Heidi Jermyn
Hailing from the sunny Sunshine Coast, Australia, Heidi has been professionally active in the web industry for a decade. She got the taste for web development back in the bad old days of tables and inline styling and has since sunk her teeth into flash app development, games, project management and her big loves of website design and front end dev. Late 2008 she formed Cookie Web Consulting with Orla Duncan and together they’ve been on a mission to develop beautiful, functional and affordable websites – almost all of them on the beloved and most wondrous of platforms… WordPress.
Session: WordPress Use Case Scenarios
After complaining that I never heard about stuff happenning in my adopted home town (a common woe of many a blow-in) I decided to build a community website to showcase events, local news and comment and promote the town of Kilcock in general. I did it on practically no budget and little spare time – using a free WordPress template, some wonderful plugins and some hard slog. It’s been up since June 09 and coupled with a very active Facebook page it does very well in visitors, interaction and even selling ad space to cover basic costs of hosting and promotions. I have gained 2 excellent writers to help with post diversity and am always looking for more articles from local ‘knowledge experts’. I’ll share my story on the WordPress User Case Scenarios panel and pass on how you might be able to setup something similar in your community using the peerless, open source platform – WordPress.