On today's episode we're going to talk about the ins and outs of organizing a great WordCamp and how you can get involved right here on Your Website Engineer podcast number 276.

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin and today we are going to be talking about WordCamps and how we can organize them and how we can get involved in helping pull off a great WordCamp. We're just a few weeks off of WordCamp Dayton and I cannot believe it's over, for as much work as it went into and the weekend was an amazing blast. And I just wanted to share some of the thoughts I've had over the last few months of kind of organizing it, being one of the co-organizers and in charge of all the things speakers. And so we're gonna dive into that in just a little bit.

There is some really cool things in the news, lots of news actually this week. The first thing is WordPress 4.5 Beta 3 is now available. So if you are one of those that like to test the new versions of Word Press, go ahead and download the latest beta, that's Beta 3. I'm guessing that the day that I record this is going to be the day that the next version comes out so you'll already be outdated. But there has been some new things with adding logo support. Inside the customizer they have now a responsive preview that you can add to your themes, which is pretty cool so you can see your themes in a responsive view, whether that be on a mobile or a desktop or a tablet size view.

There is just a lot of things that they fixed. They've updated some emoji, they've bug fixed. There's been more than 100 changes since the previous version. So that's what's going on in the WordPress base when it comes to the latest technology and the latest news.

Another thing that I wanted to share is there is a brand new podcast out there called Do the Woo Podcast and that is put on by Bob Dunn who also goes by Bob WP. And there'll be a link in the show notes to this and he's going to be – his podcast is all about moo commerce and woo themes and all the things that it takes to use the plug-ins at woo commerce and how you can integrate them, how you can set things up, how you can build a membership site, how you can do reoccurring payments, how you can ship to anywhere in the world. All that kinda stuff is going to be covered under Do the Woo podcast.

Another thing in the news, and this came out of WPTavern.com, shows that WordCamp Europe 2016 is being on track to be the largest WordPress conference to date. It's going to be held in Vienna June 24 through 26. It's expanded the capacity to 2200 attendees and so 400 extra tickets were made available last week. And the first 700 seats sold out six months in advance and so they scrambled, they found a larger venue. It looks like it's a huge, huge place. I believe, if I remember correctly, we actually saw this building when we were in Vienna when we were touring and it's just a gigantic building. It takes up an entire city block. It's really cool.

I will be there for this WordCamp. I'm actually one of the volunteers and it just will work out that I'll be able to travel over there and spend some time at WordCamp Europe. I missed WordCamp US so I thought the next best thing is WordCamp Europe. No, actually I really enjoy helping out organizing. Again, we're gonna talk about this in this episode but it's going to be a lot of fun to travel overseas and be able to see a lot of the WordPress folks that I don't normally get to see.

So if you're interested, there'll be a link in the show notes to check out to see if tickets are available. If you are living in Europe anywhere, I highly recommend coming to this event because it is going to be awesome. There's going to be some really great speakers and of course [Inaudible] [00:03:21] will be there and just a ton of learning and a ton of networking and fellowship and just hanging out and spending time with other WordPress folks. So that was really cool as well.

And then lastly in the news, JetPack turns five and so that's the big news, it turns five. It's cool. There's an article on WPTavern.com as well and it shows the very first iteration of the JetPack user interface. And there's been a lot of improvements that've happened over the last five years. And so it's really cool.

There's just so much going on within JetPack that they actually moved it from JetPack.me to JetPack.com. Finally we're able to get the JetPack.com top level domain. And that's just – that's what's happening. There continues to be improvements with JetPack. There are all the time behind-the-scenes things that I'm seeing that is just going to make JetPack that much better, make it that much user friendly, make it that much faster, make it just that much more valuable to run on every single WordPress site that you are running.

All right. In the next segment is all about is there a plug-in for that. There's more than 43,000 plug-ins in the WordPress repository and it's hard to find the perfect one. And I know that this one today that I'm recommending, it's called Advanced CSS Editor, and it is one that I've never recommended before. I've recommended a few other CSS plug-ins and especially JetPack. JetPack has a built-in CSS module. There's one called, I think it's really simple, CSS something along those lines. But this one is really cool because this gives the power of adding custom CSS to the customizer.

