What a weekend! WordCamp Boston 2012 is in the books and overall it was a very good conference once again. There were 600 attendees this year from all over New England, the biggest WordCamp yet! Personally this was my third WordCamp Boston (if you want you can check out my thoughts on the 2010 WordCamp Boston and 2011 WordCamp Boston) and if I were to sum up the experience this year in a word it would be validation.
What do I mean by validation?
- Validation that we are progressively pushing the WordPress platform
- Validation that our business strategies and programs are on point
- Validation that design and programming practices stack up with the industry
As a website development agency who specializes in WordPress development, we are always looking to expand our skill sets and our development and design tool boxes as well as looking to gauge how we stack up with some of the bigger shops out there. This year’s WordCamp was the first time we didn’t feel “blown away” by anything technical that we saw. It made us feel even more excited about how we are pushing our current client’s WordPress website development & design projects. Now that’s not to say we didn’t take any useful tidbits home because we definitely did. We learned a lot of useful business positioning and strategy tips, great mobile development theory and tons of great SEO and writing strategy sessions along with tons of tweets and networking throughout the weekend. If you’re curious about what went on you can view all of them through this cool new website I discovered over the weekend called Eventifier. Here are all of the photos, tweets and activity from the attendees and here is my activity. The following are my personal favorite presentations each with my top takeaway from WordCamp Boston 2012:
Excellent Business-Focused Presentations
- Selling WordPress by @rbeyeler from @growthspark
– Clients don’t care about WordPress! Clients care about their business and how to improve it and how we can help them do that. Could not agree more. - Enterprise-class WordPress Websites by @jakemgold of 10up.com
– Never lost an enterprise client project because a project was priced too high, only when it was priced too low. If you want to do enterprise level work you have to look and act the part and be prepared to partner with organizations that will help you support enterprise level goals and systems.
Great Responsive Website Design Presentations
- Responsive WordPress Theming by @professor
– capability to combine new wp_is_mobile() call in WordPress 3.4 to easily set up and call different menus for different browser size formats and allow the site manager to control these settings on their own! - Going Mobile: From 960 to 320 by Chris Cochran
– Always start with your mobile design layout first to determine your most important content and then work your way up to the desktop version design.
And a good array of content strategy and optimization talks
- Future of SEO by Ramesh Kumar
– The Panda update Google released earlier this year is only one of 500 search improvements that Google plans to roll out THIS YEAR! - Engaging and Growing your audience beyond the blog post by Douglas Hanna
– Need to add more helpful content to our blog and our client blogs that are less time sensitive and that resolve simple problems which makes the content on the website more appealing and long-lasting to search engines and visitors alike.
Bring on WordCamp 2013 We Can’t Wait!
WordCamp continues to be a great networking event and an even better venue for us to learn, compare and test our skills as some of the most progressive and accomplished WordPress designers and developers the Northeast has to offer. I met so many interesting, fun and smart people and got to reconnect with others that I have seen at this event every year. We can’t wait for next year I am definitely going to plan on putting together my own presentation so that I can share some our expertise and knowledge as a presenter with next year’s group of attendees. You can count on that! In the mean time if you are interested in having any WordPress website work done you can always give us a call at 603-325-2429 or fill out our website development request form.
