Jodie Miners
In this day and age, every community group, sporting team or not-for-profit group needs their own web presence. That’s why we’re excited to have Jodie Miners presenting at WordCamp Gold Coast on building a web presence for your community group using WordPress.com and other free tools.
Jodie’s presentation will focus on free or very low cost tools that your group can use to to get online and get organised.
She’ll focus on using WordPress.com for building out a simple website and then look at other free tools you can integrate with your site to make a fully online community. This will include apps to manage your:
- Emails
- Documents
- Events
- Forms
- Email Marketing, and much more.
We asked Jodie a little more about her experience in building online presence of community groups and how she found her way to WordPress.
At WordCamp Gold Coast, you’ll show us how Community Groups can use WordPress.com and other free web tools to build their web presence. What are some community groups you’ve helped get online with WordPress?
The community group I generally use as my playground to test new things out is NSW Underwater Hockey – There was always one missing piece on WP.com that meant that I would not change it over, but now that we can do Google Calendars on WP.com, this site will be the basis of my demos for the talk.
I’ve even got my Mum onto building WordPress.com sites and she has built one for her Probus club and one for her brother’s business.
What tools other than WordPress do you encourage groups to use?
Google Apps, MailChimp, Eventbrite, Saasu.
What sort of outcomes have community groups seen after getting an online presence?
It’s quite a transformation – having the ability for multiple people to edit the site, and having no issues with editing and uploading HTML pages, and having only the one “guru” who holds the keys to the kingdom.
There is also the other benefits of using Google Apps which gives them the domain, their own email addresses and a central place to store all of the documents that is key – (then they can link to those documents on the WordPress site to enable download from their site).
Plus all the other wonderful free or very cheap tools to manage members and send emails to members is key to the whole solution for community groups.
You’re a Business Analyst by day working in the world of Sharepoint and other Enterprise technologies, how did you find your way into the world of WordPress?
When I first started blogging I started out on WordPress.com, I had used blogger and did not like it at all. A few years back I was asked to help a friend set up a site for their small business – that was on Full WordPress, so it was a good opportunity for me to undertake this project and learn WordPress.
I then did a WordPress e-Commerce site for another friend’s business and tackled some basic PHP. I struggled with not knowing enough CSS so I got some 1 on 1 training to learn CSS from scratch and I now feel that I can tackle some more in-depth customising of WordPress themes.
I’m not a coder, so I don’t ever intend to be able to build custom themes or do major development on WordPress.
What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Gold Coast – the socialising or the sunshine?
Well, all my family is on the Gold Coast so it will be a good time to catch up with them also, and it’s always nice to pop in for a visit to Currumbin or Burleigh Beach for a swim and a few beers at the clubs overlooking the beach.
But mostly I’m looking forward to learning heaps about WordPress and hopefully sharing a few tips of my own.
Thanks Jodie, we’re looking forward to learning from you and hopefully teaching you a thing or two as well.
You can follow Jodie on Twitter. You should also follow WordCamp Gold Coast on Twitter.
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