While we get the site finished, (i.e steal borrow the design from our younger sibling WordPress Sheffield) I thought I’d give you a quick update at where we are at with Northern Bloggers/WordPress Leeds.
For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, the WordPress Leeds & Northern Bloggers group was intended to be a monthly meetup in Leeds to discuss blogging and WordPress, only we haven’t had a meeting for 6 months due to a lack of venue.
Well the good news is we now have a venue thanks to the amazing people at Duke Studios (see the space via Google Maps) who have offered us space once a month for the foreseeable future.
The fist meeting at Duke Studios will be 24th June 2014! (Put that in your diary)
The goal for our meetings are for bloggers, publishers, designers and developers to get together to discuss publishing, blogging and of course WordPress. To give you a bit of history, the group initially started as WordPress North a WordPress specific group it quick morphed into Northern Bloggers which expanded its remit to cover publishing and blogging generally. Since then we have had talks from the Guardian, WordPress Developers, Designers, Press Relations officers for the government, travel bloggers, fashion students and a lawyer to just name a few. When we relaunched in 2013 after a hiatus we launched as WordPress Leeds with the goal to keep a slight focus on the technology behind 20% of the internet.
Today Northern Bloggers/WordPress Leeds works like this: we have two talks, the first is a “general Interest” talk, that is not platform specific for example we have had talks on:
- getting the media to write about you,
- How to source images,
- looking at how analytics can improve your writing etc
Our second talk is WordPress specific for example we have had a talk on:
- the “Dashboard”,
- plugin advice,
- deploying your site etc.
While we haven’t in the past, we now have the capability to record every talk and our goal is to do this where possible, so that those who can’t make the meetings can see the talks. We haven’t nailed the specifics yet on this, but most likely we will only record the talk and not the post questions.
We also plan every few months to have “Dev Nights” these would replace the regular monthly meeting for that month and aim to focus on WordPress developer and designers, so instead of a general talk we would have two WordPress specific talks, with the second talk being a more developer focused talk. For example, in our normal meetings a talk on Advanced Custom Fields would be great, on “Dev Nights” we’ll be able to have a narrower focus more technical focus, such as “using Human Made’s custom meta boxes”. Of course anyone is welcome to come to “Dev Nights” and we hope everyone who comes to Dev Nights comes to our general meet ups as well but the aim is to allow for more in depth developer discussions that are not suitable for wider WordPress user group.
We also think that it would be great to alternate this with some special events where the floor is given over to blogging entirely.
So here is what to expect from a normal WordPress Leeds/Northern Bloggers event:
- Two talks: one general, one WordPress specific
- Great mix of people not just developers and designers, but also bloggers, journalists, social media managers.
And on WordPress Leeds “Dev Nights”
- Two WordPress Specific Talks aimed at Intermediate to Advanced Level
- WordPress Developers and Designers as well as a broader developer group
WordPress Leeds is back! But…
We need you!
WordPress Leeds might be back but we need your help, we have sourced a venue but we still need:
- Speakers, yes you! We are looking for both WordