Lessons from WC Kansas City 2012

We had five members of Team Haden at Wordcamp KC this year, and we had a great time. We enjoyed working on a new site for Maison de Naissance at the Hackathon, we felt well cared for at the Sheraton (except for the high-priced but poor quality wifi), and we all learned some stuff.

Here are my major takeaways:

1. From Justin Kopepasah, I learned that resizing a photo precisely and then specifying height and width is old school. Now, for your responsive designs, you should resize to the maximum size your users are likely to need, create a container for your image, and specify the percentage of the space the container should occupy.
2. Justin also convinced me that the separate mobile site is not the ideal. Check out Justin’s slides.
3. From Akram Taghavi-Burris, I learned about using WordPress polls to do a quick comprehension check during trainings. Set up the poll to produce a multiple choice question, have everyone login, and you can check periodically during the training to make sure you haven’t lost anyone.
4. From Brody Dorland I learned that Hubspot has a snazzy calculator to help determine what monetary values to use for goal setting when you don’t have e-commerce or similarly hard figures to work with.
5. Brody also reminded me of Inbound Writer, which I have never found very impressive. However, he suggested that it’s better than nothing for people who don’t have the budget to hire someone like me, and he definitely has a point.
6. From Joe Hyrkin I learned about Wordnik, which I find seriously intriguing. I’ll be reviewing it here in a day or two.
7. From Brian Bookwalter I learned the importance of actual sign-off, as opposed to our usual, “So, do you like it as much as we do? Any changes? No? Okay, we’ll build it now” approach.
8. From Wes Mikel and Philip McFee, I learned that favicons are not optional, even if your logo doesn’t look its best at 16 pixels square. Also that fun wants us to have it. Check out their slides, because seriously, even if they don’t have much new info for you, their slides are cool enough to be a pleasure to look at just as an aesthetic experience.
9. From Sean Borsodi I learned that famfamfam has loads of cool free icons you can use for your favicon image if your logo is too complex to make a good favicon when you shrink it. Rick Nielsen, who was also presenting but was in the unfortunate position of having to give the last presentation of the day when everyone else had already covered what he had planned to talk about, has a step by step tutorial for using favicons at WordPress that includes “a bag of fruit snacks” under needed items for the process, so you know it isn’t scary. It involves a cPanel, though, so it’s not for everyone.
10. From Josepha I learned that you can make a cute dress out of those promotional T shirts you collect from WordCamps.

Looking for the slides from my presentation? Here they are: