Top Five Takeaways from WordCamp 2013

Last weekend I spent the day in Baltimore in a room full of WordPress fans for a fun day of learning and sharing . Two tracks of sessions made it hard for me to choose — every session was terrific.  It was a great day and I picked up a few tips to share.

1. George Stephanis, from Automattic, shared that the JetPack plug-in suite includes rich analytics, specific to WordPress, that run side by side with Google Analytics.

2.Akilah Thompkins-Robinson, from Akzmedesigns shared that google doesn’t like when we post links in FaceBook posts, and she recommended that we post links into comments  instead, in order to improve our FB visibility

3. Josh Patterson, from Web Mechanix, shared that SEO is not about building back links any longer. It’s about content, and sharing this content across all of your social platforms. Throughout the conference, there was a lot of buzz about google+ as the platform to watch for SEO.

4. Lee Blue, from cart66, gave a great overview of the e-commerce process, and traditionally WordPress users need a “mashup” of plugins for e-commerce. He and his team developed cart66 for WordPress and it works as a single-solution that visually integrates with a web site. He also recommended Stripe as an alternative.

5. In what I thought was the best session of the day: “Make your website everything friendly” Tracey Rotton shared that by using the new HTML5 “Form Input Types”, when the browser encounters a particular type of input request (like when a website asks a user to enter her email address), it will bring up the correct keyboard for that element, (it will display a keyboard with the @ sign).

The sessions are recorded and free to watch from all the WordCamps across the country. The most popular Wordcamp is in San Francisco, and you can watch the session here: http://wordpress.tv/event/wordcamp-san-francisco-2013/.