WordCamp Auckland 2017 – Review of Oceanic WordPress conference
Posted on: 18 Mar 2017
Written by: Ngaire Ackerley
WordCamp Auckland 2017
Take 2 Days, 12ish speakers, 80ish attendees from Australia and NZ and a bunch of WordPress chat, what do you get? WordCamp Auckland
Dee Teal – Project Management Principles to improve your work, life and mental health
Dee Teal – Project Management
Dee Teal kicked off the day discussing Project Management. She discussed how being a bit more organised and tackling projects from a smaller MVP stance could help our clients build their businesses successfully.
In my day job I work with developers using scrum and agile processes and have a field day with jira tickets. Then in my freelance website design and development I like to still take the MVP angle when possible. I like to involve clients as much as possible from the get-go to really understand their business and goals. Dee’s presentation really made sense to me.
Dee Teal – Kanban Boards, great idea!
Me – Designing for Website Users
It was with great pleasure that I was able to help out on social media during the weekend and also present to the group about Designing for Website Users. It was a bit of a different talk, taking the angle that maybe our website users could be our first priority when starting a new web project.
I discussed how to create user personas, user journey mapping, a bit about navigation, layout and typography and a wee bit about considerations around accessibility and responsiveness.
Maria Skatova – Considering Freelancing as a WordPress developer? Think twice.
Maria Skatova – Freelancing
Maria was the friendly Russian from Wellington who gave a talk that basically explained the reasons why I don’t freelance full-time. However, she did provide some great ideas about ways she’s making it work so it still gave me hope that freelancing isn’t all that bad.
Matthew Knighton – Using the WordPress API to Sync with a Mobile App
Matthew Knighton – WordPress API and Mobile Apps
Matthew’s talk was a great start to Sunday, it was really cool to see the innovative projects he’s been working on that combine mobile apps and WordPress’s API. I was really impressed and know that he’ll go far with it all!
Peter Wilson – I’m an imposter because…
Imposter Syndrome
Peter’s talk was a crowd favourite. It gave us all the chance to realise we’ve all had those ‘imposter syndrome’ moments where we feel like we’re almost pretending to be someone more skilled than we are. The reality of it is, I believe, we’re too hard on ourselves. If we start looking from the outside in, we’re all doing a pretty fantastic job, the best way we know how.
Peter Wilson, Imposter Syndrome
It was really neat to have an open floor at the end of Peter’s talk to share our stories of imposter syndrome.
Bill Bennett – Writing Workshop: How to engage an audience
Bill did a great job despite technical difficulties of the venue. His presentation really resonated with me and got me thinking how I write for the web. I liked how he mentioned keeping paragraphs short and copy length down. He also mentioned plenty of white space between paragraphs which brought a smile to the designer in me.
An interesting idea he brought up was creating a style book for how you write for a publication. I thought that was a great idea for businesses to keep a consistent brand and tone through their website.
The WordPress’ing WordCamp Weekend
The weekend was pretty full on and most of the talks were really impressive. I’ve cut it down to just a few for this blog post to keep it short and sweet.
WordCamp Auckland in short, was an inspiring weekend with lots of great people. It was a lot smaller than the UK and European WordCamps I’ve been to, but the level of talks and attendees were just as good!
Grid Auckland – WordCamp Venue
The organisation of the weekend was really great and I really appreciated the amount of work my WordPress Auckland Meetup co-organisers Ralf and Tarei did to pull off the weekend. Sadly I wasn’t in a position to assist in the lead up to WordCamp this year, beyond the social media on the day and my own presentation. I think they did really well with the amount of time and effort that it takes to create a WordCamp. Cheers guys and thanks to all the sponsors too!
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