I can’t believe it has already been a month since I was on the FIU Campus for Wordcamp Miami conference. I feel like it was just last weekend that I was learning with almost 800 people from all different experiences and backgrounds, while connecting with others in the industry. I met other website designers, content writers, marketing professionals, developers, and just average people who use WordPress as a blog. Speakers included plugin developers, WordPress Core Platform for software and coding, hosting companies such as Bluehost and GoDaddy, marketing and business professionals, blogging strategists, SEO experts, and speakers that discussed using WordPress as a platform to make apps.
Saturday Tracks
How To Track
Content & Design
Developers
Sunday Tracks
Business
All Users
Developers
Recap on Wordcamp Miami
On Saturday I jumped between the “Content & Design” track and the “Developers” track. The developers track showed me some tools that I need to invest some time into and integrate them into my workflow. Some of the tools I learned about are Git, using custom post types to organize content, and leveraging a cache plugin to improve site speed. On the Content & Design track my favorite session of the weekend was “Designing for Information User Experiences: A Responsive Web Design Workflow” this completely changed my thinking. Showed me to switch to a mobile first thinking and desktop second as the average mobile traffic is 30%-50% depending on the site. An example of a design feature that we need to change is the hamburger symbol for mobile navigation. This is something that many people don’t know what it is or how to use it. The hamburger symbol hides the long list of navigation and upon click opens the navigation and allows you to navigate between pages.
On Sunday, the track changed to Business, All User, and Developers. I jumped around throughout all track from Genesis workshop, contracts for web professionals, growing your non-profit with WordPress. These were some great sessions as I work with Genesis Framework to develop all of our website and learned some new tricks. The best session of the day was a lawyer talking about contract and what you need to include in your contract. You can’t be afraid to have longer contract because the point of the contract is to protect both parties and for all expectation to be understood by both parties. The last session about growing non-profit introduced me to some new plugins to help non-profits and some key strategies every non-profit new to employ on there website.
The entire camp was livestreamed for those that couldn’t attend, check some of the session out at WordPress.tv. There will be additional Wordcamps later this year; Wordcamp Tampa in September and Wordcamp Orlando in November.