For several years, I’ve been involved in the Greenville WordPress meet-up group. I knew Clifton, our meet-up organizer wanted to host a WordCamp in Greenville.
During WordCamp Greenville 2018 Clifton said, “it is amazing to see a dream come to fruition.” With an excellent list of speakers and a sold out event, Clifton and his team orchestrated a smooth one-day conference.
As a blogger and user of WordPress, this was my second WordCamp conference.
Why I attend WordCamp
WordCamp provides speakers sessions where I can broaden my knowledge and enhance my skills. I learn something new at every session.
WordCamp Greenville scheduled a “user/beginner” program and a “developer” program. I attended the “user” sessions.
Chad Warner provided one of the most informational presentations, “Maintenance of Your Website.”
Not only is management of your site important, but having the best security plugins is equally imperative.
For small businesses who use WordPress, Lauren Jeffcoat’s session on customer support was invaluable, along with Ben Meredith’s presentation on “How to Get Better Support.”
Three representatives from Engenius, a web design agency in Greenville, presented “Top 10 Things They Learned Doing Website Design.” If you are an aspiring WordPress website designer, their information was priceless.
Although I do not sell anything on my WordPress site, April Wier’s presentation was applicable to any small business owner.
Jason Blumer’s process of pricing projects was enlightening.
Benefits of WordCamp
Besides informative presentations, attendees have the opportunity between sessions and during the catered lunch to network, share ideas and exchange business cards.
I made a few promising connections and made a few new acquaintances.
I am looking forward and hoping for a 2019 WordCamp Greenville.
April Wier, “Repetition is the king of sales comfort.”
Chad Warner explains ManageWP, MaintenanceWP and JetPack
Jason Blumer says, “focus on your clients’ wants, instead of needs.”
WordCamp Greenville can be declared an official success! Organizers are so grateful to all sponsors, volunteers, speakers and attendees.
Although larger cities hosting WordCamp events may attract larger crowds, our one-day event in Greenville SOLD OUT and enticed attendees from North Carolina, Georgia and as far away as Charleston, South Carolina.
Most WordCamps are locally organized to bring together WordPress users and developers, in order to educate, share ideas and network. Hundreds of these events occur world-wide, throughout the year.
Anyone, from beginning bloggers to professional website developers are welcome at any of the WordCamp events. Please check the website for available conferences at https://central.wordcamp.org/schedule/.
The organizers and sponsors of WordCamp Greenville 2018 would like to say…
THANK YOU for attending our inaugural event!
Did you find the sessions informative?
Did you enjoy the after party?
What could we have done better?
If you attended WordCamp Greenville 2018, please take our survey.
We are so glad you are joining us for the inaugural WordCamp Greenville event.
Make sure you bring the following:
Your photo ID if you wish to drink at the after party
Your business card / contact information for connecting with your fellow campers
A refillable water bottle or coffee mug
A fully charged laptop/tablet, or pen and paper for note taking – recommended/not required
Here is what you need to know:
PARKING:
Free parking is available at 66 Richardson Street, Greenville, SC 29601 – Richardson Street Garage. This is a multi-level parking garage, located adjacent to Bank of America. Enter parking garage from Richardson Street. Exit the parking garage through the back side (facing Main St.). When you exit the garage walk right towards the water fountain and then left at the water fountain. ClemsonOne Building will be on your right on Main St.
The registration desk is located just outside the elevators. Volunteers can point you in the right direction. Give your name at the desk and you’ll be given your badge and t-shirt.
8:45 AM OPENING REMARKS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
Make sure you arrive in time to hear Adam Sliver give the keynote at 9 AM.
LOCATION
ClemsonOne is located at 1 North Main Street Greenville, SC 29601 and is a campus extension, for their Master of Business Administration program.
The 2018 WordCamp Greenville After Party will be at the Growler Haus at Village of the West Greenville in downtown Greenville, SC. We will have a private room so ask for the WordCamp Greenville Party.
