WordCamp NZ Summary

I spent my weekend in Wellington at the inaugural WordCamp event in New Zealand. This is about the open source blog platform, WordPress, which we use for various projects, including our own site/blog.

Here is a quick summary of some of the presentations I attended.

6 ways for bloggers to say out of legal trouble

Steven Price, Barrister
medialawjournal.co.nz

You are liable for your content and any content in comments/forums on your site. You may get sued in any country, regardless of where the site is hosted.

1. Don’t moderate comments

   Implies that you have approved/endorsed the comments

2. Respond to complaints

   If you respond to a complaint quickly before it gets to the stage of lawyers getting involved.

3. Use "I think" a lot

   Evaluative, opinion based content is often protected by the honest opinion defense, which is protected by law. It is a grey area though, and not a guaranteed get out of jail free card.

4. If you’re going to publish private or confidential stuff, have a damned good public interest justification

5. If you want to write about a jury trial, do it afterwards

6. Credit your sources

   Copyright infringement is very common, but that doesn’t make it legal. Consider getting the copyright holders permission.

E-Commerce in under 5

presented by Dan Milward
www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/

• E-commerce plug-in for WordPress.
• Crafty Cart Theme is purpose built for the plug-in
• Integrates with PayPal and a variety of other credit card payment gateways
• Easy to set up and configure
• Over 300,000 downloads
• Paid support options and a licensed/paid version if you don’t want the open source one.

Coding Without Coding

presented by Ryan Hellyer

pixopoint.com/

• WordPress Theme Generator Plug-In that let’s end users create a customised theme.
• Used by John McCain’s campaign team and Nancy Cartwright (the voice of Bart Siimpson)
• Didn’t go with an open source model, and now regrets it.

From There to Here WordPress and the art of Zen maitenance

presented by Miraz Jordan

• Miraz writes ebooks for non-technical people to help them with WordPress.
• Used BBPress Forum Plug-In
• RoleScope Plug-In for advanced security configuration
• Wishlist Plug-In for private member only content

Xero News is Good News

presented by Philip Fierlinger
Xero.com

• Drury.net.nz, Rod Drury’s personal blog, helped get them started
• Get to know us – start a relationship with our customers
• Tried to build the blog platform internally and it was a failure.
• Pre-IPO market sensitive content limited scope of the blog
• Post launch moved to WordPress
• Built an audience providing insight on things that matter around three core themes: business, technology, design.
• Establish a voice for the blog, they wanted to be conversational, personable and transparent.
• Wanted to have subject matter experts and get contribution from the team.
• Find an angle, punchy headlines, short and sharp copy and evocative images.
• Struggling with quantity vs quality.
• Editorial review vs anything goes – asked people for contributions and then had to reject or edit them.
• Official vs casual but they are a public company.
• Check your writing by asking yourself "would you say this in a conversation"
• Blog versus latest craze (e.g. Twitter). The blog has proven to be the most consistent way to communicate with customers, get feedback and get traffic to the site.
• Global vs regional – now dealing with how to do content for the US market as well.
• Measure of success is via comments, inbound links and traffic from search engines.
• Asking for comments via email newsletter list worked really, really well.
• Successfully converting customers who are originally arriving at the blog via search engines.
• Use excerpts on the homepage not just the full post.