.  Despite social media I still see it crucial to have a website your own base on the web where people can always find your work and you are not relying on a third party service.  So as a result of this website and putting cartoons online cycling cartoons online I have drawn cycling cartoons or all sorts of different clients and I spent a significant chunk of 2016 writing and drawing a book on the topic.  And here we are and this book will be out in June.  And it wouldn’t have been possible if I had not had a WordPress site that I was able to put everything up online and the publishers discovered my work online and so I have a lot to be thankful on that front.

So, for the membership sites, whilst I have used plugins to help me run by licencing I have not yet run a full membership website but I am working on one.  Here we have the work in progress, brilliant site not yet built, cartoons and member benefits.  A lot of artists are using a site called Patrion to fund their work, people pledge money and in return get benefit.  They maybe see your work first or they get downloads or merchandise in return for making a payment.  So I thought I don’t need to be being Patrion fees I can do this using WordPress.  So watch this space it is a work in progress.

And number five using WordPress to sell online.  There are brilliant plugins like WooCommerce that allow you to sell.  I have not yet used them I sell through third parties I tend to link through other places that sell what I do rather than selling on my own website., these are a few of the things that I sell, books and tea towels and all sorts of bits and pieces.

I wanted to talk about themes and plugins, as somebody who has been to a couple of previous WordCamps I have found it really useful to get practical tips on useful plugins and themes that other people have found useful.

So first of all themes and my main advice here is let your content shine.  This probably is a more important principal than any specifics about particular themes.  So for me for my work I need something that will allow an image of about seven hundred pixels wide.  So the theme need to accommodate that and I don’t want too much other distractions.  I want my cartoon to be the most interesting thing on the page.  I definitely don’t want a heading over an image which a lot of themes have, great for some people but not for a cartoonist.  For you it will be different depending on the kind of work you have and what you need.  There are cartoon specific themes, but I have never found one that particularly fits my particular work, you can Google them just as well as I can.  I thoroughly recommend paying for a themes.  Free themes are a great way in and anyone can get going with a WordPress site.  If you are going to use it as a business site it will pay for itself many times over to have one professional designed of a good quality.  For me I have been looking for modern simple themes by somebody I trust, and I have used genesis themes by studio press, I do love their designs.  And also a theme called generate press by Tom Usbourne with simple lines and the ability to customise.  I will put the links to these.  They are not on my slides owing to slight incompetence on my part.  I will put the links on my website after this talk.

So plugins membership plugins.  As I have already discussed the one that I use is called member press.  I am trying out a plugin called restrict content pro for my website.  There is a Guy called Chris Lima who writes a blog and he has his finger on the plugin world.  I will put the link on the website after this talk.  So secondly page builders.  I recommend a bit of caution, some are better than others and if you build too many pages using them you can find yourself with problems in the future if you have relied too much on a plugin for how your website looks.  But for me they are very useful for doing front pages and a few pages of my website.  The ones I have used is page builder by site origin and I am currently experimenting with one called Beaver builder and I will put an article by Pip Williamson about a comparison of different page builders.  So recent posts now some of you may know other ways to achieve this, for me using a plugin which shows a list of cartoon thumb nails has been absolutely brilliant for me.  And while researching for this talk I have discovered the plugin I use has been discontinued and therefore is not one I should be using.  And this demonstrates the importance of reviewing your plugins every now and then.  Then I use sharing plugins, you want people to be able to share on social media and there are many of these available.  Ones that fit a particular site and allow me to customise the text for the Twitter link.  Then just to heap everything else together quite a lot of other plugins.  I use one to convert give to JPEGs and an image optimiser so my cartoons load quickly on mobile phones.  I use SEO plugins, back up plugins and a few others I will not list.

So some lessons learned.  First of all find your niche, this is in my opinion key all purpose advice for making it as a cartoonist as well as having a successful website.  It is really hard to be the number one current affairs cartoonist in the world.  Once you narrow it down to one issue.  To give an example, housing or the environment or cartoons about a particular interest, golf or classic cars, once you choose a topic a niche it becomes a lot more achievable I think it is the same with websites.  So if you are writing or drawing about something that is specific it is far more possible to be a significant player in that world.  So for me historically I have drawn a lot about churches, now I do a lot about cycling and I have other possible things I know about that I may do cartoons about in the future.

So my second lesson learned and this was learned the hard way.  Choose a good host.  Like many things in life you get what you pay for.  I started out with a really inexpensive host and it did not go well.  The site would be down for days on end.  You could not talk on the phone, emails took longer and longer.  And it was incredibly embarrassing explaining into people why my site was down again.  I stuck with them for years because the thought of changing host was at the time too big a process to contemplate.  Now I have WordPress specific hosting, I can tall to them on the phone night and day and I do both and they know what they are talking about.  I would definitely recommend you choose somebody who is a good host for your site.

