{"id":173097,"date":"2018-06-13T13:00:16","date_gmt":"2018-06-13T13:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/premium.wpmudev.org\/blog\/?p=173097"},"modified":"2018-06-13T02:34:09","modified_gmt":"2018-06-13T02:34:09","slug":"wordcamp-europe-2018-preview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wordcamp-europe-2018-preview\/","title":{"rendered":"Get Excited, WordCamp Europe 2018 Is About To Begin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/central.wordcamp.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">WordCamp<\/a> is an especially great event wherever it&#8217;s held. But, there are some big things happening in WordPress right now, and with WordCamp Europe about to kick off in Serbia, Thursday June 14th, we&#8217;re excited to take a look at some of the discussions lined up.<\/p>\n<div  class=\"wpdui-pic-regular  \">\n<figure class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" data-caption=\"true\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"attachment-600x600 size-600x600\" src=\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Screen-Shot-2018-06-11-at-4.55.19-PM.png\" alt=\"WordCamp Europe 2018 is in Belgrade, Serbia\" width=\"600\" height=\"307\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">WordCamp Europe 2018 Starts Thursday, 6\/14<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p>If you take a look through the schedule, there are a couple great talks to look forward to from some great speakers regarding:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Design<\/li>\n<li>Freelancing<\/li>\n<li>Gutenberg<\/li>\n<li>Search<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It all looks pretty standard. The thing to keep in mind is that WordPress is changing\u2014always\u2014and it&#8217;s events like WordCamp Europe, WordCamp U.S., and all the others that allow us to come together as a community to figure out how we can help drive it forward as one of the fundamental pillars of the Internet.<\/p>\n<p>So, what events are we looking out for? Well, pretty much all of them, but a couple things got my attention looking at the schedule.<\/p>\n<h2>Evolving Design Trends in WordPress<\/h2>\n<p>Design is always the most fundamental part of building anything. Poor design usually leads to poor execution usually leads to poor adoption. But design is fundamentally changing, and a few talks are indicating that it&#8217;s changing in a <em>BIG<\/em> way.<\/p>\n<h3>1. <a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/session\/the-ethics-of-web-design\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Ethics of Web Design<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>With <a href=\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/big-updates-wordpress-wpmu-dev-and-the-gdpr\/\" target=\"_blank\">GDPR<\/a> in full effect, the attention is now on WordPress users at every level to understand how their work affects users&#8217;s data security. Does that include designers? This talk by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/speaker\/morten-rand-hendriksen\/\" target=\"_blank\">Morten Rand-Hendriksen<\/a>\u00a0might not necessarily address that, but given the importance of GDPR and the fact that this is WordCamp Europe, it&#8217;d be difficult to imagine the talk not hitting on a few of the critical issues facing designers now that data privacy is front and center.<\/p>\n<h3>2. <a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/session\/wordpress-and-inclusive-design\/\" target=\"_blank\">WordPress and Inclusive Design<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>This talk seems to argue that design is what propelled WordPress forward, but that the definition of design changed. It alludes to &#8220;inclusive&#8221; design as being the next step, and coming from <a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/speaker\/john-maeda\/\" target=\"_blank\">John Maeda<\/a>, Global Head of Computational Design + Inclusion at Automattic, and a Ted speaker, the discussion should make it on your list.<\/p>\n<p>Something tells me this might tie into WordPress&#8217;s overall growth strategy for the future. Unfortunately I&#8217;ll be watching from Austin, TX, so feel free to send out tweets of the event to give me a synopsis, or write your own blog recap on it!<\/p>\n<h3>3. <a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/session\/origins-of-design-inspiration\/\" target=\"_blank\">Origins of Design Inspiration<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Design is something that always changes, and I&#8217;m not particularly good at it. Being a writer, visual design has always been a bit of a mystery to me. On the other hand, I&#8217;m always looking for tips on how to develop ideas, and how I can approach <a href=\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/consistency-web-design\/\" target=\"_blank\">design in WordPress consistently<\/a> like some of the best. This talk looks to cover just that.