 Fy lawer, y glasiau a'r ystod, a bod yn ystod i'r gwaith o'r agor, yn ystod i'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gwaith, ond yna'r ddechrau'r gwaith yn ystod i'r gwaith. Felly, byddwn i'n gweithio'r ddweud o'r ystod o'r gweithio'r gwaith yn ystod i'r ei ddweudio'r cartwnid, oherwydd mae'r gweithio'r cyllid. Mae'r Gweithio'r Gweithio'r Gweithio'r gwaith i'r Eisex er fydd yw'r cyfforddol i'r cyflwyto ar gyfer cypl â ypwynd 2015 a bydd hyn yn ddefnyddio'r cyflwyto ar gyfer cyllidion Cymllus Felly mae'r cyfrannu'r fawr yn golygu, mynd i'n bwysig o gydag cyflwyto â'r cyflwyto Hydiwch, dyf wedi am Yma'r cyfrannu i'r cyfrannu cyflwyto ac yn ystgrifedd yn ddechrau ac rwy'n gwybod yn ymgyrch i'n argyflei'r cyfrannu Mae'n eu ffordd am yr ystyried gweithio, yw'r cyhoedd, roedd yn gwneud yn gweithio, gyda siaradau â'r cyflwyngau. Mae'r pethau wedi arlawni, ac yn ymweld a'i gwneud baradwyd i'ch gael ymlaen i'r cyflwyngau hynny. Nid o'r rhaglen o'r cyflwyngau hynny. Yn ymweld, mae'r cyflwyngau hynny'n gweithio? Yn ymdwy'n gweithio. First of all, ychydig i chi wedi gwneud o'r cyflwyngau i'r cyflwyngau cyflwyngau. I'll be showing you how I came to use WordPress, why I love it, how I use it, and some of the things that I've got badly wrong that would have been useful to know at the start. Next, coders, developers and other people doing highly technical things. I'm hoping that whilst I'm unlikely to provide you with any brand new insights into the inner workings of WordPress that a user's perspective will be interesting for you. So see me as a case study, a guinea pig, and if I don't talk about the aspects that interest you, do ask me about them in the question time or afterwards. And then, latecomers, those who turned up to the wrong room, etc. I'll be showing some cartoons so I hope you enjoy them. As you can see, I've only drawn an audience of three and the dotted lines are a lazy cartoonist trick for drawing everyone else. So, first of all, some disclaimers. Firstly, I'm not going to teach you how to draw cartoons or how to be a cartoonist, but in case anyone does want to know, this is the cartoon creation process simplified version. Disclaimer two, never take technical advice from a cartoonist. I had a lot more hair when I drew this cartoon. It's not that I'm not technically competent, but I'm a cartoonist, not a WordPress specialist. And a third and final disclaimer. This talk is not intended to say, look at me, aren't I brilliant? Look what a success I've made of everything. Whilst I've had some successes which I'll be talking about in the next 10 minutes, I've also made a lot of mistakes and I'll be telling you about some of those too later on in the talk. So, first of all, a couple of examples of my work, just so we know what kind of thing I do, so which might help to help you to understand what I'm talking about later on. So, first of all, this is one for freelancers, locations of this year's tax paperwork. And this is how I organise my desk. So, just to give you an idea of where I keep everything on my desk. Now, I do a lot of cartoons of a kind of church theme and this is one that I did for the newspaper I draw for, called The Hierarchy of Biscuits. And hopefully it makes sense even if you're not in that particular world. So, we've got the gold foil wrapped double chocolate deluxe for the dignitaries. Then we've got the digestive and the chocolate chip cookie, Bourbon, custard cream, ginger nut. Then at the bottom, those pink wafer ones, the nice biscuit, the malted milk and the rich tea. So, I draw about all sorts of different topics, some more serious than others. And this is one that I've done, I did a few years ago about food banks. So, this was in 2013. Perhaps we need to ask why this is happening. And just to give another example of one on a topic, this is a climate change cartoon about those who are most responsible, least vulnerable versus those who are least responsible, most vulnerable. So, that just gives you an idea of the kind of work that I do. So, how did I start using WordPress? Well, my story begins in 1996. Oasis were topping the charts, it was the Atlanta Olympics and I was starting to draw cartoons at a college in Dorset. So, this was my room in the college and it was on a corridor that lots of people had to walk down. And so, I'd post the cartoons that I had drawn on my door and people would stop and read them. And I suppose this for me was my pre-internet, at least for me, example of a website in that I would post them on the door, people would stop and look at them. And just to give an example of the kind of cartoon quality, you know, the artwork's a bit flaky, but this is the kind of thing that I was drawing. So, suddenly he pulled the cord on his ejector seat. This is fitting in a lecture. So, at the time I had a car, this is the best photo of me taken in the 1990s. Now, I no longer needed the car. I had a friend who had a computer who no longer needed the computer, so we did a swap. So, with my new 14K modem, I connected to the internet and before long, I learned a bit of HTML and put a website up on GeoCities, which will mean something to a few of you but not