Security matters.  So in the past fortunately quite a number of years ago I was hacked, a combination of cheap hosting not taking care to update everything.  At the time it was a huge head ache, so keep everything up to date and pay a bit more for security.

Take care with plugins.  One thing I learned some plugins take rather greater server resources than others one of the reason my site went down a lot I learnt in hindsight I was using plugins that were hammering the database, they were making lot of requests to back things up.  So beware of using too many plugins and beware of using settings that will cause a strain on the server.  You may need to talk to somebody a bit more expert than I to understand the specifics of what that means.  That was a lesson that I had to learn the hard way.

The great news is despite my various technical problems I have always found lots of people willing to help.  This has often meant Twitter I have used Twitter a lot, also the WordPress forums or the forum of whatever plugin I have been having problems in.  And the room here where you can go for advice is absolutely brilliant and I was in there yesterday.  It is great to know there are lots of people that can help you.  And in return help other people.  So most people you meet in every day life don’t know how to make a website and you do.

So if you are a professional web developer obviously you will need to charge for your services.  Those who aren’t why not help people encourage somebody to have a first play on WordPress.com or help a fellow business owner with a problem.

I have got one other lesson I thought of after I ton my slides which is be generous but not too generous.  By this I mean I have had a lot of benefit from posting cartoons online and letting people see them without pay walls or charging them to see them.  Also there comes a time when you can’t give absolutely everything away you need to make a living.  It is finding a balance between being generous with your content, also finding ways you can make it pay as well.

So challenges.  For me at least.  Nothing works with everything else, sorry about that.

The first challenge for me is code.  As WordPress is not my main thing I don’t understand as well as many of you what goes on under the hood.  But fortunately this is my in depth graph on the subject.  How often a WordPress user has to deal with actual code.  When I started it was a lot.  All sorts of little jobs that could only be done by going and changing code.  Gradually things have improved and plugins can do a lot more.  It is a former challenge rather than a current one.

Second for me, has anyone brought themselves a brilliant domain years ago and never got around to doing anything with it and keep on paying a tenner a year.  This is me.  I have too many ideas for new directions I can take my work in.  I buy the domain and possibly set the site up and that is it.  So for me it is a case of thinking what am I focusing on.  These are the website I have shown you.  But as well as this I am doing lots of drawing commissions, thinking about merchandise.  So it is knowing where best to focus your time and your energy.  I have been guilty of letting some of my projects slide a bit because I have gone on to something new and exciting.

Now SSL, this is a huge one for me and I have a cartoon to illustrate.  The task I must undertake is towering over me like a great big monolith.  Too big to contemplate so I think I will go and have a little look at the internet.  This could apply to lots of things, this has been my approach to SSL.  It seems like a huge thing I am afraid to tackle.  Fortunately I have received a lot of really useful advice over this weekend, it is now not quite so much of a challenge as it once was.  It is still something that I need to face and do.

Creativity, staying fresh without getting worn out.  I love what I do, the demand to be funny all the time sometimes comes at a cost and sometimes on a rainy Monday morning when you have a deadline at two PM to come up with a joke and a way to illustrate whatever you are drawing about can be challenging.  In the same way staying creative with regard to websites sometimes can be difficult.

So in conclusion, the main thing I want to say to everyone involved with WordPress is thank you.

You have made it possible for me to do what I do.  It is not always plain sailing.  And there are times when say an error message comes up or my site runs slowly or a plugin won’t update and I could list minor gripes, but fortunately now they are minor and they are occasional not the norm.  So thank you for everyone involved in WordPress and to anyone considering using WordPress for your business or creative endeavour I would entirely recommend it and I hope my experiences have been of some use, do ask me more so thank you everyone.

My slides should by now possibly have miraculously appeared on my website.  Otherwise they are online at speaker deck.  And I will be tweeting the reasons to love WordPress cartoons shortly (Applause).

Any questions?

MARK:   We have time for questions.  If you can raise your hand if you have a question and we will get a mic over to you and you can ask your question.

FROM THE FLOOR:  Really enjoyed your chat and love your cartoons, really funny.  I was suggesting if WordPress could commission you to do a lovely logo for next year’s T-shirt.

DAVE:   Thank you.

FROM THE FLOOR:  I have a question.  Roughly how long does it take to do a cartoon I wouldn’t have a clue?

