Generally, when people approach me to work with them, they come bearing a certain number of assumptions about web designers. While it’s nice that someone somewhere who has clearly never met me thinks I’m a latte-drinking, WACOM-owning, Mac-plugged hipster, the reality is that I sit here most days in my pyjamas, working away on an ageing Dell desktop and trying to figure out how to open those new-fangled .docx document types.

And while I do take my coffee very seriously, my credibility in this arena is greatly diminished by the fact that I do not know how to roast my own coffee beans. It’s very hard to hold my head up at conventions for swanky web designers, which explains why I don’t go to those. (That plus I don’t get invited.)

So here, for your Monday morning amusement, are the Top Ten Things You Never Want to Hear About Your Web Designer:

• I am completely self-taught. I have never taken a web design, coding or marketing class, and am thus entirely unqualified for pretty much any job you might want to hire me for. I’m pretty OK with that.
• I learned to code HTML creating free pages on GeoCities, because I wanted to edit the colours on the provided templates.
• I learned to build an SQL query in FrontPage. At the time, it was the only visual builder around and it opened up the world of databases to me. I will be forever grateful.
• On the very rare occasions when I actually need to create a table for, you know, tabular data, I still use FrontPage, mostly because it’s so rare I can’t really remember how to code tables any more.
• I learned basic CSS from a woman named Vee McLaughlin over many hours in an ICQ chat window. She was incredibly patient and to a huge extent, I owe her my entire career.
• I live in the Motherfucking Bank Guilt Spiral. It is impossible for me to blog if I owe any client work. I always owe at least one client work; therefore I almost never blog. Or do laundry. Or buy groceries. Or go to the bank.
• I do not use PhotoShop. I mean, I can, but 98% of the non-vector graphics I create are done in PaintShop Pro. The version I use was released in March of 2000. I will never upgrade it.
• I overwrote a client’s live site by accident in 2001. There was no backup. I still have nightmares about it and have never made that mistake again.
• I stuck the color #92BD5D in my palette back in the day when we used only web-safe colours, and waited more than 10 years for it to become trendy so I could use it pretty much constantly. When it becomes passée, I may never work again.
• I am overwhelmed by data and have not opened my RSS reader in a year. 99% of my reading list comes from Twitter. I do not subscribe to Smashing Magazine, Mashable or anything else I’m supposed to be reading, including your blog.

The final blow to my credibility:

I own no Apple products and there is no part of me that wants an iPhone.

I make no bones about the fact that I freaking love permission based marketing, which is marketing wanker speak for email newsletters. Dollar for dollar, this is the absolute cheapest form of marketing you can engage in, and even if you’ve never thought of having a newsletter before, chances are that when we work together, you’re having one.

There are two reasons I love newsletters. One, anyone who would turn down the opportunity to put their brand in front of hundreds or thousands of people each week or month and generate click-thus for their site for pennies is a moron. Two, because these subscribers have opted in and asked to hear from you, they already have an affinity for your brand, product or service. These are essentially pre-qualified buyers, and if you can get them to open your mail and give them a strong call to action, you can pretty much convert the snot out out of them.

Plus I love doing them. I make a lovely looking HTML newsletter if I do say so myself, and the metrics you get from Campaign Monitor are like crack bananas for monkeys. Every mailing is pretty much 24 hours of stats porn, and the market intelligence in those stats is worth 1,000x the cost of the mailing. It’s fantastic.

So when I work with a new client, some portion of the time is spent on the mechanics of building their new subscriber list. People new to email marketing generally have a vague notion that you go out and buy a list somewhere, but in fact you never do this. You build your own list, slowly and carefully, with a combination of cunning and brute force.

The standard “sign up to our newsletter” form on most websites (including this one) isn’t, let’s face it, enormously appealing. If you want people to sign up – and I assume you do even though I do not – you need to help them do that:

• Incentivise People: Very few people want more email. However, many people would like the chance to get discounts, to enter a contest, to get industry intelligence, or whatever carrot you can offer.
• Bribe People: “Would you like to give me your email address?” is not really a winning sales pitch. “Would you like to enter to win a free Wii?” works surprisingly well, however.
• Catch People: Catch them at checkout with a tick box when they’re buying from your online store, and catch them at the till with a clipboard list if you have a retail shop. Don’t be aggressive but make sure you give them an opportunity to opt in.

