Surviving First Contact

It's our first meetup of 2021 and we're looking forward to getting everyone back together again (virtually) for some interesting talks.

We're going to be using Zoom for the event - the link will be added a couple of days beforehand.

So grab your own pizza and a drink and join us for an evening of informative talks.

A big thanks to our sponsors SR2 (https://www.sr2rec.co.uk/), Ents24 (http://www.ents24.com/), Brightpearl (http://www.brightpearl.com/), BookingLive (https://www.bookinglive.com/) & OneSub (https://onesub.io/) who are supporting us and are helping make the virtual event happen.

Our talks are:

• The First Contact
  Andreas Heigl (@heiglandreas)

So you did a great job with your website and now your customers want to get into contact with you. They actually want give you their holy grail and apply for a login. And that's where it usually starts to go south. So many things can go wrong with a registration form that your customer doesn't really feel welcome or safe. In this session we will debug a few real-life examples from a user-experience Point of View. By analysing that we will find ways to make the first contact of a user with our application a better experience. And you don't need to be a coder to see why and how to improve your next registration form.

• Minimum Viable Website: the 5 minute challenge
  Ismael Velasco (@DevOnAJourney)

The biggest barrier to building my personal website and starting blogging is the initial friction. It takes a good while to learn your way around, configure, set up and style a CMS, deployment platform or your own website.

What if you could start a timer and in under 5 minutes flat you could have a minimum viable website, your first deployable increment, good enough for you to go live and start comfortably blogging, but infinitely expandable, into a full fledged site or even a SAAS? In 5 mins, you could build your mate a site. In 5 mins, you could have your long mused dev blog. And every hour you spent thereafter would just add value. You're off.

That was the challenge I set myself. I'll demo, against the clock, a CLI wrapper I wrote around the Laravel Wink microCMS. If you know Laravel, not only should you be ready to go live in 5 mins, but you will also instantly know what to do next to refine or expand it.

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Unfortunately we can't head anywhere afterwards for a drink, but we'll keep the chat going so that you can chat with each other.

Once the talks are finished, we'll open up the meeting so that everyone who wants to can turn on their cameras and microphones to join in the conversation.

You can also join us in Slack any time, just head to https://slack.phpsw.uk

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Your first time coming to PHPSW? Welcome!

It's going to be a bit different this month as we're all online, but we expect the night to roughly run as:

• From about 6:45 you should be able to join the event.
• At 7pm, we'll do a quick welcome talk and some community announcements
• At ~7:10pm we'll have the talks
• We finish talks at ~8:30pm, but will keep the event going till 9pm (or beyond) so you can join in the conversation

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How is this online thing going to work?

We've decided to use Zoom to host the event.

You'll find the link for the webinar under the location section of this event. You'll be able to access the event from the start time and it will prompt you to install a client if you wish/need to. There is also a web client available.
On joining you will be asked for an email address. We're not messaging attendees etc. so this can be a non-real address.

Note: We will be restricting video and screen sharing to hosts and speakers only until after the talks.

Please be aware that our code of conduct (https://phpsw.uk/code-of-conduct) still applies.

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As always, a big thanks to our meetup sponsors Ents24 (http://www.ents24.com/), Brightpearl (http://www.brightpearl.com/) & OneSub (https://onesub.io/) without whom we wouldn't be able to put on our meetups.