David Coveney on WordCamp London 2015

David Coveney is the Director of WordPress web development company interconnect/it (https://interconnectit.com). The firm is the largest independent provider of WordPress solutions to the news, corporate and large enterprise market in the United Kingdom. Founded in 2006, interconnect/it has worked together with a vast array of web brands on their WordPress needs including: Informa PLC, Telegraph Media Group, Greenwich PCT, and The National Air Traffic Service. Mr. Coveney was featured recently at WordCamp London on the UK Agency Panel – which brought together people who run some of the leading WordPress agencies in London and across the rest of the UK. 34SP.com WordPress Hosting caught up with David Coveney to gleam his expertise and to get an insider’s view of this year’s WordCamp London.

 

How did you get involved with WordPress? Give us a bit of background on how you got here.

A long long time ago, I needed a weblog, when it was the cool thing everyone did. It was mostly so I could document my travels around South America, and the main audience was my Mum. Whilst in South America I decided that as my previous work in PeopleSoft was likely to decline since Oracle’s takeover (I was right about that!) I should try setting up a business. I had no idea what I was doing, exactly, but a part of business is finding a niche, and that takes time. I hired a friend, we knew we’d need a website at some point, so that was one of the first things we did once we decided what we were going to do. And then friends asked us for websites as well. Over time we built a lot of websites and realised that that was now our primary business.

 

What was the most impressionable thing you took away from this year’s WordCamp London?

I wouldn’t say that people in the UK WordPress industry are all that impressionable but are, instead, tinged with a hint of healthy scepticism.

 

For someone who wasn’t there – What was vibe like in London? What do you see as the most compelling reason a person may want to attend a WordCamp event?

You can get a lot of inspiration – you see what other people are doing, and how they’re doing it, and then you can talk to them afterwards. There are also many networking opportunities and you can meet some genuinely impressive people. The vibe at WordCamps is always healthy and open, which is such a nice thing to see.

 

Did you see the 34SP.com display table? What did you think?

I did, but I can’t really remember it. Ultimately hosting isn’t something we’re generally in the market for as our clients usually deal with that, and where we do get involved it’s very much at the high-service end of the market. Consequently I don’t pay much attention to webhosts at conferences. Sorry!

 

What is next for Interconnect IT? Anything you can tell us about your future plans?

At interconnect/it we’re continuing with growing our portfolio of client websites, with some interesting ones to come. Secondarily to that, we’re also starting to work out which of our internal tools we should release. Recently we brought out WordPress Performance Profiler – https://wpperformanceprofiler.interconnectit.com, which gives people, mostly developers, a deeper insight into what performance bottlenecks may be lurking out there and it’s been getting some attention. If all goes well and we can find a way to turn a profit from it then we’ll see about releasing some of our other tools.

 

Editor’s note: Mr Coveney also suggested that ‘keen’ developers of WordPress who care about performance should check out the WP Performance Profiler mentioned above. He mentioned that it will help to make your website faster and give you insights that you just can’t get from tools like New Relic. The company actually halved the html render time of: http://www.interconnectit.com within a week of installing the plugin and has had other similar successes elsewhere.