WordCamp Orlando 2018 was awesome!

A first timer’s view on WordCamp Orlando this year.

What is WordCamp? WordCamp is the annual WordPress Conference held across the country.
When: November 9th – 11th
Where: UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management in south Orlando

WordCamp Orlando 2018 is officially over, November 9th – 11th and it was an awesome weekend of WordPress. This year was the first time for Pascale Media and our team. By team, I couldn’t bring the ChronMan so it was myself, Mr. Pascale representing PascaleMedia.com at the conference. I was excited to meet other first time attendees and the veterans of the conference provided some amazing insight. Being surrounded by such a strong and growing community for the first time has shown how amazing the WordPress community can be. The toughest decision was which talk to attend as they all provided great value and insight. Below are some of the highlights we had the opportunity to experience.

Friday – Day 1 The WorkShops

On Friday, WordCamp Orlando started with 3 choices of amazing workshops; a Development workshop, a Design workshop, and a WordPress 101 workshop. Truly supporting the community from beginning to end shows the support available within WordPress. Whether this is your first day or your a seasoned veteran the valuable information was awesome. Our team at PascaleMedia.com has built a website or two; well, way more than that but who’s counting? So we jumped right into the Development Workshop because we love to talk tech knowing our platform in depth.

We all know technology grows fast and getting brushed up on some old skills while polishing some new ones is always recommend. Covering some amazing topics from setting up a local development environment, to working with the command line, themes, plugin creation and using Git from speakers Geoff Myers, Adam Soucie, David Wolfpaw, Tessa Kriesel. Day 1 was awesome.

Saturday + Sunday – Day 2 -3

WordCamp Orlando Day 2 started early but with much better traffic than Friday’s; good thing coffee never stopped flowing. Highlighting just a few of the great classes that day included “You’ve been hacked! Now what?” with speaker Sean Murphy. From the WordCamp Orlando 2018 website they tell us “Sean Murphy leads the Threat Intelligence team at Defiant” the team who brought us Wordfence a plugin we absolutely love. “He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), and hobbyist locksmith.” The talk covered to not panic through incident response plans, an opinion we couldn’t have agreed with more.

Another great talk by Wouter Postma, owner of WPLounge.nl one of the biggest Dutch blogs related to WordPress,  about A/B Testing with Google Optimize.  In this talk, Wouter showed the attendees how to use Google Analytics and Google Optimize. Both free tools that not only track the visitors to your website but can help show which UX/UI  decision has the greater impact with A/B testing. Sometime simple changes can make a huge difference.

Dealing with Problem Clients – Fencing in the Friendly Monsters, an amazing talk by the fantastic Nathan Ingram. Nathan is the Host at iThemes Training where he teaches WordPress, is the lead organizer of WordCamp Birmingham and so much more. In this talk Nathan explains the how to create and preserve your workflow keeping problem clients from getting worse by protecting your business by building good fences. The time flew by because this talk was awesome.

The last session we are talking about today is “So you installed Yoast SEO, what’s next?” with speaker Rahul Nagare, co-founder and CTO at Nestify, where he managing 10,000+ WordPress and WooCommerce websites. Search engine optimization for some can be overwhelming to the point the frustration outweighs any benefit. Rahul shared great tips and insight into getting started with ranking on Google even with the constant changes for the rules in SEO.

Looking forward to WordCamp Orlando 2018 & beyond

An action packed weekend that flew by with amazing vendors, stellar volunteers and one amazing WordPress community. Looking forward to the next WordCamp Orlando and WordCamp Miami coming the first of next year. PascaleMedia.com is happy to be apart of WordPress and all the great people that support open-source.