Last Saturday I drove down to Victoria for my first Wordcamp. Today at our Comox Valley Business Women’s lunch I got teased a little bit about my ‘camping’ experience.
So what was an artist doing at Wordcamp? Well, learning a little bit more about WordPress, open source software that is making it possible for so many of us to manage the content on our websites, and I might add tweak the design and function to our heart’s content.
I can’t say that I didn’t struggle and then struggle a whole lot more when I first put up my own website. But like a lot of other artists I had no budget to pay someone else to do it, so learning to do it myself seemed like a good idea at the time.
I’ve learned so much the hard way (by making mistakes) that it took me a while at Wordcamp to realize that I actually understood what the presenters were talking about, most of the time anyway. That was a really nice feeling; the other nice feeling came from meeting so many people who were willing to share what they had learned and allow others to benefit from their experience.
I came away with a lot of information that will help me to develop and improve this site, and I know I will now have a better experience while doing it. What I’d like to share with anyone who’s not familiar with WordPress is that this software is not just for blogging.
It’s a great content management system that can be used for all kinds of websites; for example WordPress users include CNN, the New York Times and Martha Stewart. This software is free, it is flexible beyond belief and with the release of WordPress 3.0, which I was told could be coming any day now (or a day or two later maybe), this content management system should be even better.
I’m looking forward to the release of the next stable version of WordPress and to having another ‘camping’ experience in my future. Many thanks to all the organizers, volunteers, sponsors and presenters who made Wordcamp Victoria possible.