We attended WordCamp London, a great event that showcased another year of huge developments in the WordPress community – and we can’t thank the organisers enough for such a fun, interesting and professional event.
We loved the talk about WordPress mentorship programme and enjoyed hearing how the sessions and community grew after the idea’s inception. It was really interesting hearing from the mentees and seeing them in the crowd at the end of the talk; they all looked so pleased to be part of the programme and happily took questions from members of the crowd at the end.
This talk was one everyone could relate to; being a newbie and not knowing where to begin or where to turn, to gather the information and knowledge to be successful in the development industry. It was great to hear of the CodeBar non-profit initiative that is helping to coach and develop new talent. The focus on “show and tell” and continuing to listen and learn from Senior Developers rang true with us. It’s not always practical for a Junior to shadow a Senior Developer as they work but participating in the daily standup and retrospectives review can be a great place to start. It was great to hear Georgia’s experience and development from University to landing her first job in the development industry. Learning to code and development incentives are fantastic if the candidate has the passion and drive to learn, Georgia demonstrated to everyone that putting your mind to something and sticking to it will pay dividends in the future.
The next talk was a great induction and update on Git, and specifically how Git has taken over from SVN to become the industry standard for version control. Using a central place (i.e. the “blockchain” for source code) ensures that development work, history and commits can be seen as long as the developer is connected to the internet rather than having to install a machine specific system. We were also shown the fantastic interactive resource Explain Git which provides interactive examples for the user to git commit and git branch and see in real-time what is happening behind the scenes. We were shown examples of plugins that are trying to solve the Git and WordPress cross over, documenting the revisions and commits to Git through the WP Admin.
This talk focused on the need and opportunity to grow client relationships and ensure a Support and Maintenance packages can be discussed and agreed on once the initial website project is complete. Most ongoing clients are not price focussed, they are looking for a service provider who understands their needs and can efficiently produce results when called upon.
Sharing with clients the website development process and how you get things done is a great way to build confidence. The discussion should move onto the investment that a website provides, a continually evolving machine that generates revenue and awareness for the company. Keep reviewing the website and its functions to ensure that it is highly tuned and providing value.
The final talk we attended was concerning the Privacy Notices on a website and the GDPR implications. The number of people that attended the talk was a great reflection of how timely and current the suggestions and points raised during the discussion were. The presentation covered the background of Privacy Policies and how legal teams have tended in the past to create lengthy legal text that no user would read to mask and hide the implications of privacy. This will change once GDPR come in and will help the user to gain back control over what data is shared with companies and what companies must do to keep data safe.
Adding clear contact details in Privacy Notices and ensuring that you avoid ‘legal speak’ is important as is adding how long you will be storing and holding the customer’s data for. We thought the idea of how UX can play a key role in the delivery of the Privacy Notices was very interesting; using accordions and large specific logos to help users to quickly and easily identify the sections they are looking for was a great insight.
The talk ended with some advice to see Privacy documentation as a living breathing piece of work that is continuously evolving; this will ensure the information is up to date and fresh. GDPR should be embedded throughout the company, and all documents and processes should be agreed and supported by management.
Read more about how Moove Agency are supporting our clients with GDPR with our GDPR Cookie Compliance Plugin.
