Chris Burgess

Tech geek from Melbourne, Australia

Big Digital Adelaide 2016 Live Blog

The Big Digital Adelaide conference kicked off this week – from June 7-8, 2016 at The Science Exchange. Below you’ll find a few of my highlights and resources.

If you want to follow along on Twitter, the hashtag is: #BigDigitalADL

You can check the official Big Digital Adelaide conference website and conference schedule.

Big Digital Adelaide

Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) interviewing Gary Illyes (@methode) at Big Digital Adelaide

 

 

Day 1, Opening Keynote – Rock Your Super Heroes: Melanie Spring – Sisarina

Melanie Spring opened Big Digital by jumping into how to think differently and build motivated teams. Melanie’s passion was contagious! She gave the audience plenty of homework, critical stuff if you work in a team – you’ll know how important it is to be happy! 🙂

If was a brilliantly inspiring talk, check out more about Melanie Spring from Sisarina:

http://sisarina.com/

Get the Game & Rock Your Team:

http://sisarina.com/humans

Melanie’s Podcast: Adventures in Branding:

http://sisarina.com/adventures-in-branding-podcast

The Internet is People! Optimising for User Experience: Woj Kwasi – Kwasi Studios

I’ve been following Woj for a very long time, his session covered how important it is to focus on the user.

He talked about users, context and covered some great real world examples, as well as a bunch of great tools:

  • FullStory
  • Hotjar
  • Lucky Orange
  • CrazyEgg
  • Mouseflow
  • Inspectlet

And more..

This talk should be mandatory material for all web developers and marketer. Awesome stuff!

How To Use Google AdWords Without Throwing Your Dollars Down The Drain – Karen Dauncey

Understanding the Art of Link Earning – Dan Petrovic

Dan talked about the value of tapping into current news.

  • Rising Topics
  • Controversy
  • Research, surveys, data etc.

He explained why earning journalist attention is hard (and why it should be hard). Dan gave an example of how gets data using Google Consumer Surveys, to collect your own data to compile it using the best representation.

Remarketing, it’s more than just Cart Abandonment – Amy Who?

Social Media Pay to Play – Simone Douglas

Plan To Create Content That Matters – Joshua White

Joshua talked about the importance of being strategic when it comes to content.

A few of the key takeaways were:

  • Know your message
  • Know your objectives
  • Know your audience

Local Search in the Land of #Oz – Casey Meraz

Paying for SEO: A Blueprint for Determining Good Review Sites & Paid Lists – Garrett Mehrguth

Winning Paid Traffic With WordPress – Peter Mead

Redirection – WordPress plugin for managing redirects:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

Insert Headers and Footers – Help using tracking code, or adding code into headers and footers:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/insert-headers-and-footers/

Google Tag Manager – Help implementing Google Tag Manager (GTM) in WordPress:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/duracelltomi-google-tag-manager/

Google Tag Manager Chrome Extension:

https://support.google.com/tagassistant#topic=6000196

Talk to the Spider – Dawn Anderson

Mobile Visibility to the Max! 2016 Edition – Aleyda Solis

Why The Hell Should We Care About CRO? – Bryant Garvin

https://twitter.com/zviko_masiiwa/status/740046823058857984

Tackling Attribution Across Paid Media – John McGowan

Why Analytics Is Your Easy Win – John Clayton

Why Featured Snippets Are Good – Jennifer Slegg

Investing In Digital ‘Real-Estate’ – How You Can Buy Websites And Get Instant Traffic, Rankings And Cash-Flow – Matt & Liz Raad

Matt and Liz Raad talked about how to think about digital or virtual real estate. They presented some of their own purchases of established sites and gave examples of some reported sales. With a background in buying and selling brick and mortar businesses, they applied the same methods to digital assets.

Keynote – I’m Gary Illyes, Ask Me Anything

 

 

Day 2, Keynote – Real Australian Business And The Ideas Boom – Fred Schebesta

https://twitter.com/silbus/status/740326421650755584

Forget the Fairy Dust – Joel Klettke

https://twitter.com/ThemAdvertising/status/740335574276440066

A Not-for-Profit Perspective on Digital First Thinking – Tania Cavaiuolo

Everything You Need to Know about Panda – Jennifer Slegg

20 Content Marketing Tactics To Make Your Business Blog Go BOOM! – James Norquay

Site Symbiosis – Leveraging Content Development, SEO and Social Media – Danica Barnack & Kimberly Brown

Penguin Taming for Real Time Results – Sha Menz

Million Dollar Style On a Hundred Dollar Budget – Mike Esordi

Personalised Search and Content Delivery Just Got Real – Stelios Moudakis

That’s All They Wrote – Gary Illyes

Blog Better, Blog Less – Kate Toon

https://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker

http://www.hubspot.com/blog-topic-generator

http://tweakyourbiz.com/tools/title-generator/

Head Slapping WordPress Security – Chris Burgess

I’ll be putting together a separate post on this one with more resources, based on the feedback from those that came along – stay tuned! My slide deck is below, if you have any questions, let me know! 🙂

Harnessing The Power Of Archetypes For Your Marketing – Gianluca Fiorelli

Visualisation: A Data Journey – Sam Daynes

Cheers To Podcasting! – Luke Robertson & Dave Ellis

App Indexing Lowdown – Mariya Moeva

  1. Traffic to site & app is not a zero-sum game
  2. For content apps, you can you drastically increase re-engagement and discovery
  3. Build a unified mobile strategy

30% of online shopping purchases happen on mobile

For more info on App Indexing: g.co/appindexing

  • High app engagement and quality, it can lead to ranking boost
  • More than 10,000 apps are using App Indexing
  • There are 200B deep links
  • 40% of searches on Android returns at least 1 deep link

Closing Keynote – It’s Paid Search Jim, But Not As We Know It – Michael Verghios

Michael covered what’s around the corner for search. He talked about IoT, with an interesting stat of an estimated 21B IoT endpoints available by 2020.

