Anchen le Roux and Nathan Wrigley are back this with their second Page Builder Summit.
The summit was well attended in October of last year and will surely be so this year.
The two are hosting 35 industry experts who are focused on helping you take advantage of the many page builders to grow your business.
The summit is, of course, free, and it kicks off on Monday, May 10th, 2021. The summit lasts through the remainder of the event.
Presentations are recorded, and presenters and hosts will be available during each session.
Nathan was kind enough to answer some questions ahead of the week-long event.
What is the goal of this year’s summit? How do those goals differ from last year’s summit?
So the goal, as always, has been just to introduce people to new page builders. Perhaps [we] combine that with the fact that we’ve got some founders and product developers on so we might be able to put some new products in that space under people’s noses.
But, the idea is to learn tips and tricks from people who have been there, done that, and tried things in the past and thereby make you more profitable and save you time on your work.
What kinds of changes will participants see in this year’s summit?
So basically, the format’s the same. If you attended last year, you’ll know exactly what to expect, but the big difference, I think, this year is that we’ve got much more content around blocks and the block editor because obviously that’s moved on in leaps and bounds since we were last doing the summit last October.
So there’s much more content around that [blocks and block editor].
We’ve also got some presentations—each day from the vault. So we’re actually lifting some presentations out of last year’s summit, and we’re putting them into this year, and they’re just called From the Vaults. So that’s five in total, one each day. And you can see those on the page, which is pagebuildersummit.com/schedule.
What kinds of [characteristics] did you use to choose presenters?
Basically, they have to have something interesting to say in the page builder space.
So that might be that they’re a product owner or a developer. As an example, we’ve got the guys from Elementor. We’ve got the guys from Brizy on, and we’ve got some experts in the Oxygen space. We’ve got some experts in the block space. So that was the criteria in one sense.
But also there are the non-code people.
And those people are showing us all sorts of interesting things to do around, let’s say marketing, but with a page builder. So you essentially have to have something decent to say in the page builder space, and those were the criteria.
Do you plan to continue the summit when we can do in-person events again?
Yes. We have every intention of carrying on the summit as it’s proven to be very popular. So regardless of whether they’re in-person events, I think that we will still continue to do this.
I plan to continue to; I just see the future as being a bit of a hybrid. I’m more or less convinced that in the future something like, for example, WordCamp Europe will have to have a Livestream track almost because we’ve just got used to being able to attend these events wherever they are, and, you know, not everybody can afford the airfare, the hotels or, you know, or even there’s an entitlement to a visa necessarily.
So I see even the live events, having a hybrid nature to them. And so I don’t think summits online are going away, but maybe they’ll become, I dunno, maybe less popular as the WordCamps and things come back on stream.
What were your biggest challenges to getting this summit together?
It’s always just coordinating things, making sure that the guests know when we need materials by making, contacting the sponsors, and getting information from them. So from that side, it really is just an awful lot of emailing that goes backward and forwards, and that can’t be avoided.
If anybody knows of a much better system to do that, I’d be delighted. But basically, we’re stuck in email, and it works, but it’s a bit of a time-consuming process.
And, there’s a lot of stuff that goes on in the backend that you wouldn’t in a million years realized needed to be done at the summit. I would say if you’ve never organized a summit, you would be remarkably surprised by how much has to go on.
So biggest challenge is the actual organization of it and things going on in the background.
Were you worried about hosting it so early in the year after hosting the summit in October 2020?
No, not really.
So eight months now, that feels okay to me. And certainly, in this part of the UK, the weather seems to be improving. Everything seems a bit jollier seems like a good time to do it. So if you’re thinking, “should we be waiting an entire year?” this actually seems like a better time to me.
I like what’s going on. We’re entering a happy period in terms of the climate and the weather and everything, as opposed to October when we’re just about to enter the more difficult time of the year. Obviously, if you’re in the Southern hemisphere, the opposite would apply. So no, it doesn’t worry me at all.
Is there an effort to focus a little bit more on the business side in this year’s summit?
No, not really. We’re not doing the whole grow your agency thing. There are aspects of that in some of the talks, but really this is about tips and tricks to raise your game. You interact with WordPress page builders, give you ideas, some knowledge about things that you perhaps haven’t tried before.
One of the talks, for example, is, is enabling you to use a bit of PHP and CSS to create your own custom blocks in a very short space of time. So upleveling your skills obviously has an impact upon your business,
It isn’t the processes that your business would have in the sense of, I don’t know the kind of things that you might see at a more agency-based summit, shall we say. It’s more about the stuff that you interact with inside your page builder.
Fill in the blank. Three weeks after the summit, “The summit was a success because ______.”
The summit was a success because I managed to stay alive for three more weeks.
After three weeks the summit was a success because we’ve got some nice feedback from people like we did last year, who really enjoyed it. There were an awful lot of people last year who wrote some very positive things.
We take a low-fi approach, so it’s not all live-streamed. Pre-recorded is the way that we’re doing it with live chat, and that seems to work. And I think the success will be marked by how many people expressed their, their desire for us to run it again, or the fact that they learnt a lot from it.
And we did have an awful lot of that last year. It was very nice to get so many nice comments about the way that people thought it was of great value.
Wrapping it up
The ticket is free! The information and knowledge are invaluable. Additionally, you have the opportunity to network with other professionals just like you.
Are you going to the Page Builder Summit? Let us know in the MainWP Users Facebook Group.
