WordCamp Success

Overall the WordCamp Utah 2008 was a huge success. The turn out was great, the speakers were great, and the best part of it is the networking opportunities. I was able to sit at a table with some great guys and and have some great conversations. Being that is was a WordPress conference one of the main talking points between us was blogs. So to give a couple of guys at my table a plug, here are their blogs;

Alan Gardner
Writer and editor of The Daily Cartoonist
blog: http://dailycartoonist.com/

Bags (sorry, I can’t remember your real name)
College student, aspiring writer and music addict
blog: http://www.thebigbags.com/

There were also a couple of other guys at my table that I didn’t get there info, but thanks to all for the good conversation.

Thom Allen, Ash Buckles, Alex King

Not that these last three weren’t interesting but I can sum it up in one post.

Thom Allen talked about WordPress and podcasting. He touched on ways to make it more effective and how to be successful at it.

Ash Buckles talked about SEO. He went over some good items to do and not to do and gave a list of useful plugins for wordpress that really help out. He touch on using socail networks like Twitter and Facebook to help in seo. His downfall was making the audience use Twitter to ask questions. This was a prime example of how technology has made us ineffective.

Alex King talked on Writing WordPress plugins. I had to leave unfortunetly but I hear he annouced a cool new theme. Visit their wordpress page at Crowd Favorite.

Cameron Moll - Good vs. Great Design

If Cameron Moll was the only reason I went to this, it would have be worth it. I have to say that I’m a big follower of Cameron and enjoy his presentations. This is the first time that I have listened to him speak live and his presentation, even though I’ve heard it before, was still enspiring and makes we want to be a better designer. He talked about the difference between a good designer and a great designer. One point he made on that was “reliable consistency” is what a great designer is, one who makes less mistakes. Being a designer you are looking for solutions to problems. The big mistake we make is trying to find a solution before we know what the problem is. He used many great examples and it is well worth a look through his keynote presentation. (http://cameronmoll.com/speaking/wordcamp, will be posted later tonight)

Richard Miller - Wordpress as a CMS

Richard Miller is the executive vice president of the More Good Foundation and he presented working with wordpress as a CMS (content management system). I was most excited about this presentation because that is what I have been working on the last few months and I have this strange goal of mastering this technique. Although I really enjoyed the examples and seeing that there are multiple ways of achieving this, I was a little disappointed because it really only scratched the surface on setting wp up as a CMS. I realized that what I have learned and done with wp is probably a little above average. I’m still glad that I went and heard this presentation because the audience insite was very good, which Richard encouraged.

What I also enjoyed learning about is the More Good Foundation which encourages members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to get into blogging and being social online to share beliefs and their lifestyles. I couldn’t agree with this more, even though I don’t really do it. They have around 140 websites that they manage, all of which use WordPress.

WordCamp Utah - Matt Mullenweg

To show how much of a geek I am I spent my Saturday at WordCamp Utah, the conference that brings together people interested in WordPress, blogging (and the web in general) to talk about what’s possible, where’s it going.
I have really gotten interested in WordPress over the last year or so, so it was great to get together with a large group that has similar interests. They had a wide range of topics, which I’ll touch upon, but there was a wide range of attendees, from designers to developers.
Even though there were 4 other WordCamps going on at the same time in different parts of the world, we had the privilege of having Matt Mullenweg there, who is the founder of WorpPress. He gave the State-of-WordPress and shared a lot of statistics on users and downloads. One interesting one was that through wordpress, there are about 4 million posts per month and each user typically has 4.96 plugins enabled on there site. He also showed us a sneak peak into v2.7 which addresses a lot of issues that most people complained about in the new version of 2.5 as well as there API that will be opened up for comments. Here is a quick list of new features on version 2.7

• dashboard redesign (Yes, again!)
• Quick post section on the dashboard home page
• Drag and drop feature on the write/edit section. You will have the ability to move around the different sections from the main content area to the sidebar.
• Show and hide features on the write/edit section
• Sticky posts

There will be a new website, wordpress.tv, coming that will have how-to videos as well as videos from all the WordCamp conferences.

It was really enspiring to listen to Matt and really got me excited about this great platform as well as the future of the web.

How Design Can Save Democracy

The interactive designers at The New York Times do a great job at getting readers to have more interaction with the the articles. One great example is the “How Design Can Save Democracy” Article. My reaction to this is, “Of course this is a better solution, we would be dumb not to use it”.

Well, unfortunately, not everyone thinks that way, especially those in elections. I am lucky enough to know someone that has done a lot of work with elections and current works in an elections department and she had a similar reaction to mine (she realizes the importance of design). Of course, when she showed it to her colleagues, they didn’t see the problem. Not everyone has an eye for design, but when comparing the two designs together, how could you not see the issue. Couldn’t past election issues also sound the alarm that something needs to change.

Well done AIGA and I fulling support the Design for Democracy program.

On Nov. 4, most ballots will repeat design mistakes made in previous elections. Many of these errors are avoidable. This year, the United States Election Assistance Commission released ballot design guidelines. Using these guidelines, we at AIGA developed this feature to identify common design problems and offer improvements. Related Blog Post