Dot All ‘23 Conference: A round up of the first day of talks at the Craft CMS conference

Set against the gorgeous backdrop of the vibrant city of Barcelona, the Dot All Conference brings together Craft CMS developers, and industry experts to share their knowledge and experiences. We’re here this week to find out more about the ongoing developments within the industry and it’s a rare chance to innovate face to face.

So what happened on Wednesday? Here’s a snapshot of just a few of the sessions our development team attended:

Ben Croker kicked off proceedings with Reactive Front-ends with Sprig and our Senior Developer Charlie was pretty chuffed to discover that one of the demos of Sprig in the wild featured a recent site that we had built.

At the same time, Moritz L'Hoest held a talk on Building a Collaborative Content Platform with the Control Panel. This focused on creating a great author experience and encouraged us to give a bit more attention to the CMS admin. As they’re usually a direct customer, I don’t think we do too bad a job of this in our web development agency. Some helpful suggestions included decluttering entry authoring, facilitating content transfers, and utilising the Craft CMS dashboard effectively.

In Demystifying Personalization, Maranda Provance encouraged us to think about why we’re personalising the experience. As much as it is a crucial part of web design and very much a hot topic, it must be approached thoughtfully. Overdoing it can sometimes feel icky and so Maranda encouraged Craft CMS developers to carefully evaluate whether or not the personalisation would genuinely enhance the user experience.

Website Accessibility is a key issue that all developers need to embrace and this was a topic covered in Practical Tips for Making Your Website Accessible. A surprising statistic shared by Kaitlyn Martinez and Lupe Camacho was that 1 in 6 people have a disability requiring enhanced website accessibility. The importance of aiming for AA-level accessibility and starting early in the design and development process was stressed. We received some great tips on enhancing accessibility without compromising client preferences.

After lunch I attended Matt Riopelle’s Beyond ​'Buy Vs Build’: How Craft Commerce Agencies Win in an Ecommerce SaaS World. This Got us thinking about whether we should adapt our agency model in line with the wider world. It feels like we’re already looking at this topic in the right way but we just need to do more of it!

Towards the end of the day Zoltan Varaday hosted Performance, Personalization, and Perfectionism — Choosing Your Front-End Stack, where we learned that the reaction time of the average human is 273 milliseconds. Crucially, Zoltan also reiterated that the length of time we can keep the attention of the regular user is just 10 seconds. So as we are way past that now I’ll wrap up.

All in all a full-on day that has left us with an overall feeling that we are on the right track in our work, and our approach. We are at the leading edge of a lot of this technology and using it to enhance the experience of the website users and ultimately our clients by helping them deliver industry-leading Craft CMS sites.

As ever, there is always room to improve and we’ve got some fantastic tools, tips and thoughts to take away and consider for implementation.

Looking forward to tomorrow when it is all about the state of Craft CMS and the next 12 months.

¡Hasta mañana!