I am really pleased I’ve decided to attend WordCamp Netherlands 2015 in Utrecht on Saturday, 26 September 2015. It is definitely a start of a new tradition. Doing freelance work with WordPress in London makes the quick travel to this pretty country and town (Utrecht) a no-brainer. I am already looking forward to next year.
Saturday, 26 September 2015
The day kicked off with a single track of talks in English.
Luca Sartoni’s talk (photo below) Why the Plumber Always Wins, used a good analogy of how a plumber goes about with his business and how me as a freelance WordPress designer can go wrong in business. A good insight of how to think on the business side of our projects focussing on Value / Quality / Price. Watch the video of this talk on his website.
Then of course one can never learn enough of SEO. Next up was Holistic SEO by Joost de Valk, CEO from Yoast. Joost gave tips on how to get more traffic to your site by implementing a holistic SEO strategy. For example by telling great stories, using the right keywords. Make sure to watch the video below:
Joost de Valk on Holistic SEO from punkmedia on Vimeo.
After lunch the format was divided into two tracks, one being in Dutch and the other in English. I attended two talks in Dutch. This really tested my understanding of the language. It made me realise I can follow a conversation because of similar words in Afrikaans … not for the grammar part. Rian Rietveld’s talk on WordPress is what we make of it and Taeke Reijenga’s talk on Nieuws.nl – a case study, was definitely worth the try and concentrating.
For the rest of the afternoon I switched back to English with The Javascript Theme – business in the front, WordPress in the back by Luc Princen (photo below). I enjoyed attending a talk on JavaScript and using it with WordPress. It covered 4 parts: 1. Data: The REST API, 2. Structure: Backbone, 3. Templating: Handlebars, 4. Workflow. Check out the presentation slides here.
The other talks in the afternoon, Essential PHP7 by Juliette Reinders Folmer, Interacting With REST APIs within WordPress by Daniel Pataki was focussing more on developing with WordPress. First with very important and handy tips on what to use and not to use, switching over to PHP7. Daniel’s talk gave me the courage to actually have look into APIs a bit more and give it a go, using it with WordPress.
Thank you to all of the organisers (photo below). I really enjoyed the day!
The day ended off on a high note of more networking, hanging out with old and new friends at the after party!
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