WordCamp 2016 Summary: The Future and Accessibility of WordPress
Since the year 2006, and the first WordCamp conference which was held in the city of San Francisco, WordPress developers, designers, bloggers and enthusiasts from all around the globe organized more than 500 WordCamp conferences across 48 different cities. IT professionals interested in the development of this particular platform love to gather and exchange experiences, share tips and support further growth of WordPress.
However, it’s hardly likely that WordPress needs any help in that department. Believe it or not, there are a total of 75,652,825 websites depending on this particular publishing platform and that number is in constant growth. In fact, more than 50,000 WP based websites are added to the world wide web daily.
For the fourth year in a row, .ME had the pleasure of sponsoring the annual WordCamp Europe. This time, it took place in Vienna, Austria. A lot of big names were there, and more than 2000 visitors came to hear them out and learn more about their favorite publishing platform. Among many professional developers, influencers, entrepreneurs and marketers, a keynote speaker that certainly grabbed a lot of attention is Matt Mullenweg, one of the original developers of WordPress.
Matt Mullenweg Interview
Matt was really excited to see such a large turnout, and he wasn’t stingy on sharing his experience and thoughts on competition, development and similar; he addressed some particular issues that concern him and discussed the possible future of WP. In Matt’s opinion, WordPress has the potential of becoming an actual operating system. Not just for the web, but for the open web (which would be a very brave endeavor, knowing that there aren’t so many companies that are actually supporting this idea).
Looking back on 13 years of WP history, Matt had to address certain political aspects that are influencing further development of their company. But he also made clear that when you have a company that is big as WP is right now, you have to develop plans for the next couple of decades of expansion. As it seems, there is a lot more that we can expect from WP.
In fact, let’s share some other thoughts on the future of WP development, and if you are interested you can watch a full interview with Matt right here, or read a transcript published by Ephox.
The Bright Future of WordPress
A lot of speakers tried to analyze Matt’s speech and give their thoughts on the question of further development of WP, but all of them agreed that there is a bright future ahead of the users of WordPress. Web security was certainly a popular topic, but quite a few people talked about business development and how this platform is still an obvious first choice for any small business, startups and private blogs. But you could also find out a lot about the current trends in this industry, learn more about coding and web design in general, and a few speakers really caught everyone’s attention with their very useful advice for private users and professionals in the making.
For example, a renowned front-end & back-end developer Rian Rietveld, talked about the accessibility of WordPress, and how it improved over the last years. She also addressed certain questions that are still considered as somewhat problematic for private users, like coding standards, problems with the actual development of the platform and the latest accessibility standards that users expect from WP. She also shared quite a few tips on how these private users can improve the accessibility of their websites by themselves. You can check out her talk here:
Developers of Yoast, the famous SEO WP plugin that we all know and love, also held a lecture on WC. Joost de Valk, the founder, and Marieke van de Rakt, his wife, shared quite a few tips about the best SEO practices for WordPress. They gave an amazing presentation and explained how SEO today should be observed as a whole – holistic SEO. Holistic SEO is, in Joost’s opinion, a winning strategy that can guarantee long term results. The trick is in addressing your final goals first. Once you have a clear image about your website and after you determine its purpose, building up all the other aspects, (UX, design, copywriting guidelines, etc.) from that foundation is the very best practice in search engine optimization today.
I got to present alongside my awesome @MariekeRakt at #WCEU on SEO & Copywriting; here’s the video: https://t.co/p2vBOcwQQR
— Joost de Valk (@jdevalk) June 30, 2016
See you next year
Those are just a few keynote speakers that really caught our attention. Apart from Matt, we were very excited to find out more about the latest SEO practices, learn more about the latest plugins and coding development tips, but we were also thrilled to find out more about browser based WordPress design.
However, if you attended this year’s WordCamp Europe in Vienna, feel free to share your thoughts and recommend talks and lectures that you attended. If you didn’t have the pleasure of visiting WC this year, here is an album of panoramic pictures, brought to you by Ernst Michalek. Once you get a hold of the excited crowd, you will definitely want to join us next year!
