WordCamp Goldcoast 2011 – Mixing with the greats

I’m at WordCamp Goldcoast 2011. WordCamp is where people interested in WordPress get together for a couple of days, listen to top speakers, learn a thing or two and meet a bunch of new people. So you ask, what’s WordPress? It’s the platform for building great websites.

Our introduction to WordPress was in 2006 and from there it’s been the tool of choice for developing websites, here’s a few reasons:

• Easy to use
• Well designed
• You get a result quickly
• It’s free
• It has a great community supporting it.

The last point is most probably one of the most outstanding things about WordPress, the great community!

Today’s first talk was from Kate Swaffer, well-educated, a loving woman sharing her experience as a Dementia sufferer . WordPress is vital as a tool to help her stay connected with life, family and friends. She can reflect every couple days on what she did and it allows “her to retrace her steps.”

She sums up life based on this quote . ‘live with urgency, before the emergency’ (Robyn Moore, 2011)

Throughout the day, there have been lots of great talks and information to help in using WordPress.

The last guy was John O’Nolan an Interactive designer  John can be found here at his site.

John talked about the  impact of emotions in design.

A couple of key thoughts from John were….

• “Design = The soil we are growing things on”
• “Everything is an experience”
• “Take Care of People”
• “There is only one boss. The customer!”