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WordCamp Cape Town 2011 is a Go!

Barend Potgieter — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 06:15:42 +0000

First it was a dream, a twinkle in Ashley Shaw’s eye but now finally it is a reality!

LightSpeed is proud to officially announce that WordCamp Cape Town 2011 is on and coming to the mother city this September!

We are striving to make this the biggest South African WordCamp yet, with top notch speakers from all over the globe (countries represented include SA, New Zealand, Ghana and Kenya) delving into everything WordPress!

The Details:

Date: 15 September 2011
Venue: The Alba Lounge, V&A Waterfront
Location: Cape Town
Price: R135 (includes lunch and a nifty WordCamp Cape Town t-shirt). Tickets are available at http://www.entrytickets.co.za/eventview/WCT2011
Theme: Spring has Sprung

WordCamp Cape Town Badges

The Forge has designed some kick-ass badges for WordCamp CT participants to download and post on their blogs, websites and social media profiles:

Speakers

WordCamp Cape Town 2011 will offer 2 tracks of talks and workshops:

Content Managers and Publishers

This track will focus on the role of content in WordPress Web development, including blogging, content creation, content management and content strategy.

Development

The development track will be focused on the more technical aspects of developing with WordPress, including Plugins, User Interface design and scalability.

There will be slots for 20 speakers to deliver their presentations. Presentations should be 30 – 45min long and there will be a short Q&A session after each talk.

Speakers that have been confirmed include Dan Milward (Instinct) Ashley Shaw (LightSpeed and Feedmymedia), Adii Pienaar (Woothemes) and Matt Bush (Haycroft Media). To see the full list of Speakers, click HERE.

There are still some Speaker slots to fill, so if you want to get involved and wow the WordPress community with your thoughts and insights, don’t hesitate and fill out the Call for Speakers form on the official WordCamp Cape Town 2011 website.

It’s All About WordPress

WordCamp Cape Town 2011 is shaping up to be a great event and LightSpeed is looking forward to seeing you all there!

We are WordPress Professionals – Cheap isn’t what we aim for

Ashley Shaw — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 06:30:19 +0000

LightSpeed’s team of developers are passionate WordPress aficionados and WooThemes devotees. We work with WordPress and WooThemes every day of our lives and we consider ourselves to be really good at what we do. We take pride in our work – which is of a very high standard – and we have accumulated a large portfolio of awesome clients that speaks for itself. Ninjas, Grand Masters, Assassins, Big Leaguers – call us what you will, we are professionals.

This is why we find it disturbing when clients come asking us to submit a proposal for the cheapest quote.

Cheap rarely means Quality work

Cheap – Quite frankly the word sends shivers down our spines. Cheap has never been equated with quality or enduring value.

In fact, let’s have a quick look at what some of the synonyms the Merriam Webster Thesaurus provides for the word ‘Cheap’

of low quality
arousing or deserving of one’s loathing and disgust
involving minimal difficulty or effort

None of that sounds like anything that we want a part in, and as a customer, nor should you.

The Project Triangle states it simply. If you want a project to be good quality, cheap and delivered fast, you are out of luck. You have to choose two of these attributes, and give up on the other.

Skilled in the Way of Woo

A couple of months ago it was with great pleasure that we announced being accepted as an official affiliated woo Worker. We love Woo Themes and we work with them every day, with the Woo Canvas theme or utmost favourite and the starting point for most of our projects

Recently discussion between Affiliated Woo Workers has ignited around some instances of being spammed by potential clients to provide the cheapest quote for a project. Currently the Affiliated Woo Workers page does have a section on Rules that should be complied with before a potential customer starts contacting the Woo Workers. The recent requests that have led to this discussion clearly contravened the last rule of Woo contact:

Please do not mass email all our affiliated woo workers with your requirements and ask them to bid on the work required.