The best example I have of guerilla list building in action is Ciara Crossan at WeddingDates.ie. Ciara does six trade shows a year, mostly bridal fairs. She doesn’t have a product to sell to brides that would make doing shows worth her financial while, which is sort of a bummer. On the plus side, the aisles are literally crawling with women who are perfect for her mailing list.

So that’s what she does. She parks herself next to a display stand with a champagne bucket and a romantic arrangement of bubbly and fluted glasses and says “Would you like to enter to win a free champagne draw?” several hundred times a day. The first time I saw her do this, she signed up 400 subscribers on paper entry forms, and then nagged one of her brothers into entering them into her database. (Ciara does not have siblings; she has staff.)

This is, from a guerilla marketing point of view, a brilliant result though not entirely unexpected – Ciara could sign Eskimos up for ice. What’s interesting from a mailing list point of view, however, is the unsubscribe rate. Our strategy with these gigs has always been to announce the winner of the bridal fair draw in the next newsletter, so that those manually-entered subscribers are very definitely getting the content they signed up for.  Still, you’d expect a lot of people to unsubscribe when they a) don’t win, and b) get a newsletter they had never seen before and didn’t exactly wake up that morning desperate to join.

But they don’t. These subscribers are such tightly targeted, high-value acquisitions that they stay. They unsubscribe at a rate of less than 1%. Complaint and bounce rates are so low as to be statistically insignificant.

And that, my friends, is pure marketing gold.

I’ll be honest with you and say that most people who are start-ups are absolutely horrified when I suggest not only that they go outside and talk to real people, but solicit them as well. You absolutely can do this kind of marketing online from the safety of your PJs using social networks, but you cannot target it on Twitter the same way you can at a trade show, gig, or conference. You can do a pretty good interest-targeting job with Facebook ads, but your click-thrus will be shit.

I am nothing if not the queen of Do As I Say, Not as I Do, so as a concrete example here’s how I would build my list if I was interested in increasing the subscriber base for the newsletter I have no idea what to do with:

• I would have launched my re-design with a contest for a free Bootcamp session and a Wii, tied together with a marketing strapline like “Get Business Fit” except less lame.
• I’d Tweet my contest once and rely on people with whom I have credibility and karma to re-tweet it for me, then pray it trickled down. I’d also run a Facebook campaign for cheap kicks and reinforcement.
• I would embark on a round of Barcamp talks, Open Coffee rounds and maybe a local tech conference or two. At the end of each talk I did, I’d send round a clipboard for signups and pimp the online contest.
• I’d Tweet and blog about it one more time before the contest entry closing date, and then call and yell at myself for being tacky and embarassing.

I’m pretty sure that with a bit of effort there, I could gain several hundred subscribers for the price of a Wii. Luckily, I don’t have €169 at the moment, so you will be spared from a campaign designed to get you to sign up for my newsletter, and I will be spared from having to actually decide what to put in it and sending it.

And really, isn’t it better when we all win this way?

Photo: ©Rob DiCaterino

Yesterday, while up to my eyeballs in CSS and transparent images, a surprising thought occurred to me for the first time:

Despite the fact that I’ve been pushing pixels out the door for paying customers for almost fifteen years, I have never had a website.

I have always been a blogger, and I have always used a blog to represent myself online, even when there were no blogs and I was writing in a hacked guestbook script. I’ve never had a website that, well, does what this one now does.

Some web designer.

Anyway, it was an interesting process, one which I have attempted and abandoned on two previous occasions. I think that what made the difference this time was the IWA Best Business Blog award at the end of March; blogging has been light not just because of the train thing, but because winning that award really stunned me.

I barely think of myself as a business; certainly not as a company or a service or – God forbid – a brand. And I certainly don’t think of myself as a business blogger, either; I mean, I blog about getting accidentally drunk and my dog, for pity’s sake.

But probably it was time to get a little more grown-up about this whole work thing, and that award was just the uncomfortable kick up the arse I needed. I’m grateful now in a way I wasn’t three months ago, and I feel a little better dressed for the occasion with the new design.

This redesign was a good exercise, though weeding out my portfolio was a bit of a shock – there were something like 35 sites in there, now trimmed down to a much more manageable 20. The hardest part was writing the About page, which was called “Services” for exactly ten seconds, all of which I spent wanting to kill myself. Now I just sound like the Internet’s Troy McClure instead.

No site is without its issues, so I would just like to go on record as telling any future clients, “Do as I say, not as I do.” No, you cannot have a 220k background image, for a start.

Some nice things:

• All old links still work, although you may want to re-point any links to SabrinaDent.com specifically to the blog.
• There is a colophon if you’re interested in the pieces that went into this.
• I now, apparently, have a newsletter. Trust me when I say: very infrequent.
• Social icons now behave like normal people’s social icons behave.
• And lo, there is a search box, like normal people have.

The search box makes me ridiculously happy.

PS: We lost some comments on the last entry when moving – so sorry.
PPS: My husband is a saint; I’ve put him through three days of hell.

Dear Internet:

I love the fact that you love this website. I love the fact that when people meet me, the first thing they say is “Oh, I love your website! It’s so beautiful!” It’s lovely to be known for a beautiful thing.

Unfortunately, I fucking hate it.

I cannot stand to look at it. I hate it so much, I cannot stand to blog on it, which more or less explains the extended radio silence. I’ve hated it since about ten minutes after I won the Most Beautiful Blog award in 2008. I’ve been meaning to change it ever since, but I’ve been rather busy making websites and falling off trains.

I’ve been waiting for a good time to sit down and issue forth a redesign, but lately I’ve realised that there is no good time – I’m always busy making websites and falling off trains. So that’s it – I’m committing to a new website design and I am not returning until I have one.

I have no idea if you’ll like it, or if I’ll like it for that matter. I have no idea what it will look like, but I do know this:

It will have social networking icons that actually function instead of just looking pretty. It will actually achieve the accessibility I keep banging on about. It will sensibly hold and present the content it needs to contain.

And by God, it will have a search box.

Love,
Sabrina

Since a fall from a train at a certain notorious station has rendered me one-armed for at least the next four weeks, I have spent some time recently considering the manner in which I might attempt to keep food in our bowls and a roof over the dog.

One cannot code with one arm. This leaves either phone sex or business boot camps as viable options, and since premium numbers are actually ridiculously difficult to get in Ireland, I’ve opted for boot camps.

Business Boot Camp is a service where you provide me with a limited amount of information about your existing site or your startup plan, and I give you very practical feedback and suggestions for:

• Site presentation, call to action and navigation
• Messaging and communication
• Product definition and price point
• Marketing strategy, online and off
• Search engine friendliness and optimisation
• Blogging and social media strategy

I don’t normally offer this as a stand alone service, partly because all my design and development clients get it as part of the normal package whether they want it or not, but mostly because I will kill myself before I put the word “consultant” next to my name. Most consultants I’ve encountered deliver very little value over an extensive period of time; Boot Camp is designed to give you excellent value immediately, which has to be vastly preferable.

It is important to note that whatever the To Do list we come up with for your site, it is unlikely I will be able to do it — this is not one of those marvellous website health checks designed to rope you into hiring your “doctor” for additional work. Your Boot Camp assessment will be tailored to what’s best for your business, not mine.

Creating and implementing your Boot Camp List should give you:

• A roadmap for the direction of your online business
• Resources and ideas for implementing that roadmap
• Better quality Google traffic
• A lower bounce rate and a stickier website
• More leads and a higher conversion rate

The charge for this is an extremely reasonable €300 and you should expect to spend about two hours on the phone with me after I’ve finished rummaging through your site or your business plan. You should also expect some very frank home truths and a good sized helping of salty language.

The salty language, as always, is free.

I’m back from Galway and the Irish Blog Awards 2010 with absolutely no voice whatsoever, a lovely award, a girly swag bag of happiness, and a huge smile on my face.

