When I first discovered this event (shamefully only a couple months ago) I was under the impression that it was a development exclusive gathering where talks would be given in a language I don’t master, yet. (I confess: lines of codes are still a series of symbols, numbers and letters to me.)
Pushing my investigations further, I learned that my Digital Strategy Director is a great fan of the event, so I figured, let’s give it a try! What a surprise to see content strategy and marketing talks on the schedule and to leave this place full of concepts and ideas to apply on our new projects.
Since each of us was there for different reasons, let’s go through the best pieces of advice our team heard this weekend (so you don’t feel as bad you missed it).
Yukiko: More Front-end Freedom
There is this global tendency towards doing more in front-end instead of back-end and it’s really cool to see it happening in the world of CMS. APIs give more freedom to front-end frameworks and technologies, which also means faster and lighter development potentially easier to manage (fingers crossed). Roy Sivan talked about this plugin making it all possible: REST API.
Nathalie: A Focus on Security and URL Manipulation
Don’t want all your hidden content to be accessible but still need Google to index it properly? Marie-Lynn Richard gave great tips and tricks on security and indexation related functionalities. Let’s not forget about iThemes Security, a useful plugin in case of brute force hacking. Better safe than sorry, right?
Véronique: Two-Step Verification (and CATS)
Part of Maxime Jobin’s talk was about double verification. We already secure our websites with OTP keys, but why not make use of an app instead? If the content of this talk was originally interesting, cats certainly made it memorable.
Check out the Kitty Count to see the WordPress community sharing its love for felines!
JP: Pragmatism in Social Media
How refreshing it is to hear about social media’s influencers, a slowly dying concept. Competition is fierce and followers’ numbers don’t mean anything anymore (buying likes, really?). What’s truly important is active and honest relationships. Coming from an agency that recently launched their social media marketing division, it feels like a breath of fresh air.
Cassandra: Content Strategy
On my end, I got hooked on Liesl and Mohamed “Lay of the Landing Page” and Brendan “Copy that converts” talks, both giving useful marketing and content strategy tips. Test, test, and test again sums it up pretty well.
Convinced? See you all next year!
Some cool links to keep handy
MailChimp’s exhaustive style guide
A WordPress API and React Architecture (the talk)
WordPress Development Workflow (the talk)
AngularJS for WordPress (github)
A theme (github)
