WordCamp London 2018 » Didgeroo

WordCamp London 2018

Jul 09, 2018
Chris Skitch
To celebrate Didgeroo’s love of WordPress, each year we join a pilgrimage to North London with over 500 other WordPress enthusiasts for WordCamp London.

 

 

It’s no secret we love WordPress. Though we are just a small team, we never feel lonely because of the avid community of WordPress users. WordCamp epitomises the WordPress community, bringing together the best and brightest to confer about the latest news and information

We love WordCamp so much that we continue to sponsor the event year on year. If you attended the event you may have seen our Didgeroo beermats nestling up next to the Yoast Lego figures!

 

Did you pick up one of our beermats at WordCamp London?

 

A full run-down of our favourite talks would take a whole weekend to recount, so here’s just a few of our highlights from the weekend:

1. Gutenberg

We know Gutenberg will be shaking up WordPress (when it arrives!), and we were eager to learn more about this upcoming WordPress core feature. Luckily, there were multiple Gutenberg talks over the weekend, and we managed to catch Tammie Lister’s. Tammie took us through designing with Gutenberg in mind with the enlightening talk ‘Anatomy of a block: Gutenberg design patterns’. Though we specialise on the build of a website, and tend to let design agencies take the helm when it comes to design, we know that we would take away crucial info to pass onto our clients. And we were right!

2. GDPR

It was the four letters on everyone’s lips over the weekend. We were all bristling with fear over what impact GDPR would have on our small businesses, and how it would affect our clients. Luckily, to put our minds at ease were the brilliant Toyin Agunbiade & Heather Burns. Toyin’s clear, concise way to present the facts on GDPR definitely made us rest easier that night. The next day, Heather laid out the main tips for writing a Privacy Policy, which turned out to be invaluable for us at Didgeroo when we came to write our new Privacy Policy.

Heather Burns tells us the key message about GDPR compliant Privacy Policies! (Though she didn’t see WordPress 4.9.6’s template!)

3. UI talks that rocked!

Another standout talk which focused on design was ‘UI that ROCKS: A practical introduction to Gestalt principles applied to web design’ from Piccia Neri. Marrying psychology with web design was a refreshing look at something we experience every day, and a great way to dig deeper. Another gem to take away to our design clients!

4. Finding Our Why

Lee Jackson from the Agency Trailblazer gave a fantastic talk on ‘Finding Your Why’, and introduced us to his podcast that we’ve not stopped listening to since! We have taken his talk to heart and have been delving deep into finding our strengths and working out what solutions we can provide for our clients problems.

5. Inspiring stories from Adam Walker

Adam Walker’s talk, 48 websites for 48 nonprofits in 48 hours, truly lit a fire under us, and I’m sure it was the same for all attendees. The concept is simple – helping non-profits build their website. But to make things interesting, sites are built for 48 separate non-profits and all need to be built within 48 hours. We know we’ll be signing up to the London event!

Special mentions:

Though we’ve rounded up the talks that have stuck with us, we’d be remiss not to mention two very special parts of the weekend:

  1. The wonderful crew. These blue-shirted volunteers kept the weekend running smoothly and were always ready and waiting with a bright smile to help you get where you needed to go!
  2. The food. The lunch buffet options were such a treat, but our top highlight was the amazing slices of cake that spawned queues practically around the whole building!