What is your current title and role?
I’m the Managing Director and Founder of boutique digital agency Bernskiold Media. I spend my days working primarily with web & digital strategy for our customers, but can’t really leave the hands-on development/design things behind either.
How did you first get started with WordPress?
I got into WordPress around version 2.1, which doesn’t feel that long ago, until I start looking back at the history and evolvement of WordPress since then. It’s matured in ways I could never see happen.
I’d recently started up my first small agency, XLD Studios, after having ran several community websites for a few years. WordPress started to get some good PR and after struggling with it for a while (everything has its learning curve), I got into building themes for it…and the rest is as they say, history.
How do you work with WordPress today?
There certainly are less boundaries for when WordPress is not a good fit today than there were even a few years ago. Not only are we building some incredible websites for customers, but we are able to be exploring it as a full backend system with the API as well.
While a lot has changed over the years, many things are the same. I still do a lot of UI development with WordPress.
What has changed most dramatically is how much more of my daily website development work is being done in PHP with plugins, functions and “nice coding structures” today, as opposed to how relatively lighweight-in-PHP themes in WordPress used to be. You could say I’ve in part had to learn PHP with WordPress.
What do you like most about WordPress?
I’ll admit this is not the first time I’ve gotten the question. I think the flexibility and how relatively compact it is out of the box attracts me to it. Compared to many other CMSes of the same relative caliber, WordPress is simple out of the box. I like that.
We could argue for days whether core should be reduced or expanded with more features. But in all fairness, I think we have a decent balance that we should be proud of, compared to other systems. Is it perfect? By no means. Is it still pretty darn good? You bet!
How do you see WordPress changing in the next few years?
WordPress is going to be evolving with the web. We are just seeing the REST API enter service now in December and a lot of cool things are undoubtedly going to follow on with that.
I still want to see some advancements in core, or rather, as some sort of official core addons. Multilingual support I think is an area in dire need of an official framework or API for it to really be great. And I would love to see WordPress take a leaf out of some of the enterprise CMS’s book and keep working on both the media and post workflows. With the new API and modular world comes many challenges to the built-in UI workflow too. I want, and hope, to see changes happening there too.
Why did you decide to speak about “Content Marketing Done Right For Everybody” this year?
What is the web without content? Leaving the buzzword content marketing aside for the moment, we’ve always been focused at content when developing websites. Today though, we have so much we need to know about and apply to build successful websites.
From that point of view, I want to offer a workflow for content marketing. From answering the big question of how to find topics to write about, how to optimize them good-enough for SEO through to analyzing the analytics data to evaluate performance.
Too rarely do we combine the niche topics and give the full, broad picture and workflow. That’s why I’m doing my session this year.
Are there any other sessions at WordCamp Stockholm that you look forward to?
Short and sweet: Every session.
There’s just a lot of good things in the schedule. Hopefully I get to sit in on some topics that I might not necessarily deal with every day to pick up some new interesting tidbits and gain a better understanding.
