To see whether people would like this new version, I sent out a couple of tweets One of them was picked up by Marc Hemeon, went a bit viral and got more popular than expected.

Coding the actual site

At that moment, I knew I had somehow struck gold and immediately started getting to work. I bought the domain name https://design-conferences-2019.com and started coding.

In order to keep the effort as low as possible until I could release my first version, I decided to stick to using Google Sheets as my database, which most often is a great choice when starting off with something. Eun Kyung Yoon wrote a great article about this exact technique, which was very helpful: Google Sheets and JSON: Easy Backend

Just as it Pieter Levels made it popular in the indie maker community, I decided to go with a PHP/HTML/CSS/JavaScript approach, to not depend on any frameworks, updates from plugins or similar aspects that would keep me from shipping.

During my research of how many Design conferences there actually are, I discovered how incredibly diverse this community is once again, and actually found a couple of events I had never heard before, and totally fell in love with (e.g. SustainableUX, UXcamp Europe or the UX Designers Camp by Tatjana Zavadja)

But one conference really stood out, and that’s why I made Epicurrence the featured conference of the first week. Every year Dann Petty does an amazing job of bringing together designers from all over the world for discussions while sitting in front of a fireplace, workshops and activities such as hiking or rock climbing. This year Epicurrence will take place March 21 & 22 in Breckenridge, Colorado where participants will also get to ski and/or snowboard.

Launch

The entire coding and design aspect of the new site took me about 10 days, so on January 17th, I was ready to launch. 🚀🎉

And the launch went great, Design Conferences 2019 stayed at the #5 spot for most of the day.