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about the author
Jon Mears is from the North East of England and has been building websites for nearly 15 years. He set up Creative Node in 2007 and specializes in producing content management solutions for all size businesses and public sector organisations.
A keen Sunderland AFC fan he regularly stuffered with the clubs form but now rather enjoys the clubs purple patch. Married with two children and has been known to throw some crazy shapes and spin the odd record here and there.
Design it. Build it. Making the North East proud!
It was my first Design It Build It conference and the first conference I've been to of this ilk in the North East. Being a local lad that had worked on the web for over a decade I was immensly proud of the DIBI team and the whole tech/web scene in our corner of the UK.
I'll just give you my thoughts on the one and half days at DIBI if thats ok? Great! h'away then me bonny lads!
It was the day before the conference...
I've recently started to push Creative Node as a business more seriously after leaving Newcastle City Council I found the 'Afternoon with... Startups' session to be superb and chock full of interesting speakers and valuable business lessons.
Hearing local web business leaders talking openly and frankly about their successes, frustrations, mistakes and in some cases failures, really galvanised me into thinking I can make success of Creative Node.
Frontpage 98, are you serious?
An insipirational Q&A session with Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine, CEO of MobiCart, was probably my highlight of the day. From knocking out websites with Frontpage 98 (Frontpage! WTF?) 6 years ago to getting into e-commerce (without actually knowing what it was) and the journey through various funding escapades was breath of fresh air.
Other speakers worthy of note were Bobby Patterson, CEO of happie.st, a social networking site crafted in the heart of Newcastle and David Erasmus who gave a great 'warts and all' talk about his journey, it was simply brilliant, he only had 4 slides but they were all photoshop gold.
The main day of the conference was held at the simply superb Sage Gateshead, what a building. The only down side of the day was choosing which speakers to see, as the conference runs in two halls, one for Design It and one for Build It, so you are going to miss out on half the talks. After long hard think I had my itinerary sorted and I was set.
I decided to spilt my time equally between the two camps. The deep thought of the 'Design It' arena contrasted the hardcore techie heaven of 'Build It'.
I'm not going to give you a run down of each speaker, that would be boring, so instead I'll sign off by saying Jeremy Keith delivered the best 'Design It' talk and the 'Build It' Social Kaleidoscope talk by Blaine Cook was equally terrific. Oh and some bloke called Jeffery Zeldman closed the conference in fine style!
So what did I get out of DIBI?
A wealth of information really (apart from freebies, red bull and ice cream), some insight into what challenges us web professionals face in the coimng years and how the market has changed in such a short time and that the pace isn't slowing! oh and most importantly think mobile first and that I need to do some work this site to that effect.
So hats off to Gavin Elliott, the DIBI Crew and CodeWorks for putting the time and effort into making the conference a raging success.
So ask yourself this question 'Should I go to DIBI next year?'