The carefully made plan for this weekend was to travel up to Galway on Friday to be well-rested on Saturday, a plan that when horribly wrong when I woke up at 6:00 am with awful shoulder pain, two eyes glued shut by the conjunctivitis I picked up in hospital, and a suspicious croak in my throat. Six hours was the most sleep I’ve had since dislocating my shoulder but so, so far from enough. I entertained idle and exhausted fantasies of cancelling the Ladies Tea Party all morning, but instead opted to drink double espressos whilst desperately wishing I was 28 and still taking speed.

At 3 PM everything got massively better when Ciara Crossan and I stepped into the Linda Evangelista Suite at the g hotel to setup for the Tea Party and almost died. It is squeal-inducingly stunning and the staff did an amazing job setting up for us even as Ciara and I exploded the suite into a temporary workshop of bags, tissues paper and boxes. Des Byrne from L’Onglex dropped off 40 bottles of nail varnish remover, Ruth Crean dropped off 40 adorable pocket mirrors, Curious Wines dropped off two cases of gorgeous wine I selected especially for the pretty labels, and by 4 PM we were just about ready.

For the record, everything at the g is gorgeous, from the rooms to the views to the food to the manager. We actually had to convince GM Damien O’Riordan that every single attendee was very well versed in pouring her own wine and picking up her own brownies and that the hotel did not need to staff this party with a butler. The service is that good and that friendly and that amazing.

By 4:30 the suite was overrun with women oohing and ahhing over furniture, beds and bathtubs and enjoying an atmosphere that could best be described as frolicking. The DIY Nail Bar was a huge hit, with women dragging extra chairs into the world’s plushest bathroom to varnish their nails and posing for photos in the incredible bathtub. There was a lot of laughter, a lot of chatter, and a lot of glasses raised on the private deck overlooking the beautiful water view. Alas it was over all too soon, as it always is, and at exactly 7:01 PM we drained the very last bottle of wine, collected our swag bags and piled into 10 taxis to head to the Irish Blog Awards.

For the past three years my focus around the IBAs has been on the Tea Party, which is excellent as it keeps me from fretting over nominations. Normally when various award short lists come out and I am lucky enough to be on them, I look at everyone who is nominated in my category, figure that as I’m in it there’s at least a non-null chance I might win, and gather a few coherent thoughts about what I might say if that happened. This year, I looked at the list for Best Business Blog, looked at my sparse posts for the year, and promptly ignored the fact I’d been short listed because there was less than zero chance I’d win.

Which means I was genuinely shocked and literally speechless when I did. Traditionally, this is the point at which you say “nobody was more surprised than me” but in fact a great number of people were equally surprised; I’m the first to admit it is an odd and unlikely win. I think I said on stage that last year I only wrote 24 blog entries; the number was in fact a whopping 40, but I tend not to count the site release posts.

I’m as confused and baffled as the next nominee, but also delighted. I won my very first award in Ireland at the IBAs in 2008, when I took home the glassware for Best Designed Blog. Since then I’ve picked up other gongs from various other award events, but none mean as much to me as the two Irish Blog Awards on my shelf. This is the community I care most about; it’s the people I love to work with and who’s opinions and endorsement mean the most to me. The fact I’ve got one for making a well-designed blog and one for the content that goes into it means the world to me, so thanks to all of you for reading and commenting, to the judges for voting, to Red Cardinal for sponsoring, and to John Handelaar for holding me up in the moment when I actually thought I might pass out from shock.

I sincerely apologise to Curious Wines, Contrast, Simply Zesty, and Sugru for winning. And no, you can’t have it back.

I cheered at huge volume for Pat Phelan, Sinead Cochrane, Maman Poulet, Red Mum, Panti and Beaut.ie, all of whom are most worthy winners in their categories and very deserving of their gongs. Huge cheers also to Damien Mulley, Rick O’Shea, Rymus and the video team and volunteers who make the IBAs the class event they are each year. It is a huge undertaking to pull off an event of this scale and each of them deserve all of the kudos in the universe.

