A designer at WordCamp London 2018

To remain informed about WordPress (a CMS platform the developers I work alongside use to build websites or components I have designed) I decided to attend WordCamp – London 2018. Over the two days, the talks were related to Hot Topic’s such as GDPR or Gutenberg a new WordPress editor currently in Beta testing, be development based, so looking at more technical aspects of WordPress, focus on business development or designing for WordPress.

From the talks that I attended I noticed that the presenters kept coming back to these points:

• The end user is really important, and as designers / developers or businesses we should talk to our users constantly, to make them not only feel valued, but to ensure the product we are creating is the best it can be, and has clear user-centered focus – examples of how we can do this can be through focus groups and open dialogue such as face-to-face, emails or phone calls.
• Making assumptions is something both agencies and clients tend to do – research is important to get a product to really work for its users well.
• If clients come to you with a solution to a problem it is really important that you take a step back and analyse what is it they actually want, and if another solution would actually work better in the long-term. Getting the client to think of their user and showing them evidence to support your claims is a great way to give the client a new perspective on a project.
• How accessible is the design or end developed product? Statistics of people with disabilities, or those with disabled javascript on browsers accessing the internet is a fairly large percentage, so checking there are fallback options for people who fall into these categories is a way of ensuring more people can access your websites with ease.
• Gutenberg, although not in production yet, the potential is great – it’s a brilliant visual tool enabling websites to be edited on the go, breaking up site elements into components such as quotes, text blocks, galleries and more – it will make the development process more streamlined too.

At the end of each talk, there was the chance of a quick Q&A with the presenters, there were also opportunities to network with others in workshops running alongside the talks or go to the ’Happiness Bar’ which was more like a 1-to-1 help desk to troubleshoot any current WordPress issues you may be experiencing. There were companies advertising jobs positions, and a place you could post your details, and the type of position you were looking for. Lots of freebies were on offer too, available from sponsor stands promoting their products which worked alongside WordPress.

So depending on what you were looking for, you could take away a lot of advice, and learn new things from a conference like this.