to others. And so, I was able to put cartoons and other nonsense online. Fast forward to 2002, I met lots of brilliant creative people, one of whom was a friend, became a friend Chris Taylor from Yorkshire and he started, he and I started a community blogging site. And so, this is my earliest example, one of my early examples of blogging. This is all still pre-wordpress, but for me at the time, this was an amazing technological advancement to be able to put my cartoons online. So, my cartoons were gradually becoming a bit more popular, seen online. And to cut a long story short, eventually I sent some off to a newspaper who agreed to publish them and so I had a way into being a full-time cartoonist. So, just to give an example, I was drawing a lot of church-themed cartoons at the time and here is an example of one. This will be entirely nonsensical to you if you're not in that world, but this is the kind of thing I was doing. The artwork had still not really improved that much. This is about bishops standing in the corner. So, around this time, I heard about a new piece of software called WordPress and so I began a new cartoon blog using it. And here we have my, this is my early, this is my WordPress website in approximately 2005. And it went on to be absolutely central to the way that I made my living. And I'll say a bit more about that in a few moments. But first of all, I want to say why I love WordPress. Now, it's always tricky to know if you have new material, if you're a band, you have a new song, do you play it at the beginning? Do you save it up and will the crowd like it? So, this is a brand new cartoon that nobody has seen apart from Ross, my proof reader. And so, here goes. It's 20 panels so I'm going to run through them quite quickly. So, this is 20 reasons to love WordPress. It's easy to learn. Well, fairly easy. There's no need to edit code. A community built it and keeps it going. You can install it in five minutes. Search engines love it. It's great for mobile phones. There's always somebody, someone to help with problems. You can use plugins to do lots more. Over 25% of all websites use it. It does a lot more than just blogging. You don't need to be an expert to update your site. There are many brilliant free themes. You can update a site from anywhere. People can comment and interact. Your data is on a site you own. It's great for pictures, audio and video. It updates automatically for security. You can have multiple users. You can impress your friends with a beautiful website and it's free. This is my 20 reasons to love WordPress cartoon that I will shortly put on my website. Now, I want to show you how WordPress is central to the way I make my living as a cartoonist. Now, this is a pie chart that my accountant desperately wants to see once every year. So, this is a very approximate breakdown of how I make my living. So, I do cartoons for regular clients who I've built over the years, who I do for all the time. Then, I've got one-off commissions from people who've often seen my work on one of my sites, license sales, which I'll explain in a minute what that means. Then, book advances and royalties. So, the books are on my site and sometimes the people who commission the books have seen me online and then merchandise. So, how does this work in practice? Now, I've got five ways that a cartoonist can use WordPress and I hope this would be applicable to other creative industries as well. There may well be more than five, but these are the ones that I thought of. One additional disclaimer, I've only used three and a half of these five methods. So, I'm going to demonstrate each one with one of my own websites where applicable. So, first of all, blogging, which I have already talked about a bit, and this is my cartoon blog. So, over the twelve years I've had a blog on WordPress. It has contained a mixture of serious news, cartoons about serious news, the latest work I've been doing, competitions and a certain amount of messing around as well. The benefits of the blogging approach, it puts you in the centre of a community of like-minded people whilst enabling you to show off your work. There's a lot more I could say about blogging, that's probably a whole other talk, but my main advice for bloggers is be interesting in whatever way. I don't do so much now as other parts of my work has grown, but blogging has been absolutely central to what I've been able to do. So, secondly, using WordPress for a stock image site, and this is something I do. So, this is CartoonChurch.com, which is my cartoon licensing site. Now, every local parish church has something called a parish magazine. This is usually an A4 photocopy booklet with a pastel-coloured cover. And I supply cartoons to make parish magazines more interesting. And so, having done weekly cartoons for twelve years, I've built up quite a back catalogue. So, selling licences is one of the ways that I make my living. I've been using WordPress to do this since 2005, but the advent of membership plugins has made this so much easier. It means that I can automate, for instance, the process of sending out renewal emails to people and that kind of