The Growler Haus partnered with WordCamp Greenville 2018 and is paying for your first drink.
So come and enjoy a great time with like minded folks.
Growler Haus at Village of the West Greenville
12 Lois Ave
Greenville, SC 29611
WordPressers, when you are headed to the WordCamp there are parking garages all over downtown Greenville. We recommend that you park in the Richardson Street Parking Garage which is parallel to Main St. Exit the parking garage through the back side (facing Main St.). When you exit the garage walk right towards the water fountain and then left at the water fountain. ClemsonOne Building will be on your right on Main St.
Ah yes, we will have a bar, but not the kind of bar your thinking about. The Happiness Bar is a place that you can get help with all your WordPress questions. Even though we can not guarantee that they will be answered, it’s a great place to get started.
Running 9:00am-4:25pm.
Staffed by volunteers (at WordCamp, what isn’t?) who are willing and interested in helping you solve your WordPress problem. The idea isn’t that the volunteers have all the answers or will do the work for you, but that they can point you in the right direction. If the volunteer does not know the answer, they can always introduce you to a person who can help.
Many speakers will head for the Happiness Bar after their presentation, so if you want to further explore one of their ideas or have really specific questions, sit down with them and ask.
Whether you have a question you need to be answered, code that needs to be reviewed, or want to get some work done, this is the place to be. Come and ask questions, answer questions and meet new friends. If it’s a WordPress question, you can ask it at the Happiness Bar!
A Note: Not all problems can be solved quickly and easily. Although the Happiness Bar is a place to get you going in the right direction, you might need to continue the conversation after WordCamp. And, not to disappoint you, but that might cost money when you do. Volunteers will do their best to help you as much as possible during the weekend, but sometimes, you just need a professional.
Kathy Drewien lives in Marietta, Georgia just outside of Atlanta. There she rescues abandoned, ugly, orphaned, broken, and non-productive websites for people and businesses who are ready for a change. She’s an organizer of WordCamp Atlanta, runs a local WordPress Meetup in Marietta, and mentors other Meetups and WordCamps, too. And if that’s not enough, she’s also an organizer of WordCamp US. In her business coaching, Kathy practices what she preaches, and shares insights gleaned from years of observation and personal experience. She is all about forging meaningful connections and holds to the belief that nothing beats the power of in-person interactions for cementing relationships. Bear in mind, that whenever you’re interacting with Kathy, you have her full attention. She enjoys working closely with people interested in evolving and growing and finds the process of facilitating the process gratifying. The true mentor that she is, Kathy doesn’t hand out solutions on a silver platter; one needs to be committed to the process to derive full benefit. A bit of advice? Pay close attention to what Kathy says, because she’s not the type to ‘blow smoke’ or pound you over the head with direction. If you’re not paying attention or ready to receive, you can miss her subtle suggestions. Suggestions that if you grab hold of, and run with, can have life-changing effects on your perspective and by extension your business.
Title: Hot Mess to Favorite Client: Transformation in 24-Hours
Your clients (prospective and active) are not telling you the truth. Maybe it’s about a project that’s gone off track or a website dream they envision. Or maybe they’re not sharing their thoughts on ways their business could grow its sales or improve operations. By demonstrating your ability to be truly authentic at each step in the process, you can aim toward creating projects that are more collaborative and ultimately more successful. Learn why it's critical to: – Restate, in your own words, your perception of the project. – Boldly ask, "So, what do you want from me?" – Authentically and directly tell the client what you want from them. – Test for client commitment and control.
Brent Alexander
Brent Alexander
About Brent
A designer turned developer, Brent takes a hands-on approach with many Engenius projects. When it comes to website design and functionality, Brent can both dream it and do it: his technical expertise and creativity shine as he drives our custom code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP), integrations, and User Experience (UX) design. Finally, Brent works with our stellar website hosting service, WP Engine, to ensure that your website is secure and functioning at pace. When he’s not working, Brent enjoys hanging out with his wife, working on his 1950’s era home, catching up on his favorite shows, and reading the latest design blog posts.