So you can go into your customizer and you can start adding your CSS and you'll see a live preview of it happening on the window right to the right, which is really cool. If you've ever used the JetPack or any of the other plug-ins to add to your customer CSS, you have to add the customer CSS, you have to save, that page has to refresh, then you have to open another page and then you have to refresh that page. And it's just – it takes a while when you're developing to get that perfect CSS to change that color, the spacing, the borders, whatever you're trying to do. And so this one is really cool.

It's lightweight and it allows you to use – you can write your different CSS for the different tablet – or the different sized device and whatnot. And it's all done right within the customizer, so it feels like it's part of the WordPress experience. It feels like it should be just built right into WordPress itself. And so that's called Advanced Editor CSS.

Now this is something that is fairly new and so it's only got a few hundred active installs, but it works really, really well. And I absolutely like it and I think this is going to be my new recommendation when it comes to adding CSS because the hardest part about getting CSS is getting the code right, getting the syntax right to actually change the formatting the way that you want it to. So that's – when you can see it live and you can see, oh, that's not quite right or yes, it's working immediately, you just know that, yes, that is the right code that you need for your website. So Advanced Editor CSS.

All right. Today we are going to be talking about how to pull off a great WordCamp. And this isn't a discussion just for people who are organizing WordCamps or the lead organizers. This is people that are interested in volunteering, just helping out and just wanting to give some input to your local WordPress meet-up community, whatever that looks like. These are just some things that I've noticed when we were putting together this WordCamp Dayton. It was an event that for 150 people was what we were planning and what we scheduled on. And then by the end of things, by the time all things were said and done, it was like 180 to 190 is actually how many people signed up.

And I know that some of these things that we talk about won't be good for WordCamps that are in the thousands of people range, but these are some of the things that we kinda thought about and have come up while we were getting ready for this WordCamp. And so one of the things that I just wanted to talk about is, start early. You can never really start too early. Well, you can. I mean, you can't start planning 2018 already because it's only 2016 right now. But you wanna find a venue and secure a date.

And one struggle that we had one time was we thought we would double in size from year over year and that's not necessarily the case. We went the first year was 150, the second year was 150 and then this year was 180. And so don't think that you need to find a venue that's double in size and secure it right away because the fact is you may not grow that big. I think personally you'd rather sell out an event and have a really good event with tons of people. Then the cap that you have, make it for the space, the size that you find is a perfect sized building and then kinda go from there.

If this is your first year, do a rough estimate of how many you think and then maybe next year grow it by 25 percent or 50 percent or something like that. Don't try to double right out of the gates because that may or may not happen. We had a bad experience last year with our venue was huge. We put it in a convention center. We had the same number of people and then there were other events going on in the convention center and it just didn't have that same vibe as when we have the entire space to ourselves.

Another thing that you wanna do starting very early once you kinda lock down the venue and the date, is create a basic version of your website. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, it just has to say the WordCamp is coming soon 2017, 2016, whatever year is coming up. That way people can sign up and get email updates about what's happening. That's one of the big things that we're looking at. We just finished 2016, okay, let's start planning for 2017.

And that's one of the things we talked about is, hey, we need to have a website up and running sooner than later. We can always tweak things later and get things rolling but it's always like you try to launch – you're trying to get information out to your community but you don't have a website. And that's really – we have this awesome tool called WordPress that we can use and we don't need to be struggling with finite little details right at the very end to make the website look good before we can start getting speakers or before we can start looking for sponsors and things like that.

Another thing you wanna do is you wanna make sure that you're locking down the main things first. Yes, it would be awesome to have a bacon bar or maybe live music at lunchtime or whatever, like some of those things would be really cool and it would add to the vibe of the WordCamp, but you don't necessarily need those things. Make sure that you are planning a schedule, we're getting speakers, we got the venue under control. And then once those things are tackled and under control then start working on the food and those little minute details on the website. Make sure that the swag is working. Make sure that the after parties and those types events, make sure that those are all in the works once we get the big things out of the way.

It's gonna be the worst thing in the world like, oh, we're having a WordCamp and then we can't find a venue. Obviously you wanna do the venue; get the date and those types of things first. Now when it comes to venue, I wanna say that the next piece – one of the first things is find the perfect venue. And there probably isn't a perfect place inside your city but find not that meets most of your criteria. And so some of those criteria may be, is it convenient to get to, is it ample parking, is it near hotel accommodations? Will people be going offsite for lunch? Is there places to eat locally? Is an after party; is there a place that we can go fairly close that people aren't driving all over the countryside? What about the room sizes? Can the speakers be heard all the way in the back? Is the acoustics okay? Are there PowerPoint screens that can be used? Do you have to bring your own in? Look at those types of things.

