Gabriel and I just returned from our trip to Tampa for Joomla! Day Florida 2016, a web developer and marketing conference, which we both enjoyed immensely. Not only was this our first Joomla! Day but Gabriel volunteered to give a workshop titled “Joomla! + HubSpot + Inbound Marketing: How to create a lead generation machine.” We were doubly excited to both attend the conference in order to network with awesome people and to get the scoop on the latest news, but also to give back to a community which has, through its Open Source philosophy given us a free, high quality, robust and easy to use content management system to create our own website, as well as our clients’ for the past ten years. Here at Nextiny Inbound Marketing we feel so fortunate not only because we get to promote Joomla!, the only time-tested award winning CMS created entirely by volunteers, but we also get to sing the praises of HubSpot, a jaw-dropping and cutting edge inbound marketing and sales platform created to actually help businesses to attract the right visitors to websites, convert them into leads and close them as customers, while tracking the whole process from start to finish. Furthermore, we get to help others integrate our two favorite platforms, preferred both because of their outstanding performance and also because of their founding philosophies.
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Frankly, the event very much surpassed our expectations. We kicked off our journey with an invitation to a speakers’ dinner by Jay Nickerson, who runs the Joomla! Users Group Tampa and who spearheaded the implementation of this conference to make it the successful event that it was. Once there, we we got to chat with several other members of the community and we engaged in a lively (and respectful) discussion on Joomla!’s future directions and ways for it to continue to support businesses using its CMS. We met Sarah Watz, the President of Open Source Matters, a non-profit organization which supports the Joomla! project.
Sarah traveled all the way from Sweden to speak at this event and we were impressed both with her passion for improving people’s lives throughout the world with Joomla! as well as her clear vision for improving the experience of users. We were also thrilled to find out that certifications are close to becoming a reality, as they will not only provide in-depth education on how to use the tool, but also provide credibility to businesses as well as allow employees to become more marketable. We cheered at Sarah’s “Be nice or Leave. Thank you” message about mutual respect and we were moved by her experiences with people in countries who are positively economically impacted on a daily basis by the access to an open source CMS that allows them to have a higher standard of living.
Joomla! Day Florida itself was a blast. With three keynote speakers and sixteen guest speakers, we stayed busy navigating presentation after presentation learning about everything from overriding anything through templates without hacking core code to how to tighten security to how Joomla! is working to improve User Experience (UX). As he always does, Gabriel spoke with fervor about the Inbound Marketing Methodology, lead generation and nurturing, how to use Joomla! websites to generate leads and close customers and How to create Joomla! – HubSpot hybrid websites that work. Attendees were excited to learn about the common-sense philosophy of inbound marketing and engrossed by the possibility of trying out HubSpot through the 100% free Leadin tool. Although I have seen Gabriel as a speaker in action so many times since I met him, it is always delightful to witness him helping a new generation of marketers have aha! Moments and improve their ability to truly help their customers.
In addition to the speakers, we collected great information from the event’s sponsors, including the two with whom we spoke, Sucuri, which offers security to website owners and cloudaccess.net, a hosting platform built and optimized for Joomla! hosting.
As we interacted with the community we were reminded once more that we are a part of a diverse group of people made up of developers, designers, marketers, educators, and so much more who are united by the shared project and value to collaborate to provide a software that is free, secure and high quality to everyone. In a world where daily news serve to remind us of humankind’s selfishness and proclivity to violence, Joomla! undoubtedly increases our hope in the possibility of a dream of shared goals that benefit humanity as a whole. Nextiny Marketing and our customers have benefited for years from this incredible endeavor and by volunteering to be guest speakers we feel that we are doing our part in finally starting the process of showing our gratitude and giving back. By attending these events, you too can be a part of the solution.
Jackie Marguglio, Ph.D.
Business Mastermind