Title: 10 Things We've Learned In 10 Years Building Websites For Clients
Creating & Following Systems
Selling Like A Consultant
Taking.a Content-First Approach
Mobile vs Desktop Usage
Gathering Content from Clients
Designing with Themes
Estimating & Getting it Right
Making a Profit
Supporting Clients Post-Launch
Failing Quickly
We will never be able to say we have arrived, but learning these 10 things has been asbsolutely essential to our success.
Engenius is a digital marketing agency based in Greenville, SC. We demystify digital marketing and web design with straightforward strategies: giving you what you need and nothing you don’t. 2018 marks the 10-year anniversary of Engenius. Learn more about us at https://engeniusweb.com/about/mission.
Lauren Jeffcoat
Lauren Jeffcoat
About Lauren
Lauren has been building WordPress websites for almost a decade and is currently part of the OnTheGoSystems WPML Customer Support team. She enjoys creating WordPress websites and has worn many hats in the world of web development including Project Manager, Customer Service Representative, Account Strategist, and Web Designer. Originally from New England, she now lives in Surfside Beach, South Carolina. Lauren enjoys sharing her knowledge along with tips and tricks that she has learned either through furthering her education or personal experience. Lauren is the organizer of WordPress Meetup Myrtle Beach, a co-organizer of WordCamp Wilmington, a WordCamp Speaker and a lover of all things WordPress.
Title: Support Starts Here: How to go the extra mile to make and KEEP your customers happy
In this session I will be covering the importance of good customer service and the powerful impact your support team has on your business. I will discuss practices to use and practices to avoid. I’ll take poor customer service examples and show how they could be handled differently and turned into excellent customer outcomes.
I’ll also cover the steps to develop and implement an all star customer service program. This will include the secrets to providing super service, general support standards, and how to get things right for your customers. I’ll discuss why it’s important to go the extra mile to make and keep your customers happy so that they turn into returning customers and brand ambassadors.
Cliff is a UX Lead at Pardot (part of Salesforce), helping build world-class B2B marketing tools. He’s passionate about keeping people at the heart of design. Cliff lives in Atlanta, where he co-organizes amUX, a morning meetup for the user experience community. He’s also an accomplished speaker who’s given talks around the world. Through an appropriate mixture of data and humor, he takes a unique approach to complex topics, making them both informative and enjoyable. He’s also been developing with WordPress for many years, contributes back into the community, and participates in WordCamps.
Title: DIY WordPress Site Management: Configure, Launch, and Maintain
WordPress’s content management system is only one piece of a very large puzzle. Acronyms abound as a site prepares for launch—from DNS to SSL to CDN, you’re up against a series of technical tasks that need to go well to go live. Once you get to launch, there’s a whole litany of concepts a site owner ought to understand: optimizing and maintaining SEO, keeping the site secure, monitoring performance, tracking analytics, and keeping everything up to date. Plus, what do you do when performance slows down, or your site gets hacked, or users aren’t converting like you expect? In this session, I’ll give an introduction to everything from domain hosting to site launching to cleaning a hacked site—sharing proven tools I’ve used to help hundreds of clients. You’ll get a better idea of what you can manage on your own and better understand the things you can’t (or don’t want to).
Ben Meredith
About Ben
Ben is the Senior Support Technician at WordImpress, the makers of Give, the most robust donation platform for WordPress. He also created Better Click To Tweet, the most popular WordPress Plugin for adding Click to Tweet boxes to WordPress posts and pages. A lifelong North Carolinian (with a 4-year break in Middle Tennessee just after college), Ben is also one of the organizers for WordCamp Raleigh, having led the team in 2017. When not coding or solving code puzzles to support users, you’ll find him with a guitar in hand or perhaps playing a round of disc golf. He’d lobby for it being called just “golf” and making that other game “ball golf” or perhaps “expensive ball golf.”
Title: How to Get Better Support.
