The WordCamp Lessons for Business Owners
To learn what WordCamp is, you first have to know about WordPress. WordPress is a website platform, originally used as a content management system for blogging. It’s come a long way since then; today, it’s one of the most popular platforms on which to build a website. It’s open-source and free, so it attracts a dedicated community. The Ray Access website is built on WordPress.
An extension of that community, WordCamp is a two-day, weekend conference that’s held locally in cities throughout the world, once a year at each location. On June 8 and 9, 2019, WordCamp Asheville took place on the campus of UNC Asheville. Ray Access was there to learn, to share and to network. Every year, we learn something worth the price of admission. Here are this year’s takeaways.
Biggest of the WordCamp Lessons
The most impactful and easy-to-implement of the WordCamp lessons of 2019 was the importance of Google My Business. Since Google owns the two most popular search engines on the planet (Google and YouTube), it makes business sense to appease the gods of search engine rankings. Multiple sessions touched on the need for Google My Business updates.
Ray Access has a Google My Business page, but it was largely left to fend for itself, since we considered it a tool for local-only marketing. Now that we know better, look for weekly posts to the listing. Yelp, Bing and other search engine listings are sure to follow.
The Need for Speed
Last year, the focus was on mobile-friendly WordCamp templates. It’s true that Google penalizes sites that aren’t mobile-friendly, but most up-to-date websites today follow that standard. The next step in accommodating search engines and visitors alike is load speed. WordCamp lessons don’t get simpler than that: make sure your website loads within four seconds. The trick, though, is how best to accomplish it.
Strategies abound. Plugins like Lazy Loader, JS Minimizer, WP SuperCache and Autoptomizer help your page load faster, but some may need tweaking for your specific site. There’s also the idea of a content delivery network, which shares your website images and other large files on a dispersed network, so visitors get the one that’s physically closer to where they are. Whatever you decide to do, do it soon, as Google penalizes slow-loading websites.
A Return to Basics
Finally, there’s a topic that’s both new and old at the same time. As writers and editors, the crew at Ray Access understand that the audience is the first critical piece of information needed when drafting any article, regardless of its purpose. In website terms, that involves not only the language you use, but also the experience you design. User experience or UX is a resurgent topic for all websites.
UX involves making your website easy for your target audience to navigate, find information and feel good about the experience. This science envelopes accessibility, language, design and development. It calls for clear calls-to-action and consistent labeling. It involves honesty — delivering on every promise without any bait-and-switch or other link-bait tactics.
How does your website compare? If it’s been a while since you’ve reviewed your site, contact Ray Access for a website assessment. It’s an inexpensive investment to determine the state of your website from a visitor’s point of view to get the most out of these WordCamp lessons.