5 AM and my bed seemed to arrive very early indeed, although not as early as our 9:30 wake-up call on Sunday. I dragged myself into the shower, opened my mouth to sing a few lines of something, and… nothing. Literally no sound came out. The suspicious croak from Friday and failing voice from Saturday has descended to full-on laryngitis and I cannot speak at all, although I do a very fine imitation of a chihuahua that’s been stepped on when I try. Never in your life have you heard a more pathetic “arf” noise. Were I able to laugh, I’m sure I’d find it hilarious.

Weekend scorecard: one fractured shoulder, one lost voice, one chest infection, two red eyes, 24 empty bottles of wine, 9 hours of sleep, one award and one fantastic day.

I’d happily, happily do it all again.

Last week, as previously mentioned, I made my way to Las Vegas for Mix10. I’d never been to Vegas before, and was very excited – though less keen on the Cork > Dublin > Gatwick > Vegas journey this trip entailed, what with that totalling 22 hours and all.

For the record, I love Las Vegas, and think we should all move there. It’s like Disney for grown-ups, and as long as you embrace the Matrix and its transparent artificiality, it’s sort of magical. I also really enjoyed MIX, and learned a lot; it was a great experience and I’m glad I went. Highlights for me:

• Getting to hang out all week with Martha Rotter and Claire Dillon from Microsoft Ireland, who looked after me in spectacular style and have my undying gratitude for making my trip possible;
• Getting to meet Joey deVilla, aka Accordion Guy. I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard of him and didn’t know Accordion Guy was famous, nor did I realise I had parked myself at the Cool Kids Table in the lounge, but he was just plain nice to me. He has a Vegas Travel Diary that perfectly encapsulates this trip, and a toilet that tweets.
• Standing within 6 feet of Douglas Crockford and Dr. Dr. Dr. Bill, who also answered a question for me in a session he ran as an open conversation with just one slide (it was a good slide, to be fair.)

Interestingly, when I went to Nishant Kothary’s excellent session on The Elephant in the Room, his last slide was about a conversation he’d had with Bill Buxton that was virtually identical to my last blog post. I was flabbergasted and delighted in a way that is probably only meaningful to me, but I consider it a highlight of my geek life to have my crankypants validated that way. In fact, it ranks right after getting an email from an old-guard hero of the internet saying he liked a design I did for a project he was involved in.

In Vegas, I stayed at the Luxor, which I am well aware is virtually always a mistake. However, if what you need is a room on the strip for $79 a night, it’s a pretty sweet deal. I actually liked #1091, my ground floor, casino-front room; sure, the rooms really need a refurb and I was sleeping 20 feet from a slot machine, but on the plus side, I was also 15 feet from Starbucks, and Starbucks buys you a lot of points in my world.

Less impressive: the Luxor provides wired ethernet internet access only and the hotel has no open WiFi. It has WiFi, mind you; I saw plenty of Luxor nodes, just none open for guests. This is very frustrating, and after getting no reply from “all access” @LuxorLV, I typed $sudo apt-get install firestarter into my Ubuntu-running eeePC and opened up a public access WiFi node.

This access point was called, obviously, TheLuxorSucks, and ran for four days. And that, kids, is why you do not place signs in your hotel inviting people to tweet you and then ignore the unhappy geeks.

Sadly, while I am typing this entry one-handed, it is not because my other hand is busy rolling dice on a Vegas craps table. After a rather epic return journey flying Vegas > Gatwick > Dublin and a three hour train journey from Dublin to Cork, I fell (literally) at the last hurdle before reaching home and slipped spectacularly on the wet platform at Cork station, dislocating my left shoulder. So instead of going to my badly-needed bed, I went via ambulance to A&E at Cork University Hospital, where I waited for 6 hours to be seen, x-rayed and discharged with a suitable sling and referrals to the fracture clinic and physiotherapy.

For the record, while I realise the health service is in a terrible state, I’ve no real complaints about that experience. While it was a long night, I consider 6 hours at an urban A&E with a paediatric unit to be an appropriate L4 triage wait time. Paediatric and life-threatening emergencies should always take precedence over stable patients with managed pain. (Infants are notoriously unreliable patients.) Similarly, a few years ago when I went into the Mercy as a L1 triage, I received excellent and immediate care that was entirely responsive and appropriate.