In this talk, using years of experience helping users in both free and premium plugin support, Ben will take you through what makes a good support request, how you can create better support requests, and how good support requests make WordPress better for everyone. Do you know that there’s a link between your support tickets and better documentation? Do you find yourself frustrated at developers and support reps who can’t seem to diagnose issues arising from their plugins or themes? Do you want to find better answers to your support questions, more quickly? Plus, the two-minute method of solving +50% of your support requests before you even send them.
Micah Wood
Micah Wood
About Micah
Micah is an enterprise WordPress developer and Technical Director at Narwhal Digital, an agency in Atlanta, Georgia. A believer in “Kaizen”, or continuous improvement, he is always striving to become a better developer and help others along the way.
Title: Optimizing Website Performance
WP-CLI stands for WordPress Command-Line Interface. It is a tool for managing a WordPress site from the terminal as opposed to your web browser. Learn how to install WordPress, install or update plugins, check for hacked files, create a new user, perform a search and replace, manage data, execute custom scripts and more; all from the command-line!
April helps individuals and businesses become the best versions of themselves. This may come in the form of a new, or better, web site or coaching to break through self-imposed limitations. She specializes in helping high-performers reach their goals online. She is heavily involved in Atlanta WordPress community, as a co-organizer of the Woodstock WordPress meetup (an official WP meetup) and as a former organizer for WordCamp Atlanta.
Title: Closing the Deal (Getting Comfortable with Sales)
If the fear of public speaking is greater than the fear of dying, the fear of asking for the sale cannot be far behind. Many business owners languish in low volume when, with a little bit of knowledge and practice, they can be kicking their sales into overdrive. We will cover classic sales techniques and update them for the digital age. We will also dig into the psychology that not only keeps some of us under-pricing but keeps us from closing the deal, at all. You don’t have to be cheesy, sleazy, or greasy to be a great salesperson. You will learn to sell with style and walk away with the increased confidence to go out and make more money. The talk is about the psychology of selling and how we can get out of our own heads and help our clients, instead of sell our products. It could also be titled, “Sell more by selling less.”
Jason Blumer
Jason Blumer
About Jason
Jason is the CEO of his firm, Blumer & Associates, CPAs. The firm was one of the first to move from a traditional office to a virtual environment, where they serve various creative service niches. He and his partner focus heavily on business coaching and consulting with firms and agencies, while their team meets the technical and compliance needs of the client. Jason is the co-host of two podcasts, the Thrivecast and The Businessology Show and speaks and writes frequently for CPAs and creative industries. He has been honored as one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting (Accounting Today). Jason loves to watch documentaries on just about anything and is working on his personal best in Crossfit several times a week. He lives in Greenville, SC with his wife and their three daughters.
Title: The Who, What, When and How of Pricing Your Clients
In this talk, we will discuss the difference between billing and pricing, and how humans perceive the value offered when pricing creative services. We will share some economic principles that support the importance of pricing, as well as various charts and graphs exploring all the many types of billing and pricing. We will leave time at the end for practical questions around pricing.
Chad Warner
Chad Warner
About Chad
Chad runs OptimWise, a WordPress design, development, and maintenance agency. He helps businesses maintain their WordPress sites so they run securely and smoothly. Clients love that he is professional, organized, and responsive. He has years of IT experience and still loves technology. He loves to geek-out over Tolkien and Star Wars and decorate his office with LEGOs. He lives in Greer, South Carolina with his wife and their two daughters. He’s been working with WordPress since 2009. He spoke at WordCamp Grand Rapids in 2012, 2013, and 2014. He has also spoken at WordPress Grand Rapids meetups (2012-2015) and WordPress Greenville.
Title: WordPress Maintenance: Keep Your Site Secure & Running Smoothly
In this talk, you will learn how to maintain your WordPress website to keep it secure and running smoothly. We’ll discuss: What can happen if you don’t maintain WordPress? What are useful maintenance plugins, tools, processes, and services? What’s a good maintenance schedule?
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WordCamp 2018 Greenville, SC is over. Check out the next edition!
