Dot All Conference 2025

It’s a fantastic opportunity to hear about what’s coming next with Craft and from the community as a whole through on-stage and lightning talks and wider discussions amongst Craft users and developers on what is (and isn’t) working for them.

Our Technical Director, Principal UX Designer, and SEO Lead all headed to Dot All 2025 in Lisbon last week with two of the team speaking at the conference about how SEO and UX must be a more aligned process, which is more widely known amongst SEO and UX professionals as SXO (Search Experience Optimisation).

As there have already been round-ups for the event and all of the fantastic talks from agencies, owners and developers alike, we’ve just focused on some of our favourites…

We use Sprig a lot at Abstrakt, so we found Ben’s talk incredibly interesting and insightful, as we’ve not really scratched the surface with Datastar. Ben shared a few sneak peeks before the presentation at Dot All on the Craft Discord, so we knew there was going to be some element of audience participation, which went really smoothly and was a great way to kick off the conference with interactivity amongst the attendees. 

It didn’t distract from the content, though, as Ben tied the app and the slides together so people could refocus on him speaking when the action was complete. Jamie commented that he couldn’t wait to get stuck in with Datastar once we were back in the UK and really understand its potential, and how we could use it moving forward in our development, too.

Souvik Das Gupta, Co-founder of Miranj agency, presented a talk on ‘Packaging Peace Of Mind For Your Clients’, discussing the mistakes made early on in his agency around maintenance support and the process they went through to get to the maintenance plans they have today. 

It was refreshing to hear so much humility, and where he shifted mindsets for future work and clients from ‘offering tech support wasn’t cool’ to ‘support is about taking care of people and not just code.’

We take a user-centric approach to everything we do at Abstrakt, and this really resonated with us, always putting the client and user first in our thinking with a much more emotive approach to how we operate as an agency and team.

Naturally, we’re going to have to discuss the talk we presented at Dot All! One of the questions we put out to the audience was ‘Has anyone heard of SXO?’ to which not a single hand flew up. That’s exciting for us, as it meant we were able to deliver a new idea and way of working.

As non-developers, one of the best things about the Craft community is how open everyone is to discussion, different ideas, and perspectives. We stepped onto the stage, not knowing what the reception would be like to talk about SEO and UX at a Development Conference, and we were overwhelmed by the appreciation and positive feedback after.

It gave everyone a fresh perspective on how SEO informs UX and how those two skillsets should work together from discovery stages all the way through to go live to meet user intent and put people first. From the wonderful questions after, attendees telling us how much they enjoyed our talk or learnt something new, and to those passing with their thumbs up, big smiles, and “great talk,” thank you!

Travis had so much energy, and the whole presentation felt like a real rallying call to our community. It was a refreshing take on AI and the future, and he didn’t labour over the usual over-saturated message that AI is coming for all of our jobs - which we’re tired of hearing about!

His talk was framed around the fact that the organisations that own, invest in, and profit from AI technology are the ones with all the power - currently!

His call to arms, if you will, was that we, as a community, can reclaim the power of AI by controlling how we choose to use it. As an individual, it’s impossible to make a difference, but collectively we can push back and assert control.

At Abstrakt, we consciously think about how and why AI is used in our company, but also in our products. This quote from his final slide was a powerful and uplifting end to the talk and also the entire conference: "It isn’t whether AI will change our work - it’s who gets to decide how."