Carsonified Summer Camp – Part 1

At the beginning of this week I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Carsonified Summercamp at their offices in Bath. The event, which was run for students and young entreprenuers who had a pre-launch app or an app in beta, and out of the other 7 attendees there was a wide range of talents and great ideas on show. It was a great two days with an action packed schedule full of advice and practical tips from some of the leading names within the industry and I’ve certainly picked up a lot over the course of the two days that I will carry forward.
The other attendees were:

@veritech – Johnathan Dalrymple who is a software engineer who is currently working on a number of projects and was coding away at a twitter bot whenever he could between sessions!

@robday – Robert Day, a 16 year old entrepreneur who is organising the Tomorrow’s Web conference in London on August 8th

@mattdempseycom Matt Dempsey who is a 19 year old freelance designer who designs great websites and has a number of high profile clients under his belt already and will be heading off to university in September.

@rossbearman Ross Bearman who is director of his own hosting company and also develops games with a group of other developers and yet still finds time for freelance client work.

@erakor Amaury who is currently studying Economics at Brussels University

@JamesProud – James Proud who has a great new web app called Gig Locator which is in public beta at the moment and looks really good.

@fffelix Felix who had the least distance to travel as he was a Bath local and is an aspiring designer

Over the course of the two days there was some great presentations and discussions on a wide range of topics including how to market your site, agile development and UX design. There was a relaxed feel to the schedule as we all sat round the bean bag chairs in the carsonified offices and listened to the various presenters which were more informal than the traditional conference presentations and led to a lot of great discussions.

On day 1, Ryan kicked things off with a presentation/discussion on how to market your site and highlighted a number of techniques in order to make the most of your website. The main point which came out of the session was that site owners must obsess about their conversion rates. The number of visitors and page views is a good indication of your site’s popularity but the conversion rate is the main measurement that site owners should be thinking about when looking to optimise their website. If your conversion rate is a bit low then consider changes to your site in order to increase the conversion rate. One way to implement small changes is to conduct some A/B testing and change one item on your page and use the Google Website Optimiser to control the appearance of the page to users and measure the conversion rates for those pages. If there is a significant change in conversion rates then keep these changes and then move onto another page element such as a headline or button. Keep changes to a minimum when A/B testing as if there are too many variants then it becomes hard to determine which change made the difference.

Up next was Jonathan Howell who came in to discuss and explain agile development, and the concepts of it. It’s not something I knew a lot about before hand but definitely took a lot from the session, such as how to break a project down into two week iterations and stick to these. At the end of these iteration periods then it’s important to evaluate the project and make any appropriate changes. Stick to the two week iteration periods as it is a bad sign if these periods over-run.

After lunch, Carsonified’s very own Keir Whitaker took us through a number of things concerning the area of web development ranging from podcast and magazine recommendations and general tips on how to succeed in the web industry drawing on both his own experiences and from other leading figures within the industry who had offered advice such as Daniel Burka, the lead designer at Digg. It was a really good talk and discussion with lots of practical information on how to succeed within the web industry and how to go about achieving that success.

That was the end of the discussions for the day and in following the summer camp theme we headed out to the park to play a game of “Whiffle Ball“, which is very similar to baseball except played using a plastic bat and ball. Our team unfortunately came off worse in the close run game, but was a great laugh all the same and the wild dog certainly added an extra element to the match! After the match we cooled down with a couple of cold pints in the pub before heading back to the offices to eat takeaway pizza and watch Role Models.

Overall a great day which certainly contained a lot of useful information and certainly a lot of stuff that I will take on board and use in future projects.

6 Responses to Carsonified Summer Camp – Part 1

Rob Day says: July 22, 2009 at 8:04 pm

It was a great day! Learnt so much, especially around the whole A/B testing concept.

It was great meeting you Graeme, hopefully we’ll all meet up again soon!

Trista says: July 22, 2009 at 8:57 pm

What a nice write-up Graeme! I’m so happy you enjoyed it and felt it was valuable as well as a bit of fun. We missed you at BathCamp but I’m glad to see you made it home safely. Don’t be a stranger if you ever find yourself on the east coast of the U.S.!

Matt Dempsey says: July 23, 2009 at 9:51 am

Great write-up Graeme It’s great to have so that we can remember everything that happened when we look back on it a year or so from now! Looking forward to day two!

Graeme says: July 23, 2009 at 2:32 pm

@Matt – Yeah that’s partly why I did it, with my memory I’ll forgot a lot of it! Wrote it on the train up the road while it was still fresh!

@Rob – The A/B Testing was really good, already got a few ideas on where to implement some.

@Trista – Thanks for all the hard work in organising everything, hope we didn’t make too much of a mess! I would have liked to have stayed but just wasn’t possible.

Ryan Carson says: July 23, 2009 at 6:34 pm

Great writeup – glad you could come!