Featured speaker: Troy Fawkes

Troy’s session is The One Stop Marketing Shop: Gutenberg’s Marketing Toolbox.

Troy has managed and developed just under a hundred personal and client WordPress websites over 8 years. He runs a 7 person digital marketing agency, Delta Growth, that conducts SEO, paid ads, email marketing and conversion rate optimization campaigns on all types of sites, the majority of which are WordPress.

Why did you choose your topic?

I know that WordPress sometimes fights the reputation of being a small business CMS, or at least that their competitors like to try to suggest that in their sales material. I wanted to show off WordPress’s extensibility by talking about how it has helped businesses of all sizes achieve success across all of the major digital marketing categories.

What do you want people to learn from your session?

Business owners, marketers, developers and designers will all get a slightly different angle on the session, but I want them all to get a sense of the four critical digital marketing categories (SEO, Paid Ads, Email & Marketing Automation, Conversion Rate Optimization & UX) as well as how they grow and change with a business.

I’d also like people to take away how WordPress can support a business through those growth stages (with a case study!), and how Gutenberg’s modular thinking in particular can be leveraged for achieving success in those marketing categories.

Why did you decide to speak?

I’ve worked in and around WordPress for my entire professional career and I wanted a chance to give back 🙂 I’ve been thinking about speaking for a couple of years now but this year just seemed like the right one for me.

What brought you to WordPress in the first place?

WordPress definitely came to me. I spent 2012 in China (among other things) teaching myself full-stack development in PHP and I had the utter horror of working with Drupal and some other nascent PHP frameworks.

WordPress was the only platform that I found made sense, had a friendly UX and was so beautifully modular that it would do whatever I asked it to.

I spent some time learning to build plugins and themes for both Drupal and WordPress and the contrast really made me fall more in love.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I had a client implement some fancy footwork in WordPress recently using custom taxonomies and modular design and it inspired me to learn more about some of the deeper technical and UX opportunities in WordPress, so pretty much every technical/design/UX/modular design session has me hooked.

Unfortunately that’s just about all of them!

I’m particularly interested in Christie Witt’s session, “Migrating 1,300 websites from HTML to WordPress, a business process case study.

What’s your advice for other WordCamp attendees?

Have fun, say hi, and come out for drinks after!

One thought on “Featured speaker: Troy Fawkes

  1. I believe that the stigma that WordPress is for small sites is no longer the case, perhaps 5 years ago or so.

    Either way, looking forward to his session, sounds like a great set of topics.

Comments are closed.