400 Bad request

I’m sure you were bombarded with #sxsw tweets and Gowalla checkins to various parties so here’s an overview of what it’s all about.

Talks/Panels

I don’t have an exact figure but there must have been at least 500 or so talks over the course of SXSWi.

It’s very overwhelming and hard to get a plan together. So many good topics and speakers all happening at once so you have to take a risk and choose one over the others.

On top of that you’re meeting people and socialising outside the talks.

I attended quite a few UX and design talks but the problem with this is you end up hearing about things you already know or have read about elsewhere. The better talks are about things you have an interest in but that wouldn’t be your main domain.

My favourite talks:

• Startup Metrics for Pirates
• Metrics Driven Design
• Google’s Marissa Mayer Presents

I’ve still to hear the keynotes though, which I’ve heard good reports about.

Networking Socialising

Plenty of opportunities to meet and greet people at SXSW. As most people at the Conference Center are either in a talk or on their way to a talk, the best place to socialise is at a bar or a coffee shop (depending on the time of day).

Everybody at SXSW is looking to meet people so the best thing to do is just go up to someone, introduce yourself and ask “So what do you do?“.

Parties

I heard this quote mentioned a few times:

SXSWi is 40% business and 60% parties

—Anonymous

Every night there are a tonne of parties hosted by the likes of Mashable, Gowalla, Foursquare, Vimeo, YouTube, Media Temple, MMXINI that are attended by everyone in the industry (plus the occasional celebrity).

The parties are definitely the best places to meet people and if there’s someone you really want to say hello to you can usually stalk them on Gowalla or Twitter.

The Ginger Man was a local favourite for meeting up with designers and developers. And I was able to meet up with a client, Sharethrough, at the Say Media party, which was the first face to face meeting we’d had in 18 months.

Travel advice

If you’re thinking of going next year:

• Get a US sim card – try UK2Abroad $1.50 per day for unlimited data
• If staying in a hotel outside downtown, make sure it’s on the shuttle route
• Get a Thomas Cook travel credit card – very handy
• Use Planzai to plan your SXSW trip

Anything cool?

• GroupMe and Beluga were the “break-out” apps this year. Both group messaging apps, although GroupMe not available in UK yet
• Foursquare and Gowalla featured heavily
• Noticed Uber everywhere – a new type of taxi service (SF/Austin only I think)
• QR codes are a *big* thing – they were everywhere
• Apple turned a Gold’s Gym into an Apple Store for the launch of the iPad 2
• Quite a few “Reserve your username” apps like Connect Me and 1Username popping up
• Planzai’s Rich Dale did a great job pitching to Dave McClure, Eric Ries and Robert Scoble

Thanks to Invest NI

Big thanks to Invest NI who sponsored 25 interactive companies from Northern Ireland to attend the conference in Austin, alongside Digital Circle and Digital Derry.

Special thanks to Terry Reilly who helps us plan the trip and keeps us right when we’re over there.

And thanks to the NI delegates who made it a great experience.

Would I recommend it?

Absolutely.

I was able to meet lots of cool people, learn lots of stuff, make some connections, get some work, and come home fully charged and inspired.

Who’s going next year?

Created for obsessive-compulsive designers, Build is no ordinary web conference. From internationally renowned speakers to a jam-packed social calendar, Build is bringing the best of the web to Belfast’s Waterfront Studio on the 5th November.

Build presented some of the world’s most respected designers and speakers and it was an honor to meet them and be in their presence: Eric Meyer, Wilson Miner, Ryan Sims, Andy Budd, Mark Boulton and Tim Van Damme.

The conference was a huge success, I thoroughly enjoyed myself not just on the day but across the whole week with various other meetups and Andy deserves a huge pat on the back. Well done sir! I even managed to win a ‘goody bag’ thanks to this tweet – sorry Tim ;-)

I can’t even begin to list all the awesome people I chatted to over the week as there are too many to mention but it was good to meet you all and next time you’re up for a drink in Belfast just tweet me :)

If you’re in Belfast later in the month check out the Adobe CS4 training day Wednesday 25th November (free event).

