Last month I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend Prestige Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. With a focus on business and career development, I heard presentations from some of the top leaders in the WordPress community such as Jake Goldman of 10Up, April Downing of WP Engine and Cory Miller of iThemes, among others. It was a lot of fun and definitely worth the trip across the country.
Having attended many developer-focused presentations in the past, I very much enjoyed learning about running a business which uses WordPress in a large capacity. Below are my top three takeaways.
Everyone’s Just Figuring It Out
One of my first takeaways from this conference is that everyone is figuring it out. No one knows everything. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. It is through events as Prestige where we can come together, ask the questions we will inevitably have, and learn from others who have already figured out that thing we’ve been trying to work out.
WordPress is Still Thought of as a Blogging Platform
It was really interesting to learn that many people still think of WordPress as simply a blogging platform. In his presentation Tales from the CMS Wars: WordPress and the Enterprise, John Eckman compared WordPress to other leading enterprise content management systems (CMS). Compared to the other leading enterprise CMS of Adobe Experience Manager and Drupal, WordPress can be a hard sell to those who are familiar with proprietary solutions, even though WordPress can be customized far beyond that of a blogging platform.
Make Your Time Count and Give Back
My final, and favorite, takeaway from Prestige is Chris Lema‘s point about time management. He stated, “We all have 24 hours a day. What’s incredible is what some people do with it. And what others don’t.”
His point was that we have this notion of managing time, but we are all given the same amount of time. What matters is what we do with it. He went on to compare the number of hours it took to create Wikipedia to the amount of time the average person watches television in a single year. Chris explained that it was about the amount of time it would take to create two thousand Wikipedias.
Chris also spoke of the importance of giving back to the community and the importance of leaving a legacy, which television watching undoubtedly lacks.
Overall, I had a great time and I would definitely consider attending Prestige Conference again in the future. It was incredible to be surrounded by and learn from such smart and successful people.