<\/p>\n<p>Led by <a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/speaker\/simon-cooke\/\" target=\"_blank\">Simon Cooke<\/a>, the Marketing Director of Pragmatic, this should be a great talk for anyone hoping to get inspired. Never hurts to learn how others do it, right?<\/p>\n<h2>Talks on Freelancing with WordPress<\/h2>\n<p>There&#8217;s definitely more than enough talks targeting freelancers at WordCamp Europe, but the two below caught my eye when I was taking a gander at the schedule.<\/p>\n<h3>4. <a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/session\/follow-these-10-steps-to-become-a-freelancer-with-wordpress\/\" target=\"_blank\">Follow These Ten Steps to Become a Freelancer with WordPress<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Have you cultivated skills in WordPress but you haven&#8217;t yet ventured into the world of freelancing? You&#8217;re probably not alone. Who wouldn&#8217;t like the flexibility a little extra income can provide?<\/p>\n<p>The problem is that going off on your own takes a lot of guts, and it comes with a lot of responsibilities. I&#8217;ve tried a few times, but ultimately their success was very short lived. This talk, by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/speaker\/mauricio-gelves\/\" target=\"_blank\">Mauricio Gelves<\/a>, should ring true to anyone who&#8217;s hit a few hiccups while starting their own WordPress business, and it thankfully doesn&#8217;t pass itself off as a magic formula, like so many courses out there.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re going to this one, share notes with me? Please?<\/p>\n<h3>5. <a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/session\/going-from-freelancing-to-building-a-team\/\" target=\"_blank\">Going from Freelancing to Building a Team<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>What do you do once you start to get a steady influx of business as a freelancer? Ideally, unless you&#8217;re able to grow your business with other products or services that take virtually no time to deliver, you&#8217;ll want to <a href=\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/how-to-onboard-contractors\/\" target=\"_blank\">build a team<\/a> to support your growth.<\/p>\n<p>Even if you have done it before, growing your business can bring a gauntlet of challenges.<\/p>\n<p>This talk, from\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/speaker\/karim-marucchi\/\" target=\"_blank\">Karim Marucchi<\/a>\u00a0over at Crowd Favorite, and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/speaker\/sherry-walling\/\" target=\"_blank\">Sherry Walling<\/a>\u00a0from the Zenfounder podcast wants to offer you a crash course in bringing on other freelancers, or full-time partners. Both have spent a good deal of time in the startup world, and with WordPress, so this talk should be a great fit for anyone who&#8217;s ever felt that entrepreneurial spark when closing a new deal.<\/p>\n<h2>The Future of WordPress<\/h2>\n<p>The future of WordPress is always just around the corner. In fact, we&#8217;re seeing some pretty drastic changes these days with regard to the <a href=\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/a-tour-of-the-gutenberg-editor-for-wordpress\/\" target=\"_blank\">editor<\/a>, as well as with the possibilities introduced with <a href=\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/7-ways-optimize-structured-data-voice-wordpress\/\" target=\"_blank\">voice<\/a>. These two topics you can&#8217;t afford to ignore.<\/p>\n<h3>6. <a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/session\/beyond-gutenberg\/\" target=\"_blank\">Beyond Gutenberg<\/a> &amp; 7. <a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/session\/roundtable-with-the-gutenberg-team\/\" target=\"_blank\">Roundtable with the Gutenberg Team<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Gutenberg is a hot topic, and one that&#8217;s not going away. As WordPress tries to continue on its meteoric path of growth, Gutenberg is a step toward enabling adoption by a wider audience, and if you read around the web, that has come with its share of both positive and negative feedback.<\/p>\n<p><em>The thing is: it will not be going away. <\/em><\/p>\n<p>For that reason, check out this talk by,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/speaker\/matias-ventura\/\" target=\"_blank\">Mat\u00edas Ventura<\/a>,\u00a0the lead for Gutenberg, to understand what they&#8217;ve been trying to accomplish, and also the Roundtable discussion with the <a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/speaker\/the-gutenberg-team\/\" target=\"_blank\">Gutenberg Team<\/a> to ask your questions directly of the talented people working on the project.<\/p>\n<h3>8. <a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/session\/making-websites-talk-the-rise-of-voice-search-and-conversational-interfaces\/\" target=\"_blank\">Making Websites Talk: The Rise of Voice Search and Conversational Interfaces<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Voice and WordPress are fundamentally connected. With tools like Amazon Polly, and the proliferation of voice-enabled devices, you could very easily forfeit search results to your competitors who are already looking at how to take advantage of voice queries.