Do you have to use the venue's catering? Like if you're at a big convention center, do you have to pay for their food? And so that sometimes increases the cost quite significantly. Now, the space doesn't have to be the most visual appealing space in your ceiling. Like you could go to the coolest hip new building downtown but that's gonna normally cost a lot more money. Look at different places off season.

So we held ours at Wright State University and we held it on the weekend that all the students were on spring break. So we have a good relationship with the business administration building and the folks there because we have our monthly meet-up there. And then they gave us the entire first floor of their building for the day of the event. Now, that huge, huge space, we actually had – the biggest room could hold like 90 people. And so it wasn't ideal because we sold 150 tickets, or that was the plan. What happens when it's keynote time, things like that?

Well, we ended up, we used technology called Appear.IN and we were able to stream from one room to another and use the in-house sound system to kind of broadcast sound. And it actually worked out really, really well. And so – but the big thing is whatever that room size number is for your biggest room, that's probably about what you can cap those attendees at. But then we also found that we had 40 people that didn't show or 30 people that didn't show on one of the two days. And so we didn't necessarily have 180 people there. We were down more like 130 people. And then some people wanna be in the hallway track and they wanna be doing things at other times and things like that. So that's something to think about right away early, early on.

The next thing you wanna do is kind of compile a team, whether you're the lead organizer or you're a part of the team. Make sure that there are things that are covered by multiple – not multiple people but make sure that each area has at least one solid volunteer that's going to do the work. Maybe somebody's in charge of the venue and they're gonna work with everything to get the venue under control. Maybe somebody's gonna look at the budget and they're gonna make sure that all the budgetary things are taken care of. Maybe somebody's gonna do all – maybe one or two people are gonna do all the sponsorships. They're gonna try to get sponsors to pay for a lot of the things. Maybe one or two people are in charge of speakers and all the logistics about getting speakers there. Maybe somebody's in charge of all the attendees, making sure we get all of their T-shirt sizes and all the information that's needed.

And so come up with the big ideas and the way that you wanna break it down. I know that our team was a team of six and I think we could've went maybe to eight or maybe even to ten just to give people a little less work. It is a lot of work. It's time-consuming work, especially like I was in charge of the speakers. And some people submitted two, three, four different sessions. So when it came to sending a reply and said, congratulations, you've been chosen, they had to be individualized personal emails to say which session that we chose. So I couldn't just send out a bulk message and say, congrats, you're in because they didn't know which session that they were gonna be speaking on or whatnot. So think about that.

And there's lots of people in your community that's most likely willing to take on a small snippet and they don't have to do a lot of work. Give them something that's in their wheelhouse. I know that one of the things that I could've done was find an after-party event. Well, that's not really my thing. I don't really like – I don't enjoy calling businesses and asking different questions about room space and what kinda food can we get and all that kinda stuff. So we put that on another volunteer because that was one of their strong suits.

Another thing to think about is the speaker lineup in a schedule. That's something that's really – I mean, a lot of people wouldn't even buy tickets to our event until they saw what the schedule was. I know that that's kind of crazy. I like to go to WordCamps no matter what the schedule is just to meet people and hang out and network and learn something. But you wanna make sure that you have different tracks maybe. Maybe you have different theme days, whether there be theme tracks or whatever that looks like.

Make sure you kinda put a schedule together that's going to be very broad so you get the very beginners because there's a lot of beginners in the community that are just starting with WordPress or never even used WordPress before. But then there's also developers, there's power users, there's marketing, there's business. There are all kinds of different avenues that you could tackle. You could have just a track all about creating WordPress themes or WordPress plug-ins or premium WordPress plug-ins, whatever that looks like, whatever kind of community that you're having, those are things to think about.

And it wouldn't be a bad idea if you have a meet-up group in your area to send out a survey, ask what things do you wanna learn more about. Which things are you – what skills are you weak in? What would interest you and just send that out there and try to find what people are looking for. And then that way you have some idea of what you're putting together when it comes to the schedule.

You know, we try to also put in the schedule so it went from each track, we had four tracks. And each track kind of built on each other or each session built on each other. So maybe the first one was brand new to WordPress. And then the next one might've been how to create – how to use the dashboard more efficiently. And then maybe the next one's about using WordPress as your digital hub and how you can put all of your content everywhere, put it on your WordPress site, whatever that is. The tracks got just a little bit tougher and kinda built on the knowledge from the track before, which was pretty cool.

When you're looking for speakers, feel free to get as much information as you can from your speakers right up front. I know that next year we're gonna ask for the speaker's T-shirt size and their bio right away, so then that way we're not waiting on that information to populate the website and to get their shirts ordered. We're just gonna have all that information right away. That way we have it and then we can really start moving forward when it comes time to publishing our speakers on the website. So that is really important. You could also put on the application, make sure that you add the – have a short video of you doing previous talks or where were your previous talks or do a video, have people say why they're interested in speaking at your WordCamp. Whatever that looks like, that's something to do as well.

Another thing you wanna do when organizing WordCamp is just over communicate. I can't stress this enough. Even between your team of organizers and the people that are coming to your event, just make sure you just reiterate over and over and over again. I know I sent out three or four emails for speakers to send me their slides. And I was still missing a few of them. Just keep reminding them, keep giving them information. You wanna make it as easy on your speakers as your visitors, as the people that are attending your event as possible. Make sure that they know, oh, you're gonna have to park ten minutes away or you're gonna have to pay for parking. Or lunch, you're gonna have to find somewhere offsite, or whatever that is. Just over communicate. Let everybody know.

And one of my favorite parts about doing WordCamps is put your personal flare on it, your city's flare. If you're going to Philadelphia, it would be awesome to have cheese steaks for dinner or for lunch or whatever. Try to do something that's local, something that's unique that you don't get at other places. I know that we used donuts from a local donut shop. We had a caterer come that does local catering. And so that kind of like just drew interest for the community and what Dayton's all about, which is pretty cool.

Lastly, you want volunteers. You need volunteers to help run this thing before the event, to get some things organized. Like the day before it would be awesome if you could have volunteers come and help fold T-shirts and get badges ready and get all the things ready the day of. And you gotta get all the tables set up. You've gotta get the room layout and organized and all that kinda stuff. You cannot have too many volunteers.

There's people that need to turn video cameras on in each room. There needs to be people that can tell people where the bathrooms are. There needs to be volunteers that can help facilitate lunch and tell people what lunch is and how to get it and where to stand and all that kinda stuff. So just make sure that you have plenty of volunteers and kinda map out what each volunteer needs to be doing. And just so you're prepared and you're ready to utilize them for the best things that they can do.

There will be things that go wrong with the WordCamp and a lot of times there's little things that you just don't realize until after the event, like one organizer will tell another. And honestly we didn't have a lot of big ups and downs this year. There was no like, oh, we're locked out of the building or oh, the fire alarm went off or anything like that, so that was really good. The biggest probably snafu that we had was some of the cameras; the microphones weren't working super well right at the beginning. It took a little finagling to get those working.

But just plan for a little extra time, like if the sessions are gonna start at 8:30, make sure those cameras are set up by 7:30 so you have plenty of time to troubleshoot. You gotta run to the store to get new batteries or whatever that looks like, just build in a little extra time to get ready for those types of things.

One last thing that I wanna say before I get out of here is putting on a WordCamp is a lot of work. It does take a lot of time. There's a lot of moving pieces, a lot of moving parts. Just make sure that you are willing and able to have that extra time. You don't wanna make sure that you're not taking away from your family and you're working on things all the time in the evenings. You wanna make sure that you're not signing up for too much and you're putting extra added stress in the rest of your life, things like that. And so think about those things when you're getting ready to volunteer or to become an organizer or be a volunteer or just help out with your local Word Camp.

I am putting a link in the show notes that you can go ahead and check out, how to become an organizer. If you are interested in finding out what that process looks like, those steps, and you can find all about – there's a WordCamp planning site, there's organizer applications, there's all kinds of things, And that's on WordCamp Central, or it's Central.WordCamp.org. And I'll put that in the show notes and that's all I've got for you this week, kind of a recap of what WordCamp Dayton was this year. And I'm excited for WordCamp Dayton 2017 and all the rest of the WordCamps this year. Until then, take care. Bye-bye.

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