During this discussion, some suggestions on improving the intake process for Affiliated Woo Workers came up:

The creation of a AWW Request for Proposal that makes the client fill out everything the developers need to create a decent quote. This proposal should also contain enough information to enable the Woo Workers to make the decision to quote or pass on the job. This form could be linked to from the Affiliated Woo Workers page on WooThemes.
Part of this pre-project form could relate to criteria that would help filter the requests to the appropriate Woo Affiliates, by scale of project, niche or availability.
A status or availability setting would be nice to have visible next to Woo affiliates’ names.
A price range for certain projects like Sortfolio, or an agreement on some pricing models/ranges and best business practices between Woo Workers could also help.

If, in time, the Affiliate Woo Workers are rolled into the Woo Jobs site, it will still be important to differentiate between average service providers and the endorsed Woo Workers that can be counted on to modify WooThemes. This could be achieved by having:

An “Endorsed by WooThemes“, “Preferred Supplier” or “Affiliated Woo Worker” badge next to our profiles, and also having the functionality to search and filter by Affiliated Woo Workers
A “Jobs posted/Jobs awarded” and “Jobs completed” indication for clients and service providers respectively

Educate your customers

In light of this debate, we have decided to take the initiative and create our new Client Intake Form. This intake form contains all the questions that we feel are necessary for us to submit a decent proposal.

We feel that it is in both ours and the client’s best interest to be educated and informed beforehand on the due process of gaining a quote. If customers can be educated in learning what they need before sending out for a quote, it will save time and money for all parties concerned.

Try out our New Client Intake Form

We would love to have your feedback on our new Client Intake Form! Please sound off in the comment section below.

Our Adventures in Venture Capital

Ashley Shaw — Tue, 10 May 2011 07:46:08 +0000

Venture capital is often viewed as the holy grail for Internet Startups, and rightfully so as it can give promising young companies the shot in the arm they need to go from ‘a good idea’ to ‘a great business’.

The Feedmymedia journey

At LightSpeed we have been working on our new product Feedmymedia, due for launch later this year. At this time we can’t reveal too much about it, but the concept behind it has been in development since 2007 and we are all very much looking forward to it seeing the light of day.

One of the reasons that it has taken so long is because Ashley has been bootstrapping LightSpeed, reinvesting profits into the growth of LightSpeed and the development of Feedmymedia. This is not always the easiest approach.

Over the past few months we have taken part in and applied for various Venture Capital initiatives, including Seedcamp, Future 100, Google Umbono and the Net Prophet Workshop.

So far we haven’t succeeded in catching the eye of any of these VC initiatives, but the experience has been of tremendous value to our company, and here’s why:

A fresh perspective

Applying for Venture Capital forces you to engage with your concept and be self critical. Having applied to these initiative so often over the past few months and having been shot down could be viewed as disheartening to some. However in our case the opposite is true. Every application has led to a stronger definition of our product Feedmymedia.

The process leads to a constant refining of the idea, identifies shortcomings and allows the opportunity to boil down your business concept to its simplest form.

Net Prophet

Net Prophet is a yearly conference where the most innovative thinkers and entrepreneurs in the Internet space come together to share their stories, ideas and predictions for the future.

They also host the Startup Acceleration Workshop where 10 Startup Teams are selected for 3 days of intense mentoring by a leading mentor and business couch in the Internet Space. This year’s mentor is Permjot Valia, a senior Seedcamp Mentor and Angel Investor and the founder and CEO of Help with Sales Ltd.

Sadly we haven’t qualified for the Netprophet Workshop, but congratulations to the winners. We will however be attending the Netprophet Conference tomorrow and look forward to what we will learn there.

We will be Live Tweeting from the event, so check out the progress on our Twitter Stream.

WordCamp – Word’s out on WordCamp South Africa 2011

Ashley Shaw — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 12:47:15 +0000

WordCamps are informal, community-organized conferences about everything WordPress. They are great networking and learning events put together by WordPress users of all types, from the casual user to the hard core developers and code wranglers. Everyone gets to participate, share ideas, and get to know each other.

WordCamp South Africa

The last WordCamp South Africa was held in 2008 with big success at the Wild Fig Restaurant in Cape Town (Mowbray).

Over a 100 bloggers, geeks and journalists attended the event and speakers ranged from WordPress founder and inspiration Matt Mullenweg to local legends like Adii Rockstar (born Adriaan Pienaar) founder of WooThemes and Dave Duarte self styled Marketing Geek.

