WordCamp Event 2018 [ Belgrade ]

WordCamp Event 2018 in Belgrade

WordPress WordCamp community event was held in Serbia, Belgrade and that was an experience you didn`t want to miss out. Our team started preparing for all topics that will be presented in order to stay updated in our own development and marketing world.

Mentors that we had during these 3 days and connections we made with other people in our industry will be an experience we will never forget.

Sessions were held at 2 separated locations so our team had options to choose which one suits better for them. Workshops were there too, all that was needed was your laptop and you could learn everything in a practical way with great mentors.

As we are perfectionists who always strives for the best and delivers the best to our clients, we had to be part of such an amazing event. Our first session started with topic Accessible Design held by Maja Benke.

What was very interesting for this session is that world does not seem same for us and others. There is a big number of people who are daltonist or have dyslexia. Some of them are blind or have disabilities.  As we are ones who are shaping the world today we also need to shape it for people with special needs. It is not only about us, they exist as well and this is a migration we all need to put work into, making world better place for them.

Majority of websites nowadays are not optimized for people with special needs. This is something that has a huge effect on their lives, making it more complicated. We learned during this session held by Maja Benke on how to optimize our websites for people with special needs.

Designing for users of Screen Readers

Don`t :

• Rely on text size or placement for structure
• Force mouse or screen use
• Write uninformative links and headings
• Spread content all  over the page

Instead:

• Structure content using HTML
• Build for keyboard use only
• Write descriptive links and headings
• Use a linear, logical layout

Designing for users on the Autistic Spectrum

Don`t :

• Bright colors
• Figures of speech and idioms
• Vague buttons ( read more etc..)
• Cluttered & complex design

Instead:

• Simple colors
• Write in plain language
• Descriptive buttons
• Simple & consistent layout

Designing for users who are deaf or hard of hearing

Don`t :

• Communicate only through phone
• Put content in audio or video file only
• Mak users read long blocks of content
• Make complex layouts and menus

Instead :

• Give users preferred communication
• Use subtitles or provide transcripts for videos
• Content with sub-headings, images, and videos
• Use a linear logical layout

Improving Internal Linking Structure

Our next meeting was with Yoast crew. Again it was an unbelievable experience, we had a chance to listen to both Joost De Valk and Marieke Van De Rakt, founders of Yoast plugin. A topic that our team attended was called Improving Your Internal Link Structure.

What we learned here was how to do proper internal link building in 2018. As Yoast stands for one of the biggest communities for SEO and digital marketing it was very intriguing to see how are they ranking websites.

Three important reasons important linking matters?

• Your audience will find what they are looking for
• Google understands your website
• You are not competing with your own content

We see that a lot of agencies are doing internal linking but only a few are doing it right. It is not just about linking contact page with about us page. Let`s say that we have 10 similar pages on our website and we are very strict about our niche so in most cases we will have pages talking about similar things. The first thing that we need to do is to identify one page we would like to rank for.

Next step will be doing internal linking from other similar pages to our main page. This way when Google crawls our website it will see that we are linking to one specific content instead of 10 same. Now Google knows that it needs to rank that specific page instead of ranking all 10 competing with each other getting nowhere.

Internal linking also helps Google to understand your website better. Not doing internal linking is something you don`t want to skip.

Another thing is helping your users to find what they are looking for while they are reading. If your article talks about the specific thing you simply do not want to link to something that is not relevant to your article. Not only it ruins user experience which results in lower rankings of your website, it also confuses Google not to rank you high enough.

Going from freelancing to building a team

The last session our team had during WordCamp event was a great session with Sherry and Karim. We had an opportunity to listen to how to build a great team and scale up from freelancers to a great company.

If you are going from freelancer to a leader there is a lot of things you need to work on. Building a team can decide whether your business is going to make it or not. This is a huge step and everything needs to be done properly.

Growing a team – Hiring

Lack of inexperience can quickly end up your business career, ruining your reputation for a long run. Hiring right people is a step number one you need to achieve and work on. This ongoing going process and you definitely don`t want to end up with people on your team who are:

1. Toxic
2. Blamers

Having these types of people on your team will lead to a bad atmosphere in your team overall and hurt communication a lot.
How do you asset your candidates?

• Past remote experience
• Local support system
• Time management ( time zone )
• Taking advantage of flexible working hours
• Can they overcome the distance
• Ability to prioritize
• Knows when to raise a hand
• Proactive communication strategies
• Focus and disciplines

Forming a team with this skill set can make your business tremendous success. Finding these people may take some time so always keep in mind one thing and that is fire quick and hire slow. This is a process where mistakes should not happen. Getting new people, training them costs way more money than keeping current.

Why was WordCamp Event biggest this year?

2368 Sold tickets
2085 participants from 76 countries
808 live stream tickets from 37 countries
81 sponsors
500 participants on contributor day
54 organizations
170 volunteers
65 mentors
33 sessions
19 workshops
68 interviews
6+ million Twitter impressions

Next WordCamp Event will be held in Germany, Berlin 2019. Persist Agency will see you there as well.