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.