Ryan’s Think Visibility thoughts
We all signed up to going to Leeds for the Think Visibility (#thinkvisibility) Conference ages ago and I have to say that I held some preconceptions of it potentially being a ‘Geek Fest’ or a ‘SEO Mutual Appreciation Society’. I have say I was completely surprised (and essentially wrong) to discover that it was a really positive and informative environment and I’m genuinely glad I went.
The only downside was a severe misjudgement on our part about the travel times. We got up at stupid-o-clock in the morning to drive down and all ended up a bit delirious by the end of the event, but we’ve learned our lesson and will allow plenty of time for travelling the day before next time.
So before I go into the talks in the conference that I liked, this is a good point to mention that we also got a chance to catch up with some old faces and some new ones too: So here’s a shout out to Pauland James at NorthSouth Media, Shaun Anderson at Hobo Web, ’twas good to see them again – even if they had all enjoyed the festivities of the previous night that we were absent from. These events are always good for putting ‘a face to a name’ and I found myself talking to Andrew Burnett whom I’ve heard of for ages but never actually met. Also good to see some other familiar strangers, Dave Naylor, Tim Nash et al.
My favourite part of the first talk I caught (Tim Nash) was the lack of exploding that his ‘exploding link juice’ did. He was informative and gave a good history of search engines and the Q and A’s at the end seemed to go well and continued for subsequent speakers.
I found the Eye Tracking / Usability talk extremely interesting. The sheer speed of users on websites I think is an often overlooked issue, watching the realtime hotspots of the eyes on the sample websites was fascinating. Then you get to find out what indeed is a ‘Hotspot’ and, conversley, what’s ‘A Hotspot Not’!
It was also revealed that if you ask the subjects performing the eye tracking about how they browse, that this was rather different to the actual way that they subconsciously browse, so the clever people at Simple Usability get them to perform the actions and then playback the visuals to them and ask them what was going through their minds when doing it.
Dave Naylor came across as pretty open and humerous. He revealed some interesting things to avoid and gave a good overview of the general points of importance in a good SEO strategy.
I actually enjoyed all of the talks that went on at Think Visibility. Hope I get to go again and will approach these events, in future, with a bit less preconceptions.
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