Yesterday I went to the Wordcamp Cape Town 2013. It was a lovely experience and day out of the office.
Firstly whoever had the idea to book Nicholas Smal & Gareth Allison as the MC’s had a stroke of genius. They brought great comedy, woven with a tasteful level of nerdiness that the audience loved.
From the talks from the various amazing speakers, these were the points that resonated with me.
- Don’t just build websites – solve problems. A lot of the speakers said this in their own unique way.
- Use data to make assumptions about user needs and challenges.
- Don’t design things for your client. Your client does not look at the website you built him each morning and think “oh wow, that’s a nice site”. Also the clients client don’t go to the website, look at it and think “wow, that’s a great website”. They go to a website to solve a problem. i.e. they want to buy a pair of shoes. So don’t design websites for your clients, design websites around accurate assumptions about the problem your user is trying to solve. Success is when you achieve what your clients client needs.
- Create great content for your site to get more search engine traffic. At least 600 words per page. (I personally aim suggest clients aim for 500-2000, but the number varies depending on who you ask. However good content works)
- Getting load times down dramatically increases conversion. This was something repeated several times. Get great hosting, CDN’s, Caching and Minifying- NOW.
- Never copy/past content from another site. It’s not worth it.
- For SEO aim for the long tail. i.e. the longer, more specific searches. Not only do they produce more qualified users, but they are easier to achieve.
Those were the big points I took away from the talks. If you want to discuss leave a comment or mail me.
