Suppliers’ conferences can often be little more than a dressed up sales-fest. The leading WordPress hosting company, WPEngine, struck the right balance at their Sydney Summit yesterday.
Although WordPress is truly global, it presents as being very US-centric. WPEngine’s investment in a major local event here in Australia was a very valuable opportunity to be face to face with WordPress rather than digital. The calibre of other delegates was outstanding and I had some valuable exchanges between sessions.
Notable quotes
Everything that can be measured, will be
Dr Hugh Bradlow
AI is simply pattern recognition, it’s not prediction
Dr Hugh Bradlow
Over the last decade I’ve spent more time with Qantas [Australian Airline] than my wife. Based on the offers they email, it is alarming how little Qantas seems to know about me.
Dr Hugh Bradlow
Gen Z make up 20% of the population, but their attitudes and behaviours are very different from the other Generations
Mary Ellen Dugan, WPEngine CMO
Facebook has a problem [it’s not preferred by Gen Zs]
Mary Ellen Dugan
Gen Zs are happy to browse but not amplify brands
Mary Ellen Dugan
AI has been all about VALUE [$]. Its needs to be all about VALUES [accuracy, responsibility, fairness, diversity]
Eric Jones, WPEngine VP Brand & Comms
People want to understand how you got there [it’s all about trust, interaction, meaningful experiences and lack of creepiness]
Eric Jones
90% of the solution is posing a better question
Eric Jones
Open your algorithms
Eric Jones
37% of the world’s top 10,000 websites run on WordPress
David Vogelpohl, WP Engine VP Web Strategy
Today more video is uploaded every 30 days than the major US TV networks themselves created over the previous 30 years
David Vogelpohl
In April 2019 digital transactions overtook physical
David Vogelpohl
Dev teams will move towards creating libraries of blocks for design teams to use
David Vogelpohl
46% of global traffic is coming from smart phones, and that is only going to increase
David Vogelpohl
In A/B tests, 80% of Bs fail [due to volume of cohorts]
David Vogelpohl
WordPress moving from 80 PHP / 20 Javascript to the reverse
David Vogelpohl
Tension creates extraordinary
Juan Garcia, Head of Technology, whiteGREY
User experience will become core [in corporate technology]. Must be a frictionless self-serve experience. They will be leading themselves.
Jonathan Barnett, Head of Digital Engineering, Nova Entertainment
CMO is rapidly becoming the Chief Martech Officer
Jonathan Barnett
Site performance is a competitive advantage
Richard Hill, Google
Our most valuable commodity is time [efficiency and convenience are key – see PWC 2018]
Monica Cravotta, WPEngine VP Marketing
The Martech revolution requires curated optionality
Monica Cravotta
Key observations
- WPEngine is avoiding commoditisation by going up the value chain (Genesis Themes, Atomic Blocks, Flywheel) and heavy into ease of use (eg DevKit)
- Atomic Blocks is about to become a platform within a platform. Consider the opportunities. Is this Plugins 2.0?
- Behind the hype, there’s a sizeable community of people ignoring blocks. Reason to migrate is not yet clear enough for them.
- ‘Headless’ and offloading data (via Blocks) could be massive. Kinda like a better Zapier.
Notes to self
- Checkout PressThis podcast from David Vogelpohl
- Learn more about Progressive Web Apps, Headless Decoupled Architecture and Extensible Blocks.
- Checkout DevKit, Yoast custom box schema, latest Genesis theme Revolution Pro with latest bells and whistles (esp blocks and 1-click content population)
- How to build your own blocks litturl.co/block-editor-HB
Nutshell conclusion
The commercial application of blocks is the new growth frontier. Must be as easy and worthwhile to use as Lego.