People die of heart attack, blood loss and infection; nobody dies of a dislocated shoulder.

Anyway, here I sit typing slowly with one hand. I can’t dress myself, cut my own food, or bend over to pet my dog, and I’m pretty sore. I’m also exhausted, although not too tired to put a personal injury law suit at the top of my To Do list today. There is something ironic about the fact that after doing that website last year, I found myself referring to it today, but also nice that I know what this long process will entail, and doubly nice my fabulous solicitor takes my call on a Saturday.

So there you have it: I love Vegas, MIX and Simon McGarr; not so much the Luxor and Irish Rail, who can kiss my crankypants arse.

I do not, for the record, believe in celebrity. Maybe because I grew up in NYC surrounded by famous people, it’s a pretty meaningless concept to me. I can tell you that Tom Cruise rents movies like everyone else, that Isabella Rosellini eats at restaurants like everyone else, and that Cher goes to the grocery store like everyone else, too.

As a result, I am probably hard to impress. The people I admire, I admire because of what they have to say or what they’ve done, not because of who they are. I mean, even the most amazing people are just people – mostly people who wish you’d buy them a beer.

After all, everyone poops.

But if the internet excels at anything, it’s making celebrity out of molehills. It is very, very easy to get sucked into your own PR, and to start believing everything you read about yourself. I’ve watched, and continue to watch, many people trip over their own internet egos in spectacular fashion and it is, frankly, embarrassing.

A little over a year ago, when I noticed my online profile escalating rather sharply, I made some fairly rash decisions about how to manage my internet ego. This is what I decided to do:

• Stop Reading Web Stats: While it’s nice that when I write a blog post, a big bunch of people turn up to read it, that’s just weird for me. I started blogging when there were like 300 blogs online, total. I blogged before there was blogging software; I hacked a guest book script to do it. I still write for an audience of 50, and that’s how many lovely people I like to pretend are reading.
• Turn Off Twitter Notifications: Lots of interesting people turn up in my @replies or are re-tweeted by the small, trusted circle I already follow, and I find them organically. I don’t need the ego pat of knowing when someone new finds my Twitter account.
• Turn Off Google Alerts: Likewise, I don’t need to know every time someone mentions my name. Often what’s said is wrong, offensive, or just so weird it’s more harmful than helpful. When I want fucking moronic, I read 4chan.
• Say No to Blog Interviews: Like newspapers and magazines, one has no control over what comes out on the other side, but I’m sad to say that in my experience bloggers are more problematic. Often the result enrages me. Very rarely does it make me happy.

I feel compelled to point out that the Smashing thing angered me not because of anything Lee Munroe did, but because of editorial choices on the part of Smashing. Not a single site of mine (and Lee sent in several) made it to the showcase part of an article called Showcase of Web Design in Ireland. Either I’m good enough to make the cut, including the showcase, or I’m not. Keeping my words but cutting my work smacks of tokenism, and I’m done with that.

Granted, I am sensitive to this issue because the context in which I am most likely to be mentioned is as a “Top Female Web Designer.” The web is awash with female web designers; I do not understand the compulsion to gather us together and stick us in a special little ghetto. I don’t want to be praised for my gender; I want to be respected for my work on its own merits.

Having said that, I’m perfectly cognisant of my abilities. I punch solidly in my weight class, but I am not a top-tier web designer. I create very nice, very usable sites for great people at nifty companies at an accessible price, and that is good enough for me.

No matter what Google Alerts may try to tell me.

WordCamp Ireland 2010 wrapped up this afternoon, and at exactly 4PM as the last punter walked out of the amazing Set Theatre, I melted into an incredibly pleasant state of complete and total relaxation. Doing this again may be worth it just for that sleep deprived, adreniline fuled, frantic-rush induced state of Nirvana.

WordCamp was, in a word, fun. I’ve posted a quick thank you post over on the blog, but I also have some more random thoughts as I sit here enjoying my swanky hotel room for one last night before going back to the real world.

We could not have pulled this off without the amazing staff at Langton’s. Everyone raved about the hotel. Nothing was too much trouble. You don’t know how many people are coming to dinner? Not a problem. You need two sets for the stage? Not a problem. You need snacks we don’t stock for the kids, and you need them right fucking now? Also not a problem because we will get in a car and DRIVE TO THE SUPERMARKET FOR YOU.

Failure of snack planning aside, much ado was made about the fact that this was a family-friendly conference with child care. I’m not sure anyone who attended had ever been to a conference with child care before. I’m not sure Katherine and I had ever been to one either, but it never occurred to us to do anything else. And, honestly, it was easy. I’ll write more about it later but basically: two babysitters, €60 worth of kid tat from World of Crap, an activity schedule and you’re away.

Everyone should do this – the kids were not disruptive, they were not noisy, and every single child (including our favourite escape artist) was cooperative and very well behaved.

Kids aside, there were two distinct camps of attendees at WordCamp. People who came from a BarCamp sort of background had, in general, a great time. The venue was big and plush, speakers were both impressive and totally accessible, and if not every camper could fit into every session they wanted to attend, well there were a zillion other sessions and coffee in the ballroom.

The tiny percentage of people who came from the Vegas – Le Web – NextGen circuit were less happy. There were not always enough seats, these folks didn’t seem to circulate well in the frequent coffee and meal sessions, and they generally seemed undewhelmed. On the other hand, I expect people from that sort of background to be able to do the math on their  ticket price and adjust accordingly. SXSW is $395. MIX is $1400. Le Web is €1,200. WordCamp is €50.

Is WordCamp Le Web? No. But it’s not €1,200 either.

The speakers who were scheduled for the Conservatory were champions. We had two days of glorious sunny weather – in March, in Ireland – and it killed this glass-topped room for projectors and as a workable venue. Loads of speakers switched to a white-board presentation style effortlessly and far more smoothly than I would have been able to, and I admire every single one of them (and apologise and promise to sort that for the next WordCamp Ireland.)

I gave a talk – luckily not in the Conservatory – on using WordPress as the base for your social networking world domination plan, and it was solidly mediocre. In all honesty, given the fact that I had had five hours of sleep in the preceding 72, I was tremendously pleased with myself for doing even that well. It was not my best performance, but doing it was by far the biggest effort I have ever made to get on stage and stay cognisant for 45 minutes, and it felt nothing short of triumphant to pull it off at all.

Katherine did rather better, having had a grand total of 11 hours of sleep since Thursday, and I was delighted for her that her presentation was so well received. Neither one of us, however, is ever speaking at a camp we are also organising ever again. It is simply too much to take on.

And because it will take us more than a year to recover, we’ve also decided that the WordCamp Irelands we organise will be every-other-year events. It’s not feasible, given the time commitment, for us to do this every year, but we have already opened the calendars and flicked forward a few pages to look at when we might do WordCamp 2012.

Edit: Fuck it, we’re up for 2011. It’s on!

And yes, there will be more sandwiches.

Photo Credit: Donncha O Caoimh

March is shaping up to be a mad, mad month. Also a broke month, as I’ll be travelling a lot. Since I do not travel well, I’ll probably only complete one billable project between all these events. But I’m very excited about each of these trips and thus, they are worth the pain, jet lag and poverty.

At least, that’s what I’ll be telling my bank manager when I ask him for an overdraft extension…

March 6 -7th I’ll be at WordCamp Ireland, although I’m actually travelling up to Kilkenny on the 2nd to prepare all week – 200 bags do not stuff themselves. There are still something like 30 tickets, so get ‘em while they’re hot.

March 14 – 18th I’ll be in Las Vegas for MIX10, staying next door at The Luxor. I’ll know virtually nobody but the schedule looks great and there are some talks I’m really keen to go to, although nothing is going to keep me out of CSI: The Experience.

March 27th I’ll be getting drunk sipping tea in an extremely posh suite at the g for the Ladies Tea Party before the Irish Blog Awards. I just love Tea Party; it is so friendly and fun and great to meet so many bloggers in a smaller setting. Come along!

March 27th, assuming I have not passed out by 7 PM, I’ll also be at the Irish Blog Awards. It is genuinely a great night out, and hopefully I’ll be cheering for a few clients who make it from the long list to the short list. Go team go!