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve been scrambling to keep up with that, be sure to check out this talk by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/speaker\/andrea-volpini\/\" target=\"_blank\">Andrea Volpini<\/a>\u00a0who&#8217;s at the forefront of where search meets natural language processing and semantic technologies.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and if you&#8217;re looking to boost your page-rank now before you dig into voice,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/project\/smartcrawl-wordpress-seo\/\" target=\"_blank\">SmartCrawl<\/a>\u00a0can help you drive more traffic to your site!<\/p>\n<h2>Bonus Points for Content Creation Topics<\/h2>\n<p>Plenty of companies have claimed the mantra &#8220;content is king&#8221; as their philosophy, and there are plenty of reasons to live by this rule. That&#8217;s why it&#8217;s always great to check out any kind of content creation topics you can. WordCamp Europe definitely has a few, but two that caught my eye include:<\/p>\n<h3>9. <a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/session\/learn-why-and-how-to-create-and-use-video-for-your-wordpress-blog-website\/\" target=\"_blank\">Learn why and how to create video for your WordPress blog\/website<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Content creation can&#8217;t ignore video. Think about the amount of downtime you have sitting in a waiting room, commuting to work, cooking dinner, or lounging on your couch waiting to move to the next thing.<\/p>\n<p>In those moments, have you ever stopped scrolling through your feed to check out a video tutorial? I know I have. Maybe even made a buying decision while sitting around doing nothing.<\/p>\n<p>This talk by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/speaker\/florian-gottschall\/\" target=\"_blank\">Florian Gottschall<\/a>\u00a0should cover the importance of video and walk you through how you can get started in creating it. Since you&#8217;re already blogging in WordPress, this should be a great way to make your blog even more valuable.<\/p>\n<h3>10. <a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/session\/how-to-create-user-generated-content-for-your-wordpress-website-and-business\/\" target=\"_blank\">How to create user generated content for your WordPress website and business<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>If you could steward a community of people who posted for you, would you want to? I absolutely would. Being the ultimate resource on a topic is great, but knowing that you&#8217;re attracting a crowd who&#8217;s doing a good deal of the work for you is even better.<\/p>\n<p>And user generated content can be highly influential for potential buyers. So how do you leverage that?<\/p>\n<p>This talk, coming from\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/speaker\/sven-lehnert\/\" target=\"_blank\">Sven Lehnert,<\/a>\u00a0aims to educate you on the different forms of user generated content and how you can make use of it in your WordPress site to drive more business.<\/p>\n<p>This is definitely one you&#8217;ll want to check out.<\/p>\n<h3>Are you going to WordCamp Europe?<\/h3>\n<p>The above talks are going to be great, as are the rest. If you&#8217;re going to be at WordCamp in Belgrade, be sure to check out the <a href=\"https:\/\/2018.europe.wordcamp.org\/schedule\/\" target=\"_blank\">schedule<\/a>\u00a0and try to get to as many talks as possible.<\/p>\n<p>And beyond that, take the time to network with everyone you can speak to along the way. WordCamps are such a tremendous opportunity not just to hear talks from people changing WordPress today, but to meet people who who will change it tomorrow.<\/p>\n<p>Have fun! Say hi!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>WordCamp is an especially great event wherever it&#8217;s held. But, there are some big things happening in WordPress right now, and with WordCamp Europe about to kick off in Serbia, Thursday June 14th, we&#8217;re excited to take a look at some of the discussions lined up. If you take a look through the schedule, there [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106602,"featured_media":165030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"blog_reading_time":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_tutorials_categories":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[38,10719,10175],"tutorials_categories":[],"class_list":["post-173097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-community","tag-design","tag-gutenberg","tag-wordcamp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106602"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173097"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173127,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173097\/revisions\/173127"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173097"},{"taxonomy":"tutorials_categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tutorials_categories?post=173097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}