thing. And that has made a huge difference to me. And I'll talk a little bit more about membership plugins in a few moments. So, example number three is a portfolio website. And this is my example. It's not the most shining example of a brilliant design, but this was a site I put online a few years ago to showcase my cycling-themed cartoons. Now, social media and particular Facebook has been a vitally important, has been very important in the success of this venture. And I could talk a lot more about social media. But again, this is probably a separate talk. But I, despite social media, I still see it as absolutely crucial to have a website which is your own base on the web where people can always find your work and you're not relying on a third party service. So, as a result of this website and putting cartoons online, cycling cartoons online, I've drawn cycling cartoons for all sorts of different clients and I spent a significant chunk of 2016 writing and drawing a book on the topic. And here we are, and this book will be out in June. And it wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't had a WordPress site that I was able to put everything up online and the publishers discovered my work online. And so, I have a lot to be thankful on that front. So, fourth, membership sites. Whilst I've used membership plugins to help me run my licensing, I've not yet run a full membership website, but I'm working on one. And here we have the work in progress. Brilliant site, not yet built, cartoons and member benefits. Now, a lot of artists are using a site called Patreon to fund their work where people pledge a certain amount of money each month and in return get benefits. So, they maybe see your work first or they get downloads or they get merchandise in return for making a payment. So, I thought I don't need to be paying Patreon fees. I can do this myself using WordPress. It should be entirely doable. So, watch this space. It's a work in progress. And number five, using WordPress to sell online. There are brilliant plugins like WooCommerce that allow you to sell, but I must confess that I haven't yet used them as I sell most of my merchandise through third parties. So, I tend to link to other places that sell what I do rather than selling on my own website. These are a few of the things that I sell books and 2000, all sorts of bits and pieces. So, I wanted to talk a little bit about themes and plugins. As somebody who has been to a couple of previous word counts, I found it really useful to get practical tips on useful plugins and themes that other people have found useful. So, first of all, themes. And my main advice here is let your content shine. And this is probably a more important principle than any specifics about particular themes. So, for me, for my work, I need something that will allow an image of about 700 pixels wide. That's sort of about the minimum size at which it's viewable online. So, the theme needs to accommodate that. And I don't want too much of the distraction. So, I don't want too much design in the theme because I want my cartoon to be the most interesting thing on the page. I definitely don't want a heading over an image which a lot of themes have, which is great for some people but not for a cartoonist. But of course, for you, it will be different depending on the kind of work that you have and what you need. There are cartoon-specific themes but I've never found one that particularly suits my kind of work and I could list some of these but you can Google them just as well as I can. So, I thoroughly recommend paying for a theme. Free themes are a great way in and it means anyone can get going with a word press site but if you're going to be using it for a business site then it will pay for itself many times over to have one that's been professionally designed of a good quality. So, for me, I've been looking for modern simple themes without too much to distract and also by somebody that I trust and I've used Genesis themes by Studio Press. I do love their designs and also a theme called Generate Press by Tom Osborne with very simple lines and the ability to customise. I will put the links to these. I'm afraid they're not on my slides owing to slight incompetence on my part but I will put the links on my website after this talk. So, plug-ins, membership plug-ins as I've already discussed. The one that I use is called Member Press and I'm trying out a plug-in called Restrict Content Pro for my new website. There's a guy called Chris Lima who writes a blog and he has his finger on the pulse of the membership plug-in world if that interests you and again I'll put the link to his site after this talk. So, secondly, Page Builders. I recommend a bit of caution as some are better than others and obviously if you build too many pages using them you can find yourself with problems in the future if you've relied too much on a plug-in for how your website looks. But, for me, they are very useful for doing front pages and just a few pages on my website. So, the ones I've used is Page Builder by Site Origin and I'm currently experimenting with one called Beaver Builder. I will put a link