WordCamp SLC (WCSLC) is an event where WordPress users, developers, business owners, and marketers get together for a day of learning. It happens every September with this years being held on September 12th. This was the first year WCSLC has sold out and for another consecutive year, Bluehost was proud to be involved at every level.
This year WCSLC was held in the historic City-County building in downtown Salt Lake City. WCSLC introduced a new workshop track this year. This was held in a small room with a limited audience. This was by design, it encouraged better conversations and sincere questions. The workshops were designed to resemble a meet-up much like one you would see at our local UtahWP meet-up.
Curtis Jensen, one of my Bluehost colleuges, said “(the tracks) were a great opportunity to learn, hands on, how to do different things. These ranged from learning more about WP-CLI (for the intermediate and advanced users) and designing with typography (more than just using the right font for your site).”
Speakers came from all over the country to share their knowledge with the Utah WordPress community. This year WCSLC had Dre Armeda, co-founder of Sucuri and CMO at WDS, perform the keynote. He spoke with the crowd about the questions many of them had about running their businesses in the WordPress space. With all the great speakers from around the country, more than half were homegrown right here in Utah. We think this is really cool because we think that this shows how strong the interest in WordPress is in Utah.
One of the things that is so great not only about WCSLC but WordCamps in general is seeing the community get together. There are many great presentations and many great conversations in the hallway.
I spoke with Bryan Merkley and he said, ” learned so much more about the WordPress community than anyone could from behind an LCD screen. There are people all around that use the open-source community’s efforts to further their work. I met quite a few people there and even saw familiar faces that I work with while I was there. It was a great experience to realize the impact of the open source community and WordPress particular.”
There was a social media scavenger hunt this year as well. Attendees had to find particular people or items, take a picture of them and post them to social media. You can find these photos on twitter with the hashtag #wcslc.
Utah has really great companies doing big things in the WordPress space. WCSLC is happy to have many of these companies as sponsors such as: Bluehost, MOJO Marketplace, WP Site Care, Formidable Forms, and MemberPress. Thanks to everyone who came out as an attendee, volunteer, sponsor, organizer and any combination of those. WCSLC would not be anything without the people.
