This episode brings you a rich mix of practical tips and ideas from speakers at WordCamp Europe. Whether you’re focused on SEO recovery, sustainability in tech, accessibility, or building better sites with WordPress tools, these insights span a wide range of specialties. From crafting accessible interfaces and designing readable typography to growing recurring revenue with website-as-a-service models, you’ll hear actionable knowledge that helps you build smarter, more inclusive, and more resilient digital experiences.
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Episode Transcript
Anna Moragli
Hi everyone. I’m Anna with Search Magic, an SEO agency based in UK. Your website is hit by an algorithm update. It’s really a big disaster and it can end up really bad. So what are algorithm updates that are actually what Google does in a regular base to update their algorithm base and improve search results.
And what happened if I do hit by an algorithm update, actually a lot things can happen, lose traffic or lose rankings. Also, the next question is, can I avoid hitting by an algorithm update? The sort answer is no, but what can I do if I hit. If my website is hidden by an algorithm date. There are many things that you can do and I would love to see you in my session.
The name is Help! My website was here by an algorithm update. That we will present a full action plan of what to do if your website is shared by algorithm update, and how to manage stakeholders that are probably going to get panicked when this happens. See there?
Thijs, Nora and Nahua
Hi, Thijs here. Together with Nora and Nahuai, we are very excited to organize workshop during WordCamp Europe with the title, Let’s Make WordPress Sustainable, Today. We can no longer look away from climate change due to carbon emissions. At the same time, the importance of the web is undeniable. So we raise the question, what can the workplace ecosystem do to become leading on sustainability?
This goes beyond the performance of the CMS itself. It’s also about creating awareness about use of WordPress and about the way we make use of WordPress teams and plugins. And not to forget, it’s about the way we gather as a community during events like the WordCamps and WordPress meetups. Nora, Nahuai and myself are very eager to share vision, insights, and best practices to make WordPress sustainable as from today, and we look forward to your input.
Let’s work together on sustainability. We look forward meeting you in person in Athens.
Andrija Radojev
Hi, my name is Andrija and I’d like to give you a quick advice for all of you WordPress builders on how to design your websites to be accessible. One thing you should all pay attention to is how many dev tags your website is using. A common bad practice when it comes to website development is usage of dev tag instead of a dedicated HTML tag for the specific element we want to create. For example, if you use the input element to design a checkbox, then you may find it easier to style it according to your preference. However, please bear in mind, that screen readers used by visually impaired visitors will not be able to render this element as a checkbox.
You would be surprised to learn how many polished websites that look amazing failed to serve their basic purpose due to a single inaccessible checkbox. Join me at my WordCamp session called Inclusive Coding and Design. I will be happy to meet you all and share with you even more tips so you could learn how we overlook the website accessibility.
Remember, it is our duty to make the internet a more accessible place. See you in Athens.
Carolina Nymark
Hi, my name is Carolina Nymark and I am a WordPress developer at Yoast, contributing to WordPress and Gutenberg. If you want to learn how to create a block theme, I recommend spending an an hour or two on making changes to the default theme 2023. Familiarize yourself with the settings in the side editor styles sidebar, so that you know how to add the default styles to the website and to the blocks. The next step is to install a plugin called Create Block Theme, which is available in the plugin directory. You can use this plugin to create a blank theme where you add your own colors, font, and images, and create your own templates from scratch.
The best way to learn how to create layouts in the site editor is to copy existing sites and websites and think about all the elements as blocks. Think about how you can combine blocks, use to cover block to add backgrounds, and how to use different gradients, spacing, and border settings.
When you create your block theme or when you are editing existing templates using the site editor, it is important to remember to save your main content in a post or page and not directly in the template. Instead, use the template only to add structure. To create a front page template, make sure that you add a post content block to the template, and then go into your WordPress admin area, open the reading settings and add a static page as your homepage. This way, the front page will show the content of the page and you will not lose your content when you switch themes. I hope you’ll join me at my workshop called Create a Team Using the Site Editor Without Coding.
Bud Kraus
Hey everybody. My name is Bud Kraus and I can’t wait to go to WordCamp Europe and talk about using low vision as my tool to help me teach WordPress. I’m so excited that I could go to Greece right now without an airplane, and as it turns out, I’m preparing for my talk as I speak, so I hope you’ll come.
