The last time I wrote one of these, I attended WordCamp NYC at home and then traveled not too far to Boston for WordCamp Boston. This go-around, however, I’m writing about WordCamp Pittsburgh and then WordCamp DFW this past month of September, so I have to begin this round up with an obligatory comment about our love-hate relationships with business travel.
On one hand, I love seeing new places (I had never been to Dallas or Pittsburgh) and meeting new people – I had amazing experiences both weekends. But on the other hand, I can now check “run to the gate with your shoes in your hands at LaGuardia Airport” off my bucket list. Why, TSA, why?
I spoke at both WordCamps on the topic of A/B testing on WordPress. The main point of my talk is that A/B testing is the easiest and lowest-investment CRO method proven to increase revenue on ecommerce sites, and with Nugget by Ingot, our free tool for native A/B testing, there’s no reason to not be running an experiment on your site at all times. The slides to my talk are available online, and there’s a video up, too.
As for talks that I went to – unlike the self-professed lovers of the hallway track, I love attending as many talks as I can. I find that I always learn something new and hone my public speaking skills through the process of observation. Some of the talks that stood out to me this past two weekends are below.
WordCamp Pittsburgh
With my background in the nonprofit world, I knew I had to attend Lead Developer of Give Devin Walker’s talk on driving donations with WordPress, “How To Optimize Your Website To Maximize Online Donations.”
Devin’s major points lined up exactly with what I learned in my organizing experience: make it easy, make it worthwhile, and recurring donations are your friends. But I also learned new things – for example, did you know that having your logo on your donation page has a documented positive effect on donations compared to a non-branded page? That’s impressive.
Whether you’re organizing for donations, selling products, advertising professional services, or as many innovative businesses are doing these days, a combination of both, search engine optimization (SEO) is essential. I attended Angie Bergmann’s talk on SEO. It was an excellent introduction to the topic, and I think Angie did an excellent job in providing everyone in that room a tangible toolkit for beginning to optimize their sites to be found by search engines. And as always, I learned something new: Bing has higher conversion rates than Google. I laughed, but I also understood the reasons why.
WordCamp Dallas / Fort Worth
It probably doesn’t surprise anybody that I try to attend talks on plugin development. I like to see who is working on what and have things laid out in new ways. Darren Ladner shared with us that this was his first time presenting at WordCamp, but if he hadn’t told us, I would’ve never known – he delivered a great presentation that provided an immediately applicable knowledge set for creating a plugin. His slides are available online, too. If you’re looking to build your first plugin, the slides alone give a great overview.
Finally, I really enjoyed Aaron Campbell’s talk, “Being A Good Citizen In The WordPress Community.” His main tenets were simple and appropriate: know the community, be active, and treat people with respect.
I will never forget the feeling of empowerment at WordCamp US’s Contributor Day, when I saw hundreds of people sitting in a hall contributing to WordPress at the same time. I questioned whether I would have anything to contribute, and left having translated parts of WordPress into Spanish, French and Japanese. Indeed, being a good citizen is surprisingly easy.
Rounding Up
Of course, this wouldn’t be complete without a heartfelt acknowledgement to the hard work of the organizers of both WordCamps. Melinda Helt & co. executed the first WordCamp Pittsburgh ever – that’s a feat worthy of celebration. Pulling off the first event of its kind of herculean work (I learned this the hard way with our own pre-WordCamp event, our Modern WordPress Development workshop), and that WordCamp went so smoothly I would’ve never known it was the first ever if they hadn’t told me. As for WordCamp Dallas/Fort Worth, Marc Gratch, Carrie Dils and everyone else pulled off an excellent continuation of WCDFW. All in all, I continue to love my entrance into the WordPress community – although, as Corey Miller so astutely pointed out, I’m coming up one year of being involved in this community. Perhaps I’m not so new anymore.
While I ponder that, do check out our New York City WordPress Meetup – this month’s meetup was hosted by us at my favorite Manhattan coworking space, the Center for Social Innovation. If you missed it, make sure you join the Meetup group! As for me, I’m just happy to be back home in the Big Apple for a little while.
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