Last weekend our London-based designer, Ngaire Ackerley, found herself in Edinburgh for her first WordCamp Conference. First held in 2008, WordCamp UK is an annual gathering of designers, developers, bloggers, writers and more to network and share knowledge about WordPress. This year saw almost 150 WordPress enthusiasts from across the UK and Europe descend on Scotland for the two-day event. Although Ngaire is a regular at the London WordPress Meetup, this was her first experience with a full-blown WordCamp.
The WordCamp UK conference delivered a bevy of fantastic speakers on a multi-track line-up, spoiling Ngaire and the others attendees with plenty of interesting topics.
What follows are a few highlights from some of the presentations that Ngaire was lucky enough to attend.
‘Custom Theme Development’, presented by Jonny Allbut, Steve Taylor and Rachel McCollin, discussed how different approaches for using parent/child themes and frameworks.
‘WordPress for Mobile – 2012 Update’ saw Rachel McCollin detailing interesting resources and tips for responsive web design, which is an area of great interest now that increasing numbers of people use their mobiles devices as their primary source for internet access.
The very scary and eye-opening ‘Secure from the Start’ presentation by Kieran O’Shea showed how easy it is to hack sites and passwords, while sharing useful tips and preventative measures. (Key messages: Never use overly simple, short passwords and definitely utilise password management software!)
‘WOW Plugins’ by Michael Kimb Jones, highlighted a variety of useful plugins to enhance the WordPress sites.
On an unsung but all-important topic, ‘WordPress and Web Accessibility: Why It’s Important’ presented by London’s own Graham Armfield, detailed a comprehensive list of accessibility issues for consideration. Graham raised awareness of the large number of people with disabilities, and offered great tips for everyone for implementing good accessibility practices during the WordPress development process.
Ngaire was particularly disappointed to miss Noel Tock’s presentation on ‘Customising WordPress Admin for Clients’, among others. Yet, the great thing about WordCamp UK was that everyone socialised and networked in-between the presentations to make up for not getting to every one!
All in all, Ngaire thoroughly enjoyed WordCamp UK for all its geekyness and great people. Kudos to the fantastic people who organised the event – we can’t wait until WordCamp 2013!
Check out our Tumblr page for a few more of Ngaire’s photographs from the event »
