J and Beyond 2011 Netherlands - Day 3

May 8th, 2011 at 9:58 PM CEST in Events

Today was the last day of J & Beyond 2011. What follows is a day report for this final day (check out the reports on day 1 and day 2 or the pictures we've made).

'Joomla Leadership Lessons Learned' by Ryan Ozimek

In these reports I've already written more than enough about the fact that I think Ryan is a great speaker, so I'll talk no more about that in this report. The talk was solid, and unfortunately was more similar to the one he gave at the Joomladays Netherlands than I had hoped. Due to having to leave 'early' for another session, I didn't see the Q&A round that went on after the presentation. If anyone reading this did, please put any interesting questions and answers in the comments area.

'Taking SEO Seriously Within a Next Generation Joomla Webshop Component.' by Ronni Christiansen

While I'm sure Ronni has the best intentions regarding SEO for his web shop, the theory behind it lacks ground in my opinion. After Ronni had stated a hard limit of the amount of keywords you can use on a certain page, I asked him for a source of this surprising data. He replied there wasn't really a source other than his own experience. How can you name your presentation 'Taking SEO seriously [...]' and base your SEO strategy on your personal experiences? The hallmark of science (on which serious SEO should be based) is that personal experiences are largely irrelevant because they are often colored, lack controlled variables, have a small sample size, etc. I think Ronni and SEO of the redSHOP component could benefit greatly when he decides to expand his large amount of personal experience in SEO with the latest and greatest in SEO research.

'How to Triforce (Working in 3 Places at Once)' by Stian Didriksen

While I liked the subject and approach of this presentation, the fact that the 'Questions?' sheet was shown after roughly 10 minutes (out of the available 60) disappointed me. Even though I know from personal experience that it can be hard to plan the duration of a presentation by the minute (even after practicing it), giving a 10 minute presentation just doesn't cut it. Had I known this presentation (which was by the way extended by showing some of the new features in NinjaBoard) would last only 10 minutes, I could've (and probably would've) selected another presentation. To all future speakers: please plan and rehearse your presentation so that the people showing up for it get (more or less) what they expect.

Warm Up Session

I didn't attend the formal warm up session as I was warming up in the courtyard by the sun, discussing some business with David from Chill Creations.

'Making Joomla's Admin Interface Awesome' by Kyle Ledbetter

A quality presentation by a great speaker. In 60 minutes, Kyle has led us through the history of Joomla! Administrator template overrides. From the first version of his own template AdminPraise to the last, and going by several other templates, he has shown us what can be done to make the Joomla! Administrator more user friendly. While I personally haven't used any custom Administrator templates yet, I can't wait until a template with the quality of what Kyle was showing us will be integrated into the Joomla 1.8 core.

'SEO Myths Busted' by Theo van der Zee (me!)

After some technical difficulties with my laptop that apparently still fails to output to a beamer (I had the same problem at the Dutch Joomladays a couple weeks ago), I personally think the presentation went pretty well. Even though I'm not used to talking English for a prolonged period of time, I found myself struggling to find the English word I was looking for only a couple of times. The low point of my presentation was a piece of interaction I'd tried to incorporate in the presentation. It involved a mini-interview with somebody from the audience, about the PageRank of their website and whether the thought that number actually influenced his rankings (answers: barely, there is only a 0.18 correlation). First I limited my potential interview targets by asking them who knew what the PageRank of their homepage was. After that I walked to a person in the front and asked him what his PR was, after which he answered: 28, d'oh (no disrespect at all to the gentleman in question, this just shows ever so more that SEO and related aspects are still very much unknown to most people). This rather redicilous answer however dumbfounded me so much however that it took me a couple seconds to get my presentation back on track after it. On top of that, after trying to hit the space bar on my keyboard to proceed to the next sheet, I accidentally hit the 'B' button (I didn't know that at the time as I hit like 5 buttons at once) which apparently causes your whole screen to go black. Luckily our technical guy from ThemePartner Koen Kuipers had quickly fixed this issue for me so that I could continue my presentation afterwards. The rest of the presentation went great, including some tough questions that were asked in the end. I would hereby like to thank everybody who has attended my talk, and have really enjoyed the compliments that were given to me afterwards!

Closing Session

During the closing session there was a round of feedback on the JAB, the organization was thanked for their hard work, and the potential date for J & Beyond 2012 was announced: 18-19-20 of May 2012. I'm sure there is more to come on this subject later!

That sums up JAB 2011. I hope you've all enjoyed our reports on the event and see you all at J & Beyond 2012!