Now, one of the things they told me I have to do is make my talk interactive. And I am gonna make it interactive, but one thing you won’t be doing is looking at the world the way I do as a person with low vision. So if you come to my talk, you’re gonna hear all about what it’s like to have age related macular degeneration.
That’s the leading cause of legal blindness in the United States. But how I have learned to use that as a method or a way to help me teach WordPress. So I hope you’ll come and I look forward to seeing you in Athens, Greece in just a couple of weeks. How exciting and cool is that? See you there.
Birgit Olzem
Hi, I’m Birgit Olzem from Germany – a long-term contributor with over a decade contributing to the WordPress project, and a user since its first release 20 years ago – can you imagine? I feel a bit old.
I’ve witnessed the remarkable evolution of WordPress and its community over this time. Our panel discussion at the upcoming WordCamp Europe in Athens, “Contribute to the Core without knowing how to code”, is not only a testament to how far we’ve come in broadening our understanding of what it means to contribute to a global Open-Source project. It is also a reminder that it is a marathon to keep open-minded to the potential issues contributing to a global community can bring with.
Here’s a tip for all WordPress and WooCommerce builders out there, who want to contribute with their own unique skill set: Don’t underestimate the power of effective communication.
Whether you’re participating in a chat, leaving comments, or attending in-person events like WordCamps or meetups, it’s essential to remember that your words can have a tremendous impact. Words can hurt or heal. Clear and respectful communication can foster better understanding, collaboration, and innovation within the community. It can help you network, learn, and grow, even if you’re not a coder.
In our session, I’ll be sharing more about my experiences as a woman in this field, particularly about navigating and communicating in a traditionally male-dominated environment. But for now, here’s a small takeaway: Use your unique perspective to contribute to the conversation. Don’t shy away from asking questions or sharing your insights. The WordPress community is incredibly diverse, and your voice matters.
I look forward to discussing more about non-code contributions and the importance of diversity and inclusivity in our community at the WordCamp Europe panel discussion. Let’s expand our understanding of what it means to contribute, how to bring your unique talents into the project, and encourage more people to get involved.
I hope you’ll join me at our session, “Contribute to the Core without knowing how to code” and take your time to connect at the hallway tracks afterward. I’m looking forward to meeting you there. Until then, keep communicating, keep learning, and keep contributing to the richness and diversity of WordPress and WooCommerce.
Roger Rosweide
My name is Roger. I’m the co-founder of WPCS, and our cloud platform helps WordPress agencies launch a website as a service. And one of the cool things that our platform does, which is also the tip that I have for you today, is it lets you automate the sale and launch of your websites. So it means if you want to sell a low touch website that your customers can onboard to themselves and get started, and then you upsell them your custom services, that is something that we enable, and that is, coincidentally, also the tip that I want to give you. If you wanna launch and scale a revenue model that brings in MRR monthly recurring revenue, then consider starting a low touch waz, a product that you’ve built in the past that you know works well and that you can clone to a particular audience.
So an audience that you know you can reach, an audience that you know you can serve, and give them a website that they can onboard themselves via a WooCommerce store, for example, that spins up new websites and they can explore, maybe start designing a few of the pages that you’ve created for them based on your template.
And then when they require more, you can upsell them services that draw them into your retainer, reporting, maintenance or content plan, whatever you have prepared in order to increase your monthly revenue. So I hope that helps and I hope you’ll join me for my talk at WordCamp Europe in Athens. And I look forward to meeting all of you.
I will be walking around on the premise as well. So hope you’ll see me and we strike up a conversation. Thanks so much and see you soon.
James Dominy
Hi, I’m James Dominy with WPEngine, where you can WordPress smarter. Oh my God. Skynet is here and AI is coming for my job. Or is it? Drop by any office cooler or bar after work and you’ll likely overhear a conversation about ChatGPT. And now Bard and others. In a lot of ways, these tools are amazing and in some ways they can fail spectacularly. In my WordCamp EU 2023 talk,
How I learned to stop worrying and love my new AI Overlords. I’ll be talking about the new challenges AI powered tools are bringing to WordPress content creators and WordPress developers, and dig into the reasons to embrace them. I’ll walk you through using these tools to increase your productivity in a practical way, and of course, we can all have a good laugh at how stupid AI can be.
I mean, how smart AI already is. Yes, sir. Yes, I understand. I’m sorry. It was auto corrupt. Uh, I mean, correct, correct. It was autocorrect. Please don’t hurt me.
