Introducing Our Third Round of Speakers at WordCamp Manchester

It’s now time to introduce our latest speakers to WordCamp Manchester! Tickets for food and t-shirts close in a few days, so if you want to be fed and stylish as well as inspired, please pick up a ticket before this Friday!

Elliot Taylor

Elliot runs WooCommerce agency called Raison based in Brighton, UK. Working client side and client-facing has given Elliot a unique look at how we run our ecommerce operations and the hurdles that are met along the way. Recently his team have been focusing their direction on product ideas and consultancy to help overcome these snagging points.

Building our Product – from a client agency to a product agency

We have just finished developing our first ‘proper’ product. I say ‘proper’ because although as a 3 person agency we’ve built many a plugin, they are often treated like mistresses; only worked on in the evenings and weekends. This product we wanted to treat like a client. I’d like to talk about the process of creating a product, how we built up a financial buffer from client work, the reasons why decided to move from being a client facing agency to a product building agency, whether it is working and the lessons learnt along the way.

David Murphy

Prior to joining Automattic a year ago David was a engineering manager for Canonical for over seven years, and have over 20 years experience in the industry. David has authored two technical books, numerous articles, and participated in various projects. David is a husband, a father of four, and he helps run two schools a as Governor.

Managing WordPress with Ansible

How to deploy and manage your own WordPress hosts using Ansible, from local virtual machines for development to single host instances to multi-host stacks that scale all using the same tools. Despite the varied and plentiful choices for WordPress hosting that are available, there is still something liberating about running your own servers. Providers like Digital Ocean, Linode, and Amazon Web Services have reduced or removed most of the barriers for those that want to take the leap, but Systems Administration remains an art of its own. Ansible allows us to build on the best practices of others as well as inventing our own to create reproducible environments for local development, private staging, and public instances. My session will introduce Ansible, touch on vagrant and cloud hosting, show how to deploy WordPress using Ansible, and demonstrate how we can re-use these tools across multiple environments.

Michael Cropper

Michael is the Managing Director of Contrado Digital who works with ambitious organisations and tech startups to boost revenue online through effective digital marketing and website development. Working at a strategic level with business owners and directors, he bridges the gap between what businesses need next to fulfill their ambitions and the finer technical implementations of how this is going to be achieved. Michael has a wide background working with large brands and organisations helping them grow internationally all the way down to helping startup businesses make the right decisions early on. Being heavily involved with the WordPress community he is a strong believer of utilising open source technologies within business to help them succeed. Key specialties include website development, SEO, PPC and Google Analytics. He can be found on Twitter @Contrado Digital / @MickCropper, LinkedIn at /MichaelCropper86 and regularly publishing useful resources on digital topics for businesses over on the company blog.

Tracking Your Content Marketing Results Accurately

Without a clear tracking strategy you should not be investing time in content marketing. Tracking your digital marketing activities accurately will enable you to justify the time you are investing, see a clear return on your investment and direct you efforts in the future based on past results. Reviewing the core tools to track your digital marketing activities accurately, how to integrate these tools into a effective process and how to deal with the growing Google Analytics referral spam problem.

We’ve one more round of speakers to go, but we advise you to get your tickets in soon to avoid disappointment.