Shannon Smith is the founder of Café Noir Design, a boutique Montreal web design company specializing in multilingual web development. She builds beautiful, functional websites that her clients can update themselves and that are easy for search engines to find. She supports things like making the web accessible for everyone, using open source software, helping organizations find greener more sustainable ways to operate through online technology and helping non-profits with online community organizing. Also sewist and mother of four.
Follow @cafenoirdesign on Twitter.
Shannon will be giving a talk titled “Ça coûte combien un site Web?“.
What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?
It’s been around for a bit more than a year, but my favourite improvement has to be WordPress in Canadian English. Finally! Language support generally, has improved a lot with in the past year, and I really like the option to choose the language directly from the admin as well. It just makes using WordPress so much easier.
Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?
WordCamp Montreal is always a lot of fun. There are so many people doing new and interesting things with WordPress. It’s one of the reasons I love supporting open source software. And WordCamp is a great place to hear all about some really creative projects. Every year I learn something new and it’s great to be able to contribute to the community.
What is your talk going to be about?
My talk will be “How much does a website cost?”. You can pay 0$ or 100,00$ for a website, but people have a lot of questions about why that is. Why is the price range so large? How do you know if you’re getting your money’s worth? I hope I’ll be able to answer some of those questions. We’ll look at options for several different budgets and what happens with each one.
But I’ll also be talking about the process of getting a website built, especially from the point of view of a business owner or non-profit. My talk will walk you through choosing a good developer, evaluating their work, and knowing what to budget for. I’ll talk about why the cheapest option is sometimes the most expensive and what happens after your website is finished.
What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
Hopefully people will walk out of my talk with a better understanding of how websites in different price ranges are built, and, obviously, know how much a website costs.
What new feature would you like to see in the future?
I would love to see WordPress incorporate true multilingual support. I’m really excited about how much better WordPress now works when it’s set up in a language other than English. But I’d love it if it were easier and more intuitive to build complex sites that work in multiple languages at once.