The WordCamp Report

I’ve been looking at some of the WordCamp event blogs and I’d like to make a few recommendations to help you make your event blogs more accessible and user friendly, and help everyone find the information they need.

When and Where Up Front

Please put the when and where information of your WordCamp event in a blatantly obvious location. Frame it, highlight it, make sure that it stands out.

Include the following:

1. Date of the Event
2. Times of the Event
3. Location (with link to directions map)
4. Registration/Sign up link
5. Deadline dates for registration
6. Price if applicable
7. Link for more information

You can add this in a text Widget in the sidebar and update it if the information changes or to add more information.

Information Pages

The following Pages are the minimum you should offer on your WordCamp blog:

1. About: Provide information on what the event is about, sponsors, who, what, where, and how, and links to more information.
2. Contact: Provide contact forms or email links to all the people in charge of the WordCamp event with their responsibilities and titles defined clearly. These include the overall event coordinator(s), publicity, volunteer recruitment and overseer, sponsor coordinator, blog editor, and other responsible individuals.
3. Schedule: As soon as possible, list the schedule of events. Include links to the speaker’s blogs as well as descriptions of their presentations.
4. Speakers: This is the page that most people are interested in. Who will be speaking at the event. Promote the speakers prominently with links to their blogs, popular articles, other speaking gigs, slide shows, and all the information you can gather to celebrate their attendence and let attendees know you have great speakers on board. Include photographs or their blog/company logos wrapped in links to those sites.
5. Sponsors: A WordCamp event is a very social conference. People come to meet other bloggers and WordPress fans, but they also come to meet sponsors, those in the business of blogging and social media. Promote your sponsors with bios, history, logos, and links.
6. Registration: If you are working with a registration service that allows integration into your WordPress blog, then create a Registration Page for sign ups. If not, add a sign up icon and links in your blog’s sidebar so people can quickly click through from any page on the blog to register. Include the registration link on every blog post, too.
7. FAQ: Create a Frequently Asked Questions list that explains the who, what, where, when, and how of the event, contact information, and answers all the questions that may come up.
8. Attendees: People like to see who else will be attending. Have the registration list linked to the Attendees Page to automatically list everyone who registers to attend. Include a link to their blog around their name.
9. Volunteers: Volunteers help power WordCamp events. Provide information on who to contact to help volunteer, what volunteer duties are needed, and what the benefits are for volunteering.
10. Promote Our WordCamp: Create a Page that helps attendees, sponsors, and fans to promote your WordCamp event. Include badges and icons they can use.

Exploit Social Media

Include links to your Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, and other social media services you are using to promote your WordCamp event. Put a list in the sidebar, and consider adding a feed from those services.

List them in the Contact and FAQ pages with links so people can quickly participate and add them to their feed or monitoring system.

Be sure and promote your feeds, too, so attendees and the media can keep up with the plans and activities.

Event Badges

Provide WordCamp badges in line with the current WordPress WordCamp logos, or create your own. Make them in a variety of sizes so they can use them in their blog’s sidebar, footer, or microblog. Include the HTML to put around the images.

If you do not want the images hotlinked from your site, be clear that the images are for downloading only, but still recommend they link to the WordCamp blog.

Announcements, Information, Gossip, and News

Fill the blog with activity. Write a blog post about each speaker and what they will be talking about. Interview them. Blog about recent blog posts they’ve written.

Write about each sponsor and their contribution and why they decided to sponsor the event.

Have WordPress Meetups before the event to start the avalanche of energy and enthusiasm. Inform volunteers of activities and needs.

Find all kinds of reasons to keep the activity going on your WordCamp blog. Don’t give people a reason to think nothing is happening because a WordCamp takes a lot of work, and the more it shows, the more people are interested.

Filed under WordCamp Tips.
Subscribe to RSS 2.0.
Leave a comment or trackback.