LightSpeed wants to host the next WordCamp SA and we need your support!

We want to put the following out to the community for ideas and suggestions. Please contact us and share your thoughts by commenting below the post:

WordCamp Meetup

For the run up to the actual event we want to host an informal WordPress Meetup, open to anyone with an interest in WordPress and the WordCamp event, to share ideas and get the WordPress juices flowing.

WordCamp Meetup’s are usually smaller events held before the actual conference and help to set the tone for the big event as well as providing an opportunity for potential hosts, co-hosts, speakers and sponsors to meet and discuss ideas and come up with actionable plans for the conference.

Our initial ideas for a meetup is to have a small get together early in 2011, similar to the Geek Dinners for interested parties. If you have any suggestions for Venue, Topics, Date or just want to share some general thoughts, Speak up by commenting below.

The Big Daddy: Suggestions for WordCamp SA 2011

Call for Venue Suggestions

The Previous WordCamp SA was held at the Wild Fig in Mowbray, Cape Town. Ideally it should be held at spot that is close to accommodation and transport facilities for all out of town attendees, is large enough to host a crowd of geeks in excess of 100 people and has excellent Wifi to enable all those tweets, blogs and live streaming video feeds that will be generated on the day.

Call for Speaker Suggestions

We want to make WordCamp SA 2011 the best WordCamp possible, and the success of a WordCamp depends heavily on the quality of the Speakers available to attend the event and blow our minds with WordPress awesomness

Our suggestions for Speakers:

Dan Milward – owner of instinct creators of getshopped.org
Andy Peatling
Matt Mullenweg
WooThemes
Google Summer of Code mentors or interns

Call for Sponsors

Anyone interested in sponsoring WordCamp South Africa 2011 or has a suggestion on whom to approach for sponsorship can contact us here at LightSpeed or simply leave a comment below

Things to consider:

Wifi access is essential. Previous WordCamp brought down the first Hotspot and a second had to be initiated
AV equipment is needed
The Speakers really do make or break the event

Proposed bp-components needing feedback

Ashley Shaw — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:06:52 +0000

In the past couple of months I have been doing some work for a political party in South Africa. We built a volunteer website to get party supporters to join as volunteers to help spread the word.

As part of my research I registered on the John McCain website first. The website provided its supporters with some key tools for spreading the word and supporting the party. Once you logged in you would land on your action center with big call-to-action icons requesting people to do take action. All user interactions could potentially score that use points. The user’s points would be displayed in a sidebar widget. Please note that the social network part of the website has now been closed due to election being over and John McCain loosing.

I decided to try out the Barack Obama website next and was pleasantly surprised when I found out it wasn’t ASP.NET like the McCain website! When the website first appears, the viewer sees a ’splash’ page – an entry page with a video and a signup form to join the Barack Obama ‘team’ – basically to receive Email concerning the Obama campaign. The Obama site promotes its own group and event system with the my.barackobama.com section, their statement is to “Organize Locally with our online Tools”:

Talk to Voters
Join a Local Group
Find an Event
Fundraise
Blog

I have a project that needs me to do the following:

Build a volunteer database and get the volunteers to promote the party
Get the volunteers to aid in driving the objectives of the party
Empower the volunteers by providing them the tools to connect in their geographic area
Drive discussion amongst the supporters and volunteers

My aim is to use BuddyPress to build a community of party supporters. There are a number of bp-components that are missing, like the following:

Friend importer tool and more advanced tools for recruiting new community members
User point system tracking and allocating points for user interaction
Action center and user dashboard page displaying member stats and call-to-action tools
Fund raising module allowing users to create and run fund raising initiatives for the party
Design a mobile theme for buddypress making the site more accessible
Integrating a Jabber client into buddypress allowing an in browser chat experience
Points status and leader board sidebar widget

I will be blogging each of the above points over the next day or so…..

All components we write will be released as open source and buddypress users will have full access to source code. My objective is to get feedback on my ideas to ensure that we write useful addons for buddypress.