DAVE:   It depends how long it takes me to have an idea.  That is the most difficult part of it.  So I generally think if I am doing something some of the ones I have shown you I would set aside a day to think up the idea to rough it out to ink it in a lot of me is writing as well as drawing it is the writing behind it that needs to be write, the art work is the easy bit.

MARK:   You are telling a story aren’t you.  Any other questions?

FROM THE FLOOR:  Thanks for that it was really good.  The church and cycling seem quite random topics, I wondered what took you to those.

DAVE:   To do good cartoons you need to really know your topic and those are things I know about.  So I have been a church goer since I can remember I know quite a lot about the inner workings of that world and cycling is my, what I love to do.  So I know about bike racing and using a bike to get from A to B and those are things that I know I know enough about the subject to understand where the humour is I think that is important, so yes they are a bit strange.  I have always found it important.  I have had my most successful work when I have done a niche topic like that rather than tried to do something too political, it does not usually work for me so well.

FROM THE FLOOR:  Do you find it difficult to find inspiration how do you make sure you don’t reiterate a similar cartoon you did last year or the year before.

DAVE:   Sometimes it is quite handy to do the same cartoon, people don’t have very good memories so you can get away with it.  I probably do reuse the same things sometimes.  As for inspiration it is just living life.  Listening to people talking.  Reading.  Everything is potentially a source of inspiration.

FROM THE FLOOR:  Have you ever considered an alternative to WordPress, use something those build a website?

DAVE:   In the early days I tried other blogging software, blogger and movable type, no I think because I am doing something else because I am doing cartooning not building websites once I have learnt something I want to stick with it and I have not found anything else that has all the same 20 benefits.  So.

MARK:   One here and one at the back as well.  So if you go to the back and I will do this one first.

FROM THE FLOOR:  I was just wondering how you get an idea on to a website.  The process.  So presumably starting off by drawing and scanning how do you get it.

DAVE:   Now I do, I do my work digitally, on an Ipad since last year.  And then it is very much a case of saving the file as a JPEG and uploading it as you would any other image on to WordPress it is very straightforward.  In the old days I would draw everything by hand, scan it and then you would have an image value you can then upload.  Does that answer.

FROM THE FLOOR:  Yes that is fine.

FROM THE FLOOR:  Yeah Dave it was a great talk.  I was just wondering how since you have got a the lot of imagery on your site how Google plays with it, does it play nicely?  Do you have to make sure you include lot of words to get your posts referenced?

DAVE:   When I was blogging very regularly then I did very well in Google because I had the text to go with it and I often got a lot of links to blog posts.  Which these days I suspect there is more competition around I suspect not so well.  I probably could do better on that front if I am to be honest.  I probably do need to pay for attention to my SEO than I do.  It is one thing in a long list of priorities for me.  Quite often the cartoon I need to get done by tomorrow afternoon is the pressing thing.

FROM THE FLOOR:  My question kind of leads on from that.  Because you are doing WordPress as an add on to your main job.  How do you divide up, how do you say I have done enough on the website now I am going to have to do this, do you have a pie chart like the one for your accountant on where your time goes?

DAVE:   If I did have a pie chart procrastinating would be a large chunk.  I probably do spend too much time on WordPress I should spend more time on my job.  I have come to really enjoy playing with it and experimenting and trying new plugins, different things.  So I love doing it I love working with WordPress.  So if anything I probably spend too much time, I should probably focus the point I made about focusing I should focus on one or two websites and do it really well, I enjoy it too much and keep coming up with new ideas.

MARK:   I think we have time for one or two more questions.  At the back.

FROM THE FLOOR:  What was your approach when people use your images without permission?

DAVE:   Yes so people using images without permission.  It can be a problem.  Occasionally I send somebody an email and say in an extreme case I might send somebody an email and say you should not be using this.  The more of a problem is when people put things on social media uncredited which sometimes happens, that is a bit frustrating, something can really take off on social media and you get no benefit whatsoever and for me as a creative that is a bit frustrating and I have had instances where people have cut off my name and shared something online.  But I do try now to make sure that when I post on Twitter or facebook I always have in the image I have my credit.

MARK:   Quick last one.

FROM THE FLOOR:  Where do you see your cartoons going in the future in five years where do you want to be?

DAVE:   That is a very good question I am open to different directions, I have a cycling book coming out in June.  I have no idea how that is going to go, I am hoping it will be popular and open up new possibilities for me.  Otherwise I have always got new ideas new sites so I can’t really answer that question yet I have to wait and see.  Thank you.

FROM THE FLOOR:  Good luck.

MARK:   Thanks to Dave, a round of applause (Applause) okay so it is lunch time now.  Just out here to the right hand side if you have not collected your T-shirt please do so downstairs from here.  And we will see you after lunch.