The ABCDE of WordCamp Birmingham 2015.
Here’s our quick wrap up of the 2015 Birmingham WordCamp.
I gave a workshop talk called They Grow, You Grow. About how to build better businesses for your customers, via WordPress websites.
How can you take someone that doesn’t know that a business exists, and pull them through a website to produce a customer.
The ABCDE of WordCamp Birmingham 2015.
Here’s our quick wrap up of the 2015 Birmingham WordCamp.
I gave a workshop talk called They Grow, You Grow. About how to build better businesses for your customers, via WordPress websites.
How can you take someone that doesn’t know that a business exists, and pull them through a website to produce a customer.
So here it is, our ABCDE of #WCBRUM
All about community
Community is the number 1 reason that people use WordPress. It’s also the number 1 reason that people should BUY WordPress.
When you use WordPress as a tool for your customers, they’re getting access to that network. A network of millions of users, developers, designers and admins.
YouTube, the Codex and blogs are all well and good. But being able to talk and interact with other WordPress experts, there’s not a lot that can compete with that.
Build trust within your community, within your network and with your customers.
One of the key points that I try to get across to my customers, is that you need to be a trusted source of authority and content. You need to be the go to person for your customer, for a whole load of reasons.
The WordPress community can support you.
Building code
One of the WorkShops was Jonny from Wonderflux, talking about beginning to build a theme.
Jonny, along with Mark delivered a process and even some one on one time, for developing a theme without buying a poorly coded one.
Theme workshop with @jonnyauk on themes #wcbrum pic.twitter.com/ZmiMhZdm1M
— Mark Wilkinson (@wpmark) February 8, 2015
Lots of this will be baby-town play school frolics compared to most developers. But frankly, this was AWESOME and it’s really inspired me to create a theme. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmarNEsjpDI
Content! (And management)
Content is king, right? A key theme running throughout most of the presentations and talks was that content needs to come first.
Content has grown to take over the net. Rachel had some BRILLIANT points about content (any slides anywhere?), particularly about wasted image space and how we should really design websites around content first.
Design
Parallax, responsive, mobile friendly, paid themes, 2013 theme…what do we think about design?
Well, if you read above and didn’t just skip to this bit. Design seems to be blending between coding, content and traditional design.
More than anything, I took that design should be kept to minimum fuss. The less features and widget, plugins and effects, the better. Clearer design to convey the ONE ACTION you want someone to take.
Energy
Biggest one on the list. Energy. The enthusiasm, energy and commitment from the delegates and network was palpable.
.@jonnyauk & the team introduce WordCamp Birmingham #wcbrum pic.twitter.com/oO1Ed1KkhA
— Claire Brotherton (@abrightclearweb) February 7, 2015
Drinks, food, talking and listening. Overall, the people made the event. Everything else was a bonus
Finally
(Sorry, couldn’t resist) If you want to download the ‘They Grow, You Grow’ workshop that I ran. On how to build a better business, for your customers, with a WordPress site. Go ahead and click here. Download all the material you want. Even a recording of the live workshop.
