Earlier this month, our web designer and developer Claude Mifsud was in London to attend WordCamp, a conference that is about everything WordPress. He recalls what happens when hundreds of tech geeks meet together in one place.
Contributor Day
The first day of WordCamp was Contributor Day, a day that was all about giving back to the WordPress community. Everyone chose the areas they would like to focus on, and we were off to code, test, translate strings and come up with ideas for future projects. It was certainly a day that brings the WordPress community together, from core developers to juniors who have never written a line of code, returning something back to what gives us so much in our daily work.
Saturday and Sunday Talks
The talks were exceptional, and of very high quality, tackling various aspects, from client relationships to website development techniques. We jotted down a lot of notes and are already applying what we learnt to our work, some of them listed below.
10 Reasons to Love WordPress
- It’s easy to learn
- No need to know how to code
- Search engines love it
- Responsive to mobile phones
- You can have multiple admins contributing to the site
- People can comment and interact
- It’s great for pictures, audio and video
- You can add functionality via plugins
- Over 25% of all websites use it
- It’s free and secure
Lessons Learnt and Going Forward
- Encryption must be considered an important factor in all we do.
- The work we create is not intended for our clients, but for our client’s clients (users).
- Our job is to design a solution that solves the user’s problem and enhances our client’s bottom-line.
- User education is the first step towards security and privacy.
- User Experience (UX) is more about planning, measuring and testing than it is about designing.
- Invest in accessibility features that help people with disabilities use technology more easily.
- Design isn’t just about making things look pretty. Features must be functional for your users. Web communication is not a one-size-fits-all gig.
- Explore new means of training and guiding both clients and users to navigate the platform.
- Identify problems before they happen and put processes in place to stop them from happening again.
- Anyone can contribute to WordPress.
Summing Up
We are honoured to be part of this ever growing community of creatives, who are more than willing to share their experiences and expertise to help each other work better, to provide better solutions for our clients and to develop even further in our field.
If you need help making your website easier to navigate, better looking and more secure, speak to us for a no-frills quote.