to an article by Pippin Williamson called All About with a Comparison of these different Page Builders. So, recent posts now some of you may know other ways to achieve this but for me using a plug-in which shows a list of cartoon thumbnails has been absolutely brilliant for me and while researching for this talk I discovered that the plug-in that I use has been discontinued and therefore probably isn't one I should be using so I won't recommend it to you and this demonstrates the importance of reviewing your plug-ins every now and then. Then I use sharing plug-ins which is essential for somebody doing visual work you want people to be able to share what you do on social media and there are many of these available I tend to go for ones that fit the design of the particular site you know they're like the buttons as they fit with the design and allowing me to customise the text for the Twitter link. Then just to heap everything else together quite a lot of other plug-ins so I use one to convert my old GIF images to JPEGs I use an image optimiser so my cartoons load quickly on mobile phones I use SEO plug-ins backing up plug-ins and a few others which I won't list. So, some lessons learned. First of all find your niche. Now this is in my opinion key all-purpose advice for making it as a cartoonist as well as for having a successful website. It's really hard to be the number one current affairs cartoonist in the world but once you narrow it down to one issue so just give an example housing or the environment or cartoons about a particular interest say golf or classic cars once you choose a topic a niche it becomes a lot more achievable and I think it's the same with websites so if you are writing or drawing about something that is specific it's far more possible to be a significant player in that world so for me historically I've drawn a lot about churches now I do a lot about cycling and then I have other possible things that I know about that I may do cartoons about in the future so my second lesson learned and this was learned the hard way choose a good host like many things in life you get what you pay for now I started out with a really inexpensive host and it didn't go very well. The site would go down sometimes for days on end and you couldn't talk to them on the phone emails took longer and longer to be replied to and it was incredibly embarrassing explaining to people why my site was down yet again but I stuck with them for years because the prospect of changing host was for me at the time too big a process to even contemplate but I'm pleased to say that now I have WordPress specific hosting from a host who I found to be very reliable I can talk to them on the phone night or day and I do both and they know what they're talking about so I would definitely recommend that you choose somebody who is a good host for your site security matters so in the past fortunately quite a number of years ago I was hacked a combination of cheap hosting and not taking care to update everything and at the time it was a huge headache so my advice is keep everything up to date and pay a bit more for security take care with plugins one thing I learned was that some plugins take rather greater server resources than others and one of the reasons my site went down a lot was in fact my own fault I learned in hindsight that I was using plugins that were hammering the database and I don't really understand the technical details of why exactly but my understanding is they were making lots of requests to sort of back things up and that that kind of thing so my advice is beware of using too many plugins and beware of using settings that are going to cause a strain on the server now you may need to talk to somebody a bit more expert than I to understand the specifics of what that means but that was a lesson that I had to learn the hard way the great news is that despite my various technical problems I've always found lots of people who are willing to help so for me this has often meant Twitter as I have used Twitter a lot but also the word press forums or the forum of whatever plugin I've been having problems with and the room here where you can go for advice is absolutely brilliant and I was in there yesterday so it's great to know there's lots of people who can help you and in return help other people so most people that you meet in everyday life don't know how to make a website and you do so if you're a professional web developer obviously you will need to charge for your services but for those of us who aren't why not help people so encourage somebody to have a first play on wordpress.com or help a fellow business owner with a problem now I've got one other lesson that I thought of after I've done my slides which is be generous but not too generous and by this I mean I've had a lot of benefit from posting cartoons online and letting people see them without paywalls without charging them to see them but also there also comes a time when you can't give absolutely everything away because you need to make a living so it's finding a balance between being generous with your content but also finding ways that you can make it pay as well so challenges for me at least and this is an example of a challenge nothing works with anything else sorry about that so first challenge for me is code now as my as wordpress isn't my main thing I don't understand as well as many of you what goes on under the hood but fortunately this is my in-depth graph on the subject how often a wordpress user has to deal with actual code you know when I started it was a lot you had to there's all sorts of little jobs that could only be done by going and changing some code but gradually things have improved for me at least and now plugins can do a lot more and so this is really a former challenge rather than the current one second for me and this is a big issue has anyone brought bought themselves a brilliant domain years ago but never got around to doing anything with it and they keep on paying a ten at a year so this is me I have too many ideas for new directions that I can take my work in and I buy the domain and possibly set the site up and then that's it so for me it's a case of thinking what am I focusing on so I mean these are the websites I've shown you but as well as this of course I'm doing lots of drawing commissions think about merchandise so it's knowing how to where best to focus your time and your energy and I suppose I have been guilty of letting some of my projects slide a bit because I've gone on to something new and exciting now SSL this is a huge huge one for me and I have a cartoon to illustrate the task I must undertake is towering over me like a great big monolith it is too big to contemplate so I think I will go and have a little look at the internet this is this could apply to lots of things but this has been my approach to SSL it seems like a huge thing that I am afraid to tackle fortunately I've received a lot of really useful advice over this weekend so this is now not quite so much of a challenge as it once was but it's still something that is something that I need to face and do creativity staying fresh without getting worn out so I love what I do but the demand to be funny all the time sometimes comes at a cost and sometimes on a rainy Monday morning when you have a deadline at 2 p.m. to come up with a joke and a way to illustrate whatever you're drawing about and can be challenging in the same way staying creative with regard to websites sometimes can be difficult so in conclusion the main thing that I want to say to everyone involved with WordPress is thank you you've made it possible for me to do what I do it's not always plain sailing and there are times when say an error message comes up or my site runs slowly or a plug-in won't update and I could list minor gripes but fortunately now they are minor and they are occasional not the norm so thank you to everyone involved in WordPress and to anyone considering using WordPress for your business or creative endeavour I would entirely recommend it and I hope my experiences have been of some use do ask me more so thank you everyone my slides should by now possibly have miraculously appeared on my website otherwise they are online at speaker deck and I will be tweeting the reasons to love WordPress cartoon shortly any questions yeah we've got some time for some questions so if you could read your hand if you have a question and we'll get a mic over to you and then you can ask your question we enjoyed your chat and the lovely cartoons are very funny and it's just a suggestion really I was just wondering if WordPress could commission you to do a lovely logo for the back of next year's t-shirt thank you anybody else I have a question and roughly how long does it sort of take to do like a cartoon I wouldn't know a clue it depends on whether I have a how long it takes me to have an idea there because that is the the the most difficult part of it so I generally think if I'm doing something some of the ones I've shown you I sort of would set aside a day to think up the idea to rough it out to to ink it in sort of finally so a lot of it for me is writing as well as drawing so it's the writing behind it that needs to be right for the um the artwork is an easy bit yeah he's telling a story aren't you with it so yeah any other questions hi thanks for that that's really good um the church and cycling seem quite random topics to have picked yeah I was just wondering what took you to those places well to be a cartoon to do good cartoons I think you need to really know your topic and those are things I know about so um I've been a church goer since I can remember so I know quite a lot about the inner workings of that world and cycling is my um my what I love to do so um I know about bike racing I know about using a bike to get from A to B and those are things that I know I know enough about the subject to understand where the humour is and I think that's that's important so yes they are a bit strange but I think I've always found it important I've had my most successful work when I've done a niche topic like that rather than tried to do something to you know political doesn't usually work for me so well yeah it won't work do you find it difficult to find inspiration and how do you make sure