WordPress Growth Summit

Happy Tuesday everyone! Today I’m shifting away from the usual travel stuff to write a bit bout the recent Growth Summit held by WordPress.

If you follow me on Twitter @lostmansstar or have your own WordPress account you might have seen that there was a Growth Summit scheduled for August 11th to the 13th. The advertisement had been hanging around for a while and I’ll admit I probably took way too long to consider it.

My major concern? The ticket cost was $79 USD ($106 CAD) for a first of it’s kind conference. What if it wasn’t worth it?

In the end the thought that won out was that you need to spend money to make money, and I do want Lostman’s Star to eventually be able to support itself. That, and even if the conference was a complete failure I might still learn something in the process: mainly don’t drop a hundred bucks on a first time con.

I went into WordPress to do some writing and found that the early bird special price had been extended, and can honestly say that had that not been the case I wouldn’t have bought my ticket.

So, how did it go, you ask? Was it worth it, you ask?

Yes and no.

Positives first, there are a lot of things that I really enjoyed about the con and thought WordPress did really well at.

First of all, they were responsive. Any trouble at all with payments, questions, tech solutions, the WordPress team were on it. I was told that there were two different teams that were working, one for the website itself and the other who were focused on the conference. Both were amazing.

Second, they implemented what they could of their feedback real time. One thing that stands out for me is that to join the next class we had to get out of the video chat we were currently in, scroll down a monumental list of classes that were already over, and then join the next class which had usually already started by the time I got to it. On the second day they had it so that the live classes were at the top of the list.

Third, they only required one ticket to attend ‘both’ events. There were essentially two time zones, one for the Americas and one for Asia, so you could do what I did and just stay up at night if you wanted and attend the Asian time zone classes as well.

Fourth, it was made clear that all the classes were recorded and would be available for the next 30 days. I didn’t have to stay up all night if I didn’t want to, I could easily watch the recordings later. I decided to because I wanted to attend the social networking events and also watch the presentations and be able to ask questions real time.

Now for the less positive stuff, and it all boils down to one thing.

I think WordPress expected this guy:

Someone rich, and successful, but not necessarily tech savy.

There were a lot of talks focused on the very basic uses of WordPress; things like how to make a text post or add pictures to your website. I attended a few of them to make sure I wasn’t missing anything obvious but it was the advanced block classes that were the best for me. I’ll actually be integrating what I learned into Lostman’s Star soon!

There were also some classes that had a really practical approach to information. They told you very plainly that to get more followers you should connect your social media, but only focus on one or two platforms. Instagram and Twitter, for example. These classes were fabulous, and my notebook is filled with these valuable pieces of information.

Unfortunately these two types of classes were in the minority, and the type of class it was going to be was not made clear by either the title or the description. With the exception of the social networking, block demos, and the Question and Answer periods, it became a guessing game as to what sort of information you were going to get.

In the Social Networking sessions I found that I wasn’t the only one who thought the sessions were a bit ‘nuggety’ as one person so aptly described them. There were useful ‘nuggets’ of information strewn in, but you had to sift through everything else to get them. The major culprit of these were the ‘keynote’ speaker sessions.

These keynote sessions happened at the beginning of the day and were 45 minutes long. For comparison, most of the other sessions were 30 or 15 minutes. They were mainly focused on the stories of successful bloggers, how they got to where they were, and how times had changed for them since they began, covid-times included.

There was just one thing bothered me. With the exception of one, the keynote speakers were all successful before they started their blog.

They were either already well known and their followers had engaged with their new blog and podcasts, or they already had successful careers and used that base to form a following and bring their personal work onto the internet. One worked as a spokesperson for Xbox, one was already a popular media producer before they started their own podcast, another was an executive for a large, well known company who knew Oprah before they started their blog!

So … where does that leave the rest of us?

This divide also showed in later sessions when one of the speakers mentioned the development of a new plugin.

Plugins, for those of you who don’t know, are little invisible helpers for your website. They help you gain a wider following, help you do better and easier business, make your website look nicer and more professional, all that good stuff.

This plugin looked SO cool, and I was so excited!

It was a free, open beta, so anyone could download it, use it, and give feedback to help it grow. It essentially functioned like stories on Snapchat, but it looked so much more professional. It allowed for text, editing, and even though it was built for the mobile edition of the web I think it would have looked fabulous on the computer version and I was so eager to have it as a perfect addition to Lostman’s Star.

To access plugins (any, not just this one) I would have to pay over $300 every year.

That’s not really a ‘free, open beta’ is it? That’s pay to play, and it fed into the idea that you already had to be successful or rich in order for your blog to grow.

That’s quite the nugget.

So, was it worth it?

Immediately? No.

For what I learned and got I would have expected the price to be much lower. I would value it at around $50 CAD, maximum. If there were more sessions like the straight forward, informative, and helpful ones I mentioned above, then I wouldn’t hesitate to pay a hundred dollars for a ticket.

Long term? We’ll have to wait and see.

I was given some very valuable information in some of those sessions. I hope that by taking them to heart and following them I can make a successful, beloved, and trusted travel website that can pay for itself and that I can continue to add to for a long time to come.