Starring Dan C and Company Director Duncan Short
After our early
morning arrival at the train station feeling slightly groggy and in need of a
bacon sandwich, Duncan and I talked about our main objectives for the day. We
needed to find a new platform/CMS that allowed us to create beautiful, multi
platform sites and some new directory software to bring our current directories
into the 21st century. With this is mind we made our way off the tube and
headed for Olympia.
Once we had our
passes and were scanned in, I was immediately struck by two things. Firstly the
size of the place (hundreds of stalls, zones and networking areas) and secondly
the large amount of people (mainly incredibly attractive women) that were
walking around!
Intrepid Explorers
We visited a
number of stalls as we began to find our way through and whilst they were
fascinating, none of them were exactly what we were looking for.
Our first
golden find was a seminar by the company Epiphany Search. These guys are a
leading SEO giant with an arsenal of tools and a ton of useful information
about the changing face of SEO and how to deal with Google and its ever
morphing algorithms. We both came away from this talk a lot wiser and much of
the information learnt will be used by our very own SEO teams in future
campaigns.
As we continued
deeper into the maze we met a number of interesting people who gave us advice
on lead generation, software that could read entire websites for the partially
sighted, mobile apps, mobile marketing, HTML5 responsive design and social
media.
Good networking needs pizza
We decided to
have a break and a Pizza Express To Go. This was exactly what was needed in
order to regain some of our energy and as we ate we met several exhibitors who
were eager to chat about the reasons for us being there. They told us about
their stalls and then pointed us in the direction of some stalls they thought
we would find interesting. We took their advice and went out and found them.
The first
happened to be Epiphany (the company whos seminar we had been to earlier). Here
we relaxed with a smoking cocktail (yes, really!) and spoke to Dan their head
of SEO. He was an absolute wealth of information and ended up being the best
find of the day.
Dan enlightened
us on a new CMS called Umbraco that would suit all our cross browser needs
whilst still having complete freedom with design. He discussed our directory and
highlighted how our backlink structure was working and ways we could improve
some of our rankings even further. He then took us through various software
packages we could use to spice up our old directory. To put it shortly the man
was a god!
A victorious retreat
The rest of the
stalls we visited turned out to be brilliant but completely irrelevant to what
we needed. We decided after a little while that we had found what we were
looking for from Dan the man and that it was time to leave.
In honor of
#talklikeapirateday we went out in a blaze of glory taking as many useful
freebies as we could find. With our boots full of swag (mainly of sweets and
pens) we left, ensuring we had one last snap that really encompassed our day at
Ad:Tech.
