Having won a pass to WordCamp UK via Wonderthemes, I ended up there today. This year it’s being held in the lovely city of Portsmouth

This is/was my first ever proper conference, so I didn’t really know what to expect. Any expectations I did have, however, were met and beaten to a pulp.

This thing is great. I really like using and working with WordPress, so it’s nice to be able to actually talk about it face to face with people for once: back at uni, though I know a few who dabble, I think I’m the only one in my year to take the software seriously. It can get lonely!

Anyway, shortly after I arrived into the main lecture theatre (yeah, I’m still going to lectures during summer – and what), I met a few cool people. One is Liz Myers, based on the design side, but wanting to mash WordPress into a fully featured and easy to maintain design portfolio (at the moment she has an all in one page thing, which, if you ever meet her, you will hear all about within the first five minutes ). Another is Louis Northmore, fellow Wonderthemes ticket winner. What I found interesting was how although everyone was coming into WordPress from different directions, whether that be design, development, marketing/ SEO or just blogging, we were still able to have great conversations about the software, its pros, cons and whatever: the common ground established by the conference meant everyone just got along fine. That was the most surprising thing: how easy it was to talk to people (though when I say surprising, it sounds like I expected everyone to be miserable and antisocial, which wasn’t the case). I really enjoyed meeting everyone and just talking about design and WordPress.

The talks were quite good too. I especially enjoyed the talk about mobile “responsive” design from Rachel McCollin, and, later, the demos of WOW!! plugins from Michael Kimb Jones. There are definitely a few I’ll be trying out later, along with CSS Media Queries, which seemed to be a big thing today.

It all ended up in The Dolphin, a pub down the road (of course). I ate the best burger of my life in this establishment. Combining that with two free pints of Stowford Press, courtesy of sponsors, and good company, it was a great meal.

Anyway, seeing as it’s not especially interesting to read about people talking, I’ll just say that more chatting and social blah ensued, and leave it at that for tonight. Looking forward to tomorrow: the Microsoft reps (who also own Windows Phone 7s!) are giving a talk about WordPress (an open source project) and Microsoft (a closed source company) work together; should be interesting.