Michael also talked about voice search, plus the future of digital helpers — the following stat drove this home: currently, 25% of search on mobile is voice.

 

 

 

This post is a work-in-progress. If you have any changes or corrections, just ping me @chrisburgess. Massive thanks to everyone who tweeted, the event organisers — and most importantly the speakers!

What Do You Know (WDYK) Melbourne

Last night John and Rosemary from the Web Directions team held the event What Do You Know (WDYK). Web Directions run several cool events for the web and digital industries.

The Web Directions events are aimed at designers, developers, product managers, creative and art directors – and pretty much anyone interested in digital tech. I’ve been attending their events for many years and couldn’t recommend them more highly.

A few of their upcoming events are worth mentioning:

Respond 2016

http://www.webdirections.org/respond16/

Respond is Australia’s Responsive Web Design Conference happening over 2 days in both Melbourne and Sydney.

Transform 2016

http://www.webdirections.org/transform16/

From the team behind GovHack, Transform is Australia’s Digital Government Conference. Digital technologies are “transforming” governments world wide. The term “Digital by Default” is something you’ll start hearing a lot more about. If you’re interested in this topic, you’ll love this event.

WDYK Presentations

I thought I’d publish my notes from the evening for anyone interested in the event that might have missed it. It’s hard to do all of the presentations justice – they were all excellent. If you’re a speaker and want something corrected or changed, please get in touch.

Web Performance: A Functional Guide to HTTP/2

Peter Wilson

Peter Wilson (@pwcc) – Human Made

The first talk of the night was by Peter Wilson on the topic of Web Performance HTTP/2, titled “A Functional Guide to HTTPv2”. He started the talk with a demonstration of the current page load time, “in awkward silence”, which was very effective at driving home how long the average page takes to load.

Pete will be also presenting at Respond, his talk alone is a good enough reason to attend if you’re in Melbourne.

Slides: TBA

Lessons from alm.tools

Basarat Syed

Basarat Syed (@basarat) – alm.tools, and That TypeScript Guy

Bas is the creator of alm.tools, he’s an enthusiastic developer and chances are you’ve come across his work.

He’s doing a lot of interesting work, check out his website at: http://basarat.com/.

Slides: http://slides.com/basarat/lessons-from-alm-tools/

Semantic Release/Versioning

Leonardo Correa

Leonardo Correa – Odecee

Leonardo explained how semantic release will change your life forever. It’s a big call, but he gave a passionate live demo on his cz-customizable codebase and Travis CI to prove and demonstrate how it works.

You can check out Semantic Versioning (semver.org) for more info.

Summary:

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.
Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.

Some of the things it can automate is detecting if a release is necessary or not and checking for vulnerable NPM packages. It can figure out the next release number type based on commit messages (major, minor or patch), generate changelog and bump package.json.

The motto of Leonardo’s talk was to work smarter, not harder. Something always worth focusing on!

Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r1-aKXx5RrtZc9HOW4ggEnowHgdKP3OyGFYDg7DRlzs/edit?usp=sharing

The Agile Buzz

Daina Price

Daina Price (@pricedaina) – NAB, a muse design

Daina gave a solid explanation of why Agile Development is much more than a buzzword and how it’s about adding value.

She covered some background of Agile, how to embrace “agility”, The Agile Manifesto (and much more):

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

(Reference: http://agilemanifesto.org/)

The essence of Daina’s presentation was to reach the goal of “making better software” – which is what it should all be about.

Slides: TBA

8 Actionable On-Page SEO Tips

Jamie Gemmell

Jamie Gemmell (@jwbg19) – Search Jam

Regular attendee and speaker from the Melbourne SEO and WordPress Meetups, Jamie gave a brilliant list of actionable on-page SEO recommendations that can be used on all projects.

He broke his talk into 8 sections, noted below:

1) SEO plugins

2) Separate Keywords

example.com/some-keyword-here

rather than

example.com/somekeywordhere

3) Keyword Rich URLs

4) Keyword in Titles

5) Meta Descriptions

6) Labelling media correctly, use file name, ALT tag and descriptions

7) Content

If you think it’s spammy, it probably is..

8) Time

Give things time.

Search is a topic I’m quite passionate about myself and I always pick up some new tips listening to Jamie.

Slides: TBA

Discretely Responsive

Simon Knox

Simon Knox (@psimyn) – Kogan

Simon covered the topic of being practical about moving towards a goal incrementally (think components rather than entire pages), one step at a time.

His talk was very entertaining and he talked about making changes where you can get real wins without the overhead of change management that can stifle progress. The main thinking is to move gradually to responsive, not major cosmetic changes, so this is something that *can* be done gradually.

A good point that was made was to not be afraid to make changes to existing code.

Your code is bad, and that’s ok. — Proverb

Simon offered several practical code tips, but ended up by saying that this type of work is never finished, so don’t expect an end date. You should always be cleaning things up and improving.

Slides: TBA

Closing Comments

John Allsopp hit a cord with me when he talked about Australian Boards being under represented by tech folks, and how we, as a community need to take responsibility for this. Skills like writing and speaking are critical to this, they’ll always be an incredible benefit to you – and an important step towards taking on these responsibilities. There are plenty of events looking for speakers and websites sites looking for writers!

It was the first time I’ve been to the Zendesk offices in Melbourne, it’s a very nice setup.

What Do You Know (WDYK) Melbourne

It was an awesome night, I’d recommend getting along to one when you have a chance!

WDYK was put on by Web Directions and Zendesk, so a big thanks to them both, and an even bigger thanks to all the speakers.

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