Snippets of wisdom from WordCamp Brisbane

Having a great time at WordCamp Brisbane today and looking forward to tomorrow! To keep things brief, here’s a collection of notes and quotes from Day 1.

Keynote: Troy Dean: Recurring Revenue is the Holy Grail

• Recurring revenue streams are simpler than ever!
• Case Study: Proved the market BEFORE we actually did it.
• Be conscious of the perceived value of product. If perceived value is greater than cost its an investment. If the cost outweighs the value then it becomes an expense.
• Quote from Troy: “Stay curious and make some noise”. Great advice for new business and revenue streams.

Dan Petrovic: Creative SEO

• 15.9% of people actually read everything. 56% of people just want quick answers.
• Resurfacing old content generates traffic but not links.
• Link to your promoted material from your website bio. Event organisers copy and paste and forget to strip the links out! Capitalise on this for future speaking!

Jen Jeavons: WooCommerce Case Study

• Opened with an awesome slide!
• Building an SEO first site resulted in a high google page score and a better click though rate of AdWords.
• Understanding your target market and customer personas should and does help in your design choices such as layout and typography.
• Key points:
  1. User experience is everything in commerce in particular. Constantly refining and listening to feedback.
  2. Customer service is key. Shop online so you don’t have to interact with someone. But when something goes wrong you want to speak to someone! Give it a personal touch.
  3. Photography. Be militant in maintaining the quality and styling!
  4. Keep shipping simple. 10 years of experience says keeping it simple just works.
  5. Be innovative: Try to do something different. Be inquisitive, question customers and do more analytics!

Peter Wilson: How to get a Page Score rank in the 90’s

• Page speed of 99, and that missing ‘1’ is optimising Google’s own analytics code!
• Compare your tests as you’re improving and figure out your key metrics! Time to document load, start of rendering, final completed document etc.
• Measuring is useless without a plan going in.
• Loading jQuery the default and recommended ‘WordPress’ way blocks rendering. Tinker with loading jQuery async from the footer means rendering can continue while waiting on networking. We can still use the async attribute. (side note: HTTP/2 discussion in questions)
• Telnet to a website and run HTTP commands directly. Great example of two roundtrips for any HTTP request.
• Embed core styles in the main page to avoid subsequent requests on initial load. Load it a second time for browser caching too!
• Question/Comment: Can also load above the fold styles in page and async the remaining styles.
• Answer to my question: Http/2 solves async issues at a protocol level, but for now we need to understand HTTP/1 too for BC compat.

Wil Brown Plugin Development 101

• Plugin file: docblock annotations are used by the admin and the plugins site. Include useful, descriptive info in here as your users/developers will see it.
• Two types of hooks: Actions are functions that run AT a specific event. Filters are associated with an action and used to change the code/output of that action. Remember to return values from your filters or your output will magically disappear – poof!
• Be mindful of uninstall.php vs uninstall hooks. uninstall script runs before the hooks!
• Demo on removing default widgets and branding from a wordpress installation via plugins.

Japh Build on Chassis

• High level comparison of Vanilla, VVV, Bedrock and Chassis. Chassis is a VM per project that is simple to setup and customisable for that project.
• Keep projects separate since it reflects a production environment.

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