July 13, 2025 — Most agencies waste time and money during client onboarding—not because of tools or processes, but because they’re speaking a completely different language than their clients. When a technical person talks to a non-technical client without empathy, things fall apart fast: unclear expectations, messy communication, scope creep, and frustration on both sides. It doesn’t just hurt the relationship—it hits your margins too. This talk is about: Understanding where the disconnect really happens Using empathy (not jargon) to build trust from day one Fixing your onboarding process so it’s smooth, profitable, and repeatable If you’ve ever felt misunderstood by a client (or vice versa), this one’s for you.

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July 13, 2025 — Being active in the WordPress community can help you grow as a person and teach you skills that help your business. Robert will show you shortcuts and some people you should reach out to speak to to boost your WordPress business. There is a term in WordPress: come for the software, stay for the people.

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July 10, 2025 — Have you ever been faced with a list of complex pricing requirements for an e-commerce store? A multi-step process that has many different pathways? Some interactive elements requiring JavaScript? A template or block that should look or work slightly differently depending on the combination of options or data it receives? Has the solution to any of these ever felt inherently fragile, required extensive manual re-testing every time you make a change, or resulted in a panicked phone call or email from a client because your change impacted some other part of the site that you didn’t even think of?

Sounds like you could do with a way to reduce the risk of human error by having something to automatically check all those pesky edge cases, combinations of options, types and amounts of data, etc., for you! Whether it’s during initial development as you build up layers of complexity and want to make sure you haven’t broken the earlier layers, or when you come back to the project in a year’s time praying this change to the layout doesn’t inadvertently break some usage buried deep in the blog archives – writing and using automated tests can reduce the risks and increase your confidence when writing or modifying complex code.

In this talk, you’ll hear about some of the principles, methodologies, and types of automated testing relevant to developing WordPress themes and plugins, some of the tools available, and see some real-world examples of how they can be used.

July 10, 2025 — Fed up with endless revisions, vague client feedback, and feeling more like an order-taker than an expert designer? You’re not alone. The way you present your work can make or break client relationships—and your sanity.

In this session, I’ll show you exactly how I’ve built a rock-solid presentation process that makes clients see me as the expert I am, eliminates those dreaded “make it pop” requests, and massively reduces feedback rounds. You’ll learn to frame your designs clearly, confidently, and strategically—so clients see solutions, not opinions.

July 10, 2025 — The WordPress Plugin Repository provides a platform for developers to showcase their work to a broad audience. However, it enforces specific guidelines that can influence monetisation strategies. This session will delve into the premium monetisation options permitted within the repository, highlight those that aren’t, and examine how your premium implementation can impact your product’s discoverability.

July 10, 2025 — In this talk, I’ll break down the real-world lessons I’ve learned from building and scaling multiple WooCommerce plugins into thriving, long-term businesses. From finding “painkiller” plugin ideas to building customer-driven roadmaps and shipping with small, scrappy teams — this session gives a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to build products store owners actually love (and keep paying for).

July 10, 2025 — Once you start building client websites, you run into the debate/issue of clients managing their own content. By principle, clients should have ownership of their own websites and the content, but it’s common for their freedom to affect the integrity of your beautiful design. This is where metafield plugins get to shine. You can create a consistent backend experience for the clients that will provide a layer of separation between the content and the design. Learn how to build a backend that clients will love and are comfortable to edit content in, while keeping the frontend looking the way it was intended. Once you get used to this type of build method, your sites will stay beautiful for years to come.

July 10, 2025 — What are the decided factors in making your next career move?

Do you actively think about it? Do you wait for the tap on the shoulder from a recruiter? Do you have one bad day at work and then decide you want to start applying for jobs?

In this session, I’ll take you through my career design method. There are key questions and activities I go through to make a strategic decision about my next move and I want to share this process with you!

By the end of this session, you’ll have a clear scaffold to help you get clarity about where you’re heading and more importantly, why you’re heading there.

July 10, 2025 — This presentation is a case study on how a small business created a homeschooling reading list using WooCommerce, and leveraged the Pods and WooCommerce Product Table plugins to allow members to search for books by subject, curriculum, age group, and more. Notably, the WooCommerce book catalogue includes over 1,900 titles, but the site does not sell any books. While the primary focus of the case study is on how curated book lists were delivered to clients, the approach is broadly applicable to any scenario involving a large WooCommerce product catalogue, where users need to filter and view results in a structured, table-based format. The presentation is not technical, and is suitable for both business users and developers.

July 10, 2025 — From an outside perspective it can look like leadership roles are a golden ticket, bringing with them less hands on work, higher salaries, the ability to order people around and a shiny new title. The reality, however, of *effectively* leading a team or department is quite different and may not be for everyone. This presentation will dig into what’s required to lead a team successfully, the sacrifices that have to be made, leading by example and taking on a lot of the grunt work to allow your team to work effectively while ensuring you check your ego at the door. I will wrap up the presentation with an overview of some of the tools/methods we use at The Code Company to keep a regular pulse on the health of our engineering team members, keep on top of their professional development, ensure promises made are kept and some of the issues we’re still working on to this day.