Round ups

• Front: Build Conference recap
• Pabcas: Building a better web
• Web Designer Notebook: #buildconf
• TaylorMade: Belfast builds giants
• Kyle Boyd: Build Conference – Belfast 2009
• Sam Brown: Build Conference – My experience graph
• No More Art: City of Culture eh? Well 2009 will just have to do

Press

• Wired: Belfast looks to build a hi-tech future
• BBC: The next Twitter or Facebook?

Photos

Front

Keith Anderson

Paddy Donnelly

David Parsons

Maykel Loomans

Yaili

Videos

Tim Van Damme – Designers Designers Designers (from @vectorfunk)

These are just some of the post #buildconf links I have come across. Please feel free to share your blog posts and photos in the comments below.

Please also take a moment to review or recommend any cool places you visited over the days of Build on Lookaly (another project of mine). Cheers!

• John Hewitt Bar
• McHughs
• Duke of York
• Ramada Encore Hotel
• Malmaison Hotel

Stay tuned for Build 2010.

I’ll be joining the lineup of Andy Clarke, Drew McLellan, Web Standardistas and others.

The Belfast event is being held in W5 at The Odyssey starting at 8.45am.

Tickets are still available at £59 (bargain for a FOWD event).

I’ll be talking about ‘Rounding the edges of your website‘:

• Minor adjustments to ensure your user has an enjoyable experience
• How to optimise your site for optimal performance
• Essential checks before launching your website

Further links:

• Check out the schedule
• Check out the speaker list
• More Carsonified events

I’m very excited about the event and hope to see a lot of you there. Who’s going?

Here’s a brief roundup.

What is Refresh Belfast?

Refresh Belfast is a monthly event for designers and creatives to meet over an informative talk and a ‘refreshing’ pint.

It takes place every third Monday of the month in The Black Box, and like a lot of web related events happening in Belfast is organised by Andy Good.

More about Refresh Belfast.

Who are Front?

Front are one of Ireland’s leading web development agencies with clients including BBC, O2, Independent News & Media, Carte Blanche Greetings – and lots of exciting new work they’re not yet able to speak about!

Photo source

Paul McKeever, Front’s MD, and Jamie Neely, Front’s creative director, both spoke at the event.

Topics

Paul talked about the user experience, how people will use your site and being human online (and not talking like a robot).

Jamie discussed Front’s approach to design and how it’s not about jumping into Photoshop and starting to design a site. It’s about understanding the user and client needs, scoping out the project with wireframes and sketches and building the client’s online brand.

You can view the round-up, video clips and slides on Front’s website. It’s worth a read :)

I had a great morning and going by feedback from others the whole day was a great success with some fantastic speakers and over 350 attendees. Well done to Andy Good for putting it together, along with all those who helped out. There’s a good video montage of the day here.

The 7 Deadly Sins of WordPress

I got the ball rolling at 9.30am with my WordPress talk, looking at 7 ways to make your (WordPress) blog more effective.

I thought that rather than put up my slides (which don’t really make sense out of context) I’d give an overview of the 7 points and the solutions.

1. Backup

Assume things will go wrong and the time will come when you’ll regret you didn’t backup (server problems, site gets hacked, client/other user deletes stuff, you muck it up yourself)

Solution

Backup daily automatically with WP-DB-Plugin. Your backup will be emailed to you daily and you don’t have to lift a finger.

2. Easy Comments

Make it as easy as possible for users to leave comments. Don’t put a barrier in their way in the form of captchas or having to signup to leave a comment. These are used to stop spam, but there are better user friendly ways.

Solution

To stop spam, install and activate Akismet (which will put spam in a spam folder) and verify comments before they’re published.

3. URLS

The default URL for posts e.g. http://www.leemunroe.com/?p=1194 doesn’t mean anything to users or search engines.

http://www.leemunroe.com/tips-more-twitter-followers/ means more to users (they now know what content is on that page) and search engines can allocate keywords to that page based on the url

Solution

Under Settings > Permalinks click ‘Custom structure’ and enter /%postname%/. This will change your URL so it includes the article title.

4. Feed

Make sure your RSS feed link is easy to find. It should be clearly linked to in your sidebar and should be in the browsers address bar also (this is a common convention and there are also applications that will find your feed going by the link in your head).

By default WordPress will include this link, as will most themes, but if you’re designing your own theme it can often be overlooked.

Solution

Put this code between your <head> tags:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=“Title” href=”link-to-feed” />

5. Actions

Once someone reads through your post it’s up to you to point them in the right direction of what their next actions should be. They could add a comment, read other articles on your site, help promote the post, follow you on Twitter etc.

Solution

Use the following plugins to suggest actions at the end of your post. These will help keep users on your site reading other articles or help to promote your post via social networking sites.

• Similar posts plugin
• Popular posts plugin
• Share this plugin or sociable plugin

6. SEO

For your posts to be found on Google they have to be well optimized. There are a few simple modifications you can make to help SEO.

Solution

Use the All In One SEO Pack and you can set titles, descriptions and keywords for your homepage, posts and pages.

7. Text

On the web, people don’t read they scan. You have roughly 3 seconds to grab the readers attention so your text should be easily read and scannable.

Solution

• Break blocks of text into smaller paragraphs
• Use meaningful sub headings
• Use lists where appropriate (bullet and numbered)
• Highlight (bold) keywords
• Make sure links stand out against other text
• Remove unnecessary waffle text

Photo thanks to Colin Parte

These are my 7 deadly sins of WordPress. It should take you no longer than an hour to implement these solutions and they will make a big difference to the effectiveness of your blog.

There are lots of other ways you can improve the effectiveness of your blog so feel free to share any tips below.

Also if anyone has any links to #barcampbelfast roundups or photos, please share.

And the winners are…

Best Financial Services Website

Winner: Irishdeposits.ie

Best Travel, Tourism & Hospitality Website

Winner: Ireland-guide.com

Best Digital Media Website

Winner: tv3.ie

Best Sports & Leisure Website

Winner: imra.ie

Best Community & Charity Website

Winner: heartsplay.ie

Best Education, Research & Training Website

Winner: osi.ie

Best e-business Website – (exclusive to web business)

Winner: litriocht.com

Best Property Website – (non portal)

Winner: chesterfieldblackrock.ie

Best Mobile Content/Application

Winner: Kidsafe – sentrywireless.com

Best New Indigenous Website 2008

Winner: Movies.ie

Best Use of Film, Digital Animation or Motion Graphics

Winner: thebellatwylye.com

Best Blog

Winner: Mulley.net

Best e-Government Website Shortlist

Winner: osi.ie

Best Entertainment & Games Related Website

Winner: redfm.ie

Best FMCG Website

Winner: Lucozadesport.ie

Best Recruitment Website

Winner: Prosperity.ie

Best Interactive Marketing Campaign

Winner: Mrtayto.ie

Best Professional Services Website

Winner: Rbk.ie

Best Web Design & Development Agency

Winner: Webfactory.ie

Best Retail & Home Shopping Website

Winner: Toyota.ie

Best Social Networking & Community – Peoples Choice Nominees

Winner: Boards.ie

Young Designer of The Year

Winner: Naoise Ó Conchubhair

Internet Hero

Winner: Aodhan Cullen

Grand Prix

Winner: Tv3.ie

Peoples Choice Award

Winner: Boards.ie

Congrats to all.

What do you think?

What’s your verdict on the winners? The good, the bad, the ugly…?

Check out photos of the awards.