that you don't re-attract this similar cartoon that you did last year or the year before uh well sometimes it's quite handy to you to do the same cartoon you did the year before because people don't have very long memories so sometimes you can get away you can get away with it um but yes I probably do reuse the same things um sometimes as for inspiration it's just living life really that you know listening to people talking reading you know everything is potentially a source of inspiration have you ever considered an alternative to WordPress use something else to build a website well in the early days I I used it I tried other blogging software so I used blogger and I used movable type but no not I think because I'm doing something else because I'm doing cartooning not building websites once I've sort of learnt something I want to stick with it and um I haven't found anything else that has all the same has the same 20 benefits so I think we've got one over here and then there's one at the back as well so if you don't go to the back and I'll I'll do this one first hi I was just wondering how you get an idea onto a website so the process it so presumably starting off by drawing and then scanning how do you get it yeah so so now I do my work digitally so I draw everything on an iPad um so that's my process since last year so then it's just very much a case of uh saving the file as a jpeg and then uploading it as you would with any other image onto WordPress so it's it's very straightforward in the in the old days I would um draw everything by hand scan it and then you'd have an image file that you could then then upload does that answer yeah thank you uh yeah Dave it was a great great talk um I was just wondering how since uh you've got obviously got a lot of imagery on your site and everything like that how it how Google plays with it um does it play nicely um do you have to make sure you include lots of words with it in order to get um so referenced when I was blogging very regularly um then I did call very well in Google because I had the text to go with it and I often got a lot of links to blog posts which um these days um I suspect I'm not there's more competition around so I suspect not quite so well and I probably could do better on that front if I'm to be honest um I probably do need to pay more attention to my SEO than I do but it's um it's it's one it's one thing in a long list of priorities for me and quite often the the cartoon I need to get done by tomorrow afternoon is the is the pressing thing so Mike is that on yes my question kind of leads on from that how do you because you're doing word presses and add on to your main job how do you divide up how do you say I've done enough on that on the website now I'm going to have to do this and do you have a pie chart a bit like the one for your accountant on where your time goes yeah well if I did have a pie chart there'd be a procrastinated probably be you know that would be quite a large chunk um I probably do spend too much time on word presses the truth be told I probably should spend more time actually doing my job but because I do really enjoy I have come to really enjoy you know playing with it experimenting um you know trying new plugins different different things so I do I love doing it I love working with word press so uh if anything I'd probably spend too much time you know I should probably focus what the point I made about focusing I should probably just focus on one or two websites and do them really well but I just enjoy it too much and I keep on coming up with new ideas I think we've got time for one more question maybe a couple anybody on the back what was your approach when people use your images without permission or yes so people using images without permission it's it can be a problem occasionally I send somebody an email and say you know in an extreme case I might um send somebody an email and say you know you shouldn't be using this the more of a problem is when people um put things on social media uncredited which sometimes happens and that is a bit frustrating because something can really take off on on social media and you get no benefit whatsoever and that is for me as a creator that is a bit frustrating um and I have had instances where people have um like even cut off my name and shared you know shared something online but I do try now to make sure that um when I post on Twitter or Facebook that I always have in the image I always have my credit right quick quick one last one what do you see um what do you see your cartoons going in the future like in five years where do you want to be that's a very good question and I'm I'm sort of open to different directions at the moment I'm um I've got this cycling book coming out in June and um I've got no idea how that's going to go I'm hoping that that will be very popular and that will open up new new ideas um new possibilities sorry for me um but otherwise you know I've always got um new ideas at new sites so I can't really answer that question yeah I'll have to wait and see but thank you okay thanks again today let's give another round of applause great talk okay so it's