Intro
We’ve just returned back from WordCamp London 2015 (official hashtag #WCLDN), this is the first time we have attended WordCamp as a company. It’s been such a brilliant 2 days, with well over 500 attendees and 48 amazing talks to choose from.
Day 1
Day one was certainly a jam-packed, we started the morning with a talk on how to manage a non-profit’s WordPress websites. Afterwards we got a glipse into the future of themes, with the REST API by Jack Lenox.
REST API is a brilliant API which is not new, but is new to WordPress – it’s a way of stopping page reloads by only parsing the content via JSON. It’s also a great way of handling different events such as when there is no internet. Jack used the example of the BBC, you could be in the underground with no internet, but with REST you could continue to open and read other articles without needing the internet. REST is also a top way of integrating WordPress and native apps seamlessly.
Afterwards we talk an SEO talk which reinforced everything we believe about SEO. This was followed by a truly inspiring talk by Jon Buchan about content marketing, we’re definitely on the same page – content rocks! Although content does rock it’s all about writing content for an audience, if you’re a toaster company don’t write about toasters – toaster enthusiasts are hard to come by! Instead talk about things which are slightly less relevant but still related – for example you could talk about breakfast – food enthusiasts is a much wider audience.
After this we had a talk about email marketing on a WordPress site, and then concluded the event with 2 final talks, including a talk on portfolios.
We decided to opt out of the after party as tempting as it was, we wanted to be as fresh minded as possible for the following day – we’re information hungry, so wanted to take in as much knowledge as possible!
Day 2
Day two was also just as jam-packed, we started the morning of the second day with an interesting talk by Fabio Torlini (MD of WP Engine), about Thinking big and breaking into the enterprise, this was followed by a talk on valuing pricing of websites.
After a break we went to a great talk “Cache Money Business” by Mark Jaquith from Florida, this was an interesting talk on how you can save money on server resources using some smart caching solutions, from stock WordPress plugins to nginex. Mark went through full-page caching all the way to dealing with caching certain elements. He also went through dealing with certain things which you don’t want cached, for example when a user is logged in and it says “Howdy Nathan” you don’t want the name cached for other users.
Following this we had a talk on “Design Workflow in Agency Environments”, it was great to see how other leading agencies manage their workflows, it was great piece of mind that we operate in similar efficient workflow!
We finished the day with the final two talks, and departed for some well deserved rest!
