Speaker Spotlight: Brendan Sera-Shriar

Brendan Sera-Shriar has been an interactive designer, developer, college and university professor, community manager, author, consultant, and professional speaker at some of the largest corporations and festivals in the world, including Microsoft, Mozilla Firefox, Sun Microsystems, WordCamp, BlogWorld, SXSW and more. His work has also appeared in TechCrunch, TechVibes, WordPress TV, and a host of other blogs. He was also featured in the October 2012 issue of Marketing Magazine. Despite being known best for his work as a WordPress designer, developer, and WordCamp speaker and organizer, Brendan’s best communications skills lie in his ability to help organizations understand how they can build communities around their products and services.

Brendan will be giving a talk titled “Seduce Your Readers With Copy That Converts“.


What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

That’s tough. Most improvements this year have not directly affected what I do with WordPress. But if it had to pick a few, and I guess I do :), I think there have been some significant improvements to the Visual Editor which certainly makes things easi for my clients.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

Well since this not my first rodeo I will have to re-purpose my answer from last year, which is still valid – WordPress has been a HUGE part of my professional success over the years and as an ex WordCamp organizer and long time community member I feel a sense of responsibility to give back where I can.

What is your talk going to be about?

How to seduce your readers with conversion copy writing.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

That, as writers or content publishers, we need to stop taking our audience for granted. We need to be truthful in what we create and bring something to the table that people really want and can benefit from. Then we can seduce them into becoming customers, members, etc.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

Honestly, no one in particular. I keep my on many members I follow on a handful of networks. I’m inspired by anyone that makes big moves and change in the community.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

As landing pages and one page sites become more and more the norm of the web I would really love to see more core features that enable end-users to better customize a post or page with custom fields. Currently developers and designers have to heavily rely on 3rd party plugins, widgets, apps, etc. It’s timely and costly and it’s helping no one execute better quality pages.

WordCamp Montreal 2016 is over. Check out the next edition!