This weekend, I attended my first WordCamp in Boston.   Two days, 3 tracks, hundreds of attendees, most arriving last minute and creating a shortage of food.

What I liked this year (in order of appearance on the schedule)

Day 1

• How Much Can I Charge? Pricing Isn’t Just a Number, by Adam Juda
  • Particularly the points made about clients asking for a discount and how to handle that sticky and uncomfortable situation
• Agile Contracting presentation by Mike Toppa
  • Turns out I’ve been doing some integral parts of the Agile phylosophy since I started 6 years ago.
  • Also explains why I am deeply regretting working on a fixed priced contract this spring, into summer, and it will probably drag into fall…
• Mission-based WordPress by Michael McWilliams
  • Blew me away – very charismatic, lively and engaging speaker.
  • Obviously knows a lot about website development and requirements for the non-profit world.
  • Best piece of advice I overheard him say: don’t build a free website for a nonprofit.  I’m starting to learn that the hard way.
• A Better Individual Experience by Jesse Friedman
  • I would see Jesse Friedman present even if he was discussing the benefits of one tweed fabric over another. He’s an engaging, enigmatic speaker.
  • Knew the technical aspects of what he was doing, but could easily explain them to the rest of us humans.
  • He’s proposing a great shift from the information overloaded websites we currently build to cleaner content focused websites.  He makes great fun of restaurants in his talks, esp whose annoying PDF menus.

Day 2 – Sunday

• Keynote: Smaller, Faster Websites by Mat Marquis
  • Where do I start on this?  Mat is funny, comfortable in front of large crowds, commands a room, does not get flustered by accidental shooting from his microphone or laser shootings from the audience.
  • Mat builds furniture and you can see from his presentation that he’s just as precise about his furniture building as he is about his code.
  • Typical presentations that include code turn into an eye sight exercise but Mat’s was easy to read and to the point on what he wants to teach.
• The Final 20% by Jeremy Green
  • Cycling back to the 80/20 principal, inspirational talk to get us to move away from the 80% of our project time that is not impactful.
  • I thought of him as I was manually deleting 40 old WordPress themes in my blog install, and went back to FTP and hit a big delete button.  10 minutes saved already.

What topics I would like to see next year

• Security – I’d love a whole track on security.  Everyone is thinking about it, but most people don’t do enough to their WordPress installs to protect them, so please, tell us how to do it for every kind of website – from 5 page static sites to gargantuan blogs with lots of comments.  I cannot image that this topic will ever get old, so you can really keep this going every year.
• Design – a presentation or two on design elements essential to a WordPress website and how to think about design when working with a WP framework.  This is a large topic in itself, but I think it can be parsed into manageable section.
  • I sadly missed Mel Choyce’s presentation about WP design trends.  I think design can be a whole track, also.