Speaking at WordCamp Omaha was fun. I had never been to Omaha before and was able to take some time to enjoy the city, and the sessions I attended were all fully packed with useful information and expertise.
I was happy to see a lot of women designers and developers. I look forward to a time when this is not remarkable, but Saturday at lunch the table where I sat was entirely filled with women working in tech, and that is probably a first for me at any tech conference. I met a lot of impressive folks both male and female, and I’m thankful to have social media so I can continue to keep in touch with them.
As always, the WordPress community is one of the great things about WordPress, and it was exciting to hear about the enormous variety of wonderful things people are doing with WordPress.
I learned more than ten things, for sure, but here’s a quick list:
- From Andrew Wikel I learned that almost 40% of all the ecommerce sites in the world run on WooCommerce. Also lots of important information on how to avoid problems with WooCommerce and how to debug problems if you get them anyway. I’ll be writing more about this in future posts.
- Andrew also told us that adding a picture of a padlock to your checkout page has been shown to make people feel more comfortable about online transactions.
- From Josepha Haden I learned that you can join WordPress support teams like Accessibility and Training by announcing yourself in their channels or attending their weekly virtual meeting and asking for a job to do. “Every team has tasks for new contributors.”
- From Kevin Moser I got the excellent suggestion to build a user portal at your website where you can aggregate walkthroughs.
- From Adam Warner I learned that the first email was sent in 1971. Also that there are good, practical reasons for preferring double opt-in for your mailing list.
- Adam also shared that email is the largest driver of Black Friday transactions.
- From Steph Todd I learned about some awesome tools like BugHerd and GatherContent.
- From Julie I learned that a dedicated blogger can spend 15 hours configuring a plugin and feel good about it.
- Marianne Worthington said, “Be so passionate about what you’re doing that you feel an obligation to give people a chance to say no to you.” I don’t think this counts as learning, and it’s nothing to do with WordPress, but I found it inspiring. Do you?
- From Lisa Trudell I learned that the Yoast SEO plugin is not as user-friendly as I had thought. I’ll be writing more about this, too.
If you haven’t attended a WordCamp and you use WordPress for any purpose at all, put it on your list for the future.
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