People Love Perch - White October

We love to hear how much People Love Perch. This interview is with Carl Wood from White October in Oxford and Vicky Carmichael from White October Events, based in London.

Tell us a bit about yourself and the company you work for?

CW: I’m Carl and I work as a front-end developer at White October, an Oxford agency who create websites and apps.

VC: I’m Vicky and I work at sister company White October Events. We put on content-focussed events for the digital and creative industries. Carl and I often work on building the event sites together. Between us we have a view of what it’s like to use Perch both from the development side and the CMS user side.

How did you first find out about Perch?

CW: It was recommended by a colleague, and seemed suitable for a number of future projects. We liked the idea of keeping the markup clean whilst still having a fully functioning CMS with a straightforward interface.

What sites have you used Perch for?

VC: We’ve used Perch on all our recent conference websites:

All Your Base 2014 – a database conference in Oxford in October 2014

jQuery UK 2014 and jQuery UK 2015 – jQuery UK is the UK’s largest front-end developer conference.

Also, BIRDIE Photography Conference, a one-day conference for anyone who is passionate about photography.

What makes Perch a great choice for event websites?

CW: It makes me a happy front-end developer, and provides the events team with an easy-to-use interface and enough flexibility to add the content they desire.

VC: I really like that I can specify exactly which components need to be editable in the CMS, as Carl’s building the site. We also have items that get added once the site has been launched, such as new speakers, and it’s really easy to add as many of these as we need directly in Perch.

Can you describe your process for creating a new event site using Perch?

CW: I mostly started afresh for jQuery UK 2015 in an attempt to create a kind of Perch bootstrap: a set of components that we can re-use and adapt for future event websites. I usually approach development on a page-by-page basis: firstly adding the markup, dropping in Perch tags and templates, then styles. Vicky and I work together on a staging version of the site until all the content is ready and the site is solid, then we go live!

What do you like most about Perch?

CW: I love getting quality websites live within a week, and Perch fits really well into this process. I’m perfecting the events website workflow and I’m excited about the future of Perch – particularly Runway – and the idea of content Collections.

VC: I’m crazy about the fact that I can add an entire site’s worth of content in just a couple of hours, once the CMS has been set up – Perch is really that easy to use!