Kendall Card 2.0

The weather outside is 80 degrees, not a cloud in the sky and my options for today was a century ride, plant grass, go for a hike….but alas, I’m indoors today, all day.

All day?  Yep!

I’m currently at Word Camp Utah (being held at Novell) which if you walked into the room would look like a ‘geek’ conference.  I know this because when the asked for programmers and designers to raise their hands I almost rose my hand so that when they asked for “others” that I wasn’t the only one.

But it’s been really cool and time very well spent.  $20 for this conference with a T-Shirt, a hearty lunch and snacks = I SCORED!

So far I’ve heard from:

1. Matt Mullenweg – Co-founding developer of Word Press.  Lots of great things coming, including a new version of WordPress (2.7 due out in November)  with a new dashboard that is customizable.  Matt did a demo of it and I’m really stoked for this.
2. Richard Miller – He spoke about using WordPress as a CMS tool.  Really interesting stuff here and some great examples of how some sites use pages and others use posts.  I personally prefer posts since they are fed through RSS while pages don’t have that advantage.

3. Cameron Moll – I would have paid $20 to just hear him speak.  His presentation was entitled Good vs. Great Design. One of the biggest take aways from his presentation was this idea (from my notes) 

   Homogenecity vs. Heirarchy:  What is the visual heirarchy of your site/page?  Let the prominant stuff stand out and the secondary stuff follow.   Try this with your next web/e-mail design:

   1. Grey scale your web page/document
   2. Blur it in photoshop
   3. What stands out?
   4. This will tells you about where people are looking and what is the real focus of your site/e-mail.
   5. Adjust your design accordingly to make the most important elements stand out or draw the eye.
4. Thom Allen (currently speaking) – Thom is in the above image as he introduces his topic of Podcasting.  Good stuff for sure.

2 more speakers to go, one who is talking about SEO for blogging and the last one about writing plugins.

If WordCamp comes to your city and you do anything with blogging and in particular Word Press, you NEED to attend.