On the whole, it was a great event attended by many great people. Here is what I’ve learnt and what changes we plan to make:
- The WordPress community is very varied in terms of experience and technical knowledge. We need to appeal to complete novices and highly experienced developers.
We will split the evening onto 2 halves: from 7 – 8 it will be focussed more on beginners and more marketing focussed people. The second half will be for more technical folk, with more detailed and advanced talks. We’ll also provide a clinic in a separate room where anyone can pop along and discuss their sites with our developers here at Miramedia - We need Pizza – and more beer. We had to resort to drinking cider, which is never a good idea.
One of our sponsors will be providing Pizza at half time – provided by our friends at ASK - User stories and mini-talks work really well. We were lucky enough to have Bruce from https://thelemongrove.net/ talk for 5 minutes about his site and experience with WordPress. He comes from a journalist background so an excellent case study
- The speakers need to give room to the attendees so they can talk amongst themselves – These relationships and conversations are the most useful part of the meetup and this needs to be given space.
Here is a photo from the event. Last night was just an intro so we won’t be publishing slides or videos. However keep in-touch, we will be.
The next event is on 1st June from 7 – 9. The topic for the event is “Why would you not use WordPress” and we’ve lined up 2 great speakers – details to follow.