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Highlights of WordCamp Bristol 2017

19 May 2017

Siobhan Hancock

This weekend welcomed the very first WordCamp Bristol event, held at the Watershed Media Centre in Harbourside Bristol.

I’ve had the pleasure of attending many WordCamps over the past few years and I’ve got to say WordCamp Bristol 2017 had the friendliest group of organisers you could ask for. Three of us in total attended from 34SP.com; myself, Tim Nash our WordPress platform lead and Kayleigh Thorpe, one of our WordPress specialists.

We love WordCamps and you’ll usually find a lot of us at such events, enjoying talks and socialising. First of all, I’d like to say a big thank you to the organisers who couldn’t do enough for us. Helping us with boxes, helping us not only to exhibit at the event but also to fully immerse ourselves in any talks we really wanted to go to by guarding our stand.

We always try to blog about WordCamp events after we’ve attended because there’s always lots to talk about. We all go for different purposes, some of us to learn more about what we work on day in and out, some of us to find out what community projects we can get involved in, and sometimes just to us be involved with a great community that has our love of WordPress at heart <3 This time we made a video of the highlights of WordCamp Bristol. With the location being such a scenic place we thought it rude not to.


#MyWapuu winner @ZileMorris – WordCamp Bristol

We ran our #MyWapuu competition calling for you to dress up your Wapuu stickers and enter the competition. Thank you for all your entries, we had a lot to choose from. We’re proud to announce this years winner @ZileMorris for her #MyWapuu entry. We’re big beard lovers in the office and when you put a beard on a Wapuu it becomes that much more special!

Not only did we attend and sponsor, we also spoke at WordCamp Bristol. Kayleigh gave her talk on Day 1, discussing WordPress gallery plugins and image optimisation, with the added benefit of cat photos and some of Kayleigh’s own artwork. Kayleigh’s talk was well received and we hope to see it up on WordPress TV very shortly. You can also check out Kayleigh’s slides here.

On the first night we attended the speaker/sponsor social and got to know our fellow speakers and organisers. Some regular faces and plenty of new ones. The WordPress community is a great bunch of people, from all types of backgrounds and they all do their best to make you feel comfortable. On the Saturday morning, we looked forward to a full day of innovative talks. There’s something very peaceful about attending a tech conference where you can look out the window at a beautiful harbour and flowing canal. And that was just it; the entire weekend was relaxed and high spirited. On occasion we get to meet our clients face to face at WordCamps and there’s something very nice about that. That’s the beauty of our support team, wanting to go and being sent to WordCamps. We’re real people and you get to meet who you’ve been speaking to over email or phone.

In our downtime we ended up putting out a small fire for one of our loved clients, Jo @CalliaWeb

With a gap inbetween the end of day 1 speakers and the after social, we formed together a WordPress crew and took a tour of the local canal, whilst stopping on boat based cafes for drinks. It was a hard toss up between the WordCamp after party and 2017’s Eurovision song contest, but the after party won! It was a good turnout and again a nice relaxing social. Sunday brought us forward to another amazing day of talks and what felt like a new set of people interested in our managed WordPress hosting. We saw more children attending that day too.

All in all we had a fantastic time and hope to be back at WordCamp Bristol next year. The organisers got everything spot on, including location, speakers, food and social. For their first WordCamp it was very impressive and we are happy to have supported them in their WordCamp journey.