Sessions

We had 3 tracks (users/blogger, designers & engineer) for this WordCamp. As introduced on WordCamp Central blog post, the topics were well-rounded.

Sessions include responsive publishing, mobile site development, e-publishing, performance optimization, and WordPress coding best practices.

We tried to arrange the timetable so that everyone has at least one session they are interested in. The result was a huge success I think, in fact I read several blog reports complaining that they had such a hard time choosing which ones to go!

WordPress in Japan has been growing and I am feeling that in each WordCamp. It’s showing not only in the number of the attendees, but the depths of the interests and availability of the speaker. For example, I think only a handful of people were interested in scaling WordPress, say, 2 or 3 years ago in Japan. Now there are numbers of agencies using WordPress to run large-scale sites as their CMS. In addition to topics listed earlier in this post, there were talks about contents strategy, security, blogger panel discussion, theme / plugin usage tips, analytics, and WordPress for beginners.

Automattic colleague Takashi Irie & I did a hands-on session

John Ford, VaultPress engineer did a talk on behind the scenes of WordPress.com

Attendees

I was happy to see seniors, people with kids, students, women as well as men at the event. They were amazingly cooperative in terms of operation. It seemed like a good reflection of WordPress community itself – everyone pitches in, and help each other. 80% of the registrants actually showed up, which is really amazing rate considering it was a free event.

Full house for a mobile session

Staff & Speakers & Sponsors & WordCamp Foundation

Just want to say they all were awesome. Thank you — even though I know whatever I say is never going to be enough. This was the first time we (any Japanese WordCamp organizer) worked with WordPress Foundation to make the event happen based on some of the new rules and process that are being set up. There were some bumps since we’ve never done it this way, but learn as we go — I think the trial and error will be useful lessons for future WordCamps here and else. I’m really happy to see the support and staff poured into the Foundation and WordCamp.

Handmade Wapuu, Japanese WordPress character. Yes, they are handmade!

Staff wore orange T's!

Here’s my slides from the keynote, where I talked about WordPress’ history, current status and future prospect (slides are in Japanese).

Ustream recording is already up but it also is in Japanese. John Ford of VaultPress did a session in English. Here’s his blog post (with slides) and video.

If you’re interested in seeing more feedback (maybe with Google Translate), here are a couple of links:

• Bookmarks of the attendee & staff’s blog posts
• “Togetter” Tweet collections (afternoon only, but still has over 1500 tweets)
• wctokyo2011 tag on Flickr

The photo credits goes to @odyssey, who had a WordPress baby just a few days ago and @makegoodtime, who worked hard on the official event site. Thanks!

All my worries were wrong, and I actually got to go… and it was even better than I anticipated.

They covered a wide range of topics from hands-on session (with some code samples) to high-level inspirational/work ethic/life lesson-like talk. I enjoyed the variety and change in the pace. No session was very discussion-oriented (no panels. 5-10 minutes average Q&A time) but they were high-quality professional presentations (duh!).

The whole conference was interesting because it somehow “all made sense” in the end. Now, a few days after the event, everything they said on stage and conversations I had with other attendees are coming all together. If you are a front-end developer with interests in visual design like myself, I’m pretty sure you will find with all An Event Apart delivers. Even for others, I think an event like this can give you good understanding of what other members of development team are doing to make it all happen (which will help the whole team a great deal).

If I have to pick, my most favorite one was “Selling Design” by Jeffery Zeldman. Selling designs means understanding what’s the best for your clients, and knowing what it takes to make them agree with you. He talked about exactly how to make those happen. Design doesn’t mean just visual/cosmetic ‘design’. It’s everything from creative ideas, the architecture of the site, and other important decisions. As a front-end developer, it’s easy for me to get caught up in solving immediate technical challenges. Zeldman’s talk was a good reminder of how I should look at my work within a big picture.

Another one of my favorite session was “Best Practices For Form Design” by Luke Wroblewski. Luke said something like “I can talk about forms all day If you let me” – I seriously would love to hear that all day! Just as copy on the web is not paid enough attention, forms need a lot more attention than they get now. In real stores, you can make or break your impression by how you treat customers while receiving payment at register or collecting personal information (just chatting or asking for zip code). Placing a good form on your site is as important as having well-trained & friendly wait staff at a restaurant. During his presentation, Luke showed us great real-life examples of how we can achieve that.
I’m looking forward to his new book “Web Form Design Best Practices” – coming out early next year.

The success and quality of the event itself was a proof of that these guys (and ladies) know what they need to produce good results. I feel so lucky to have been able to experience it first hand.

Links:

• Posts that link to this event’s URL (Technorati)
• Flickr photo pool: “aeachicago07″
• Zeldman has some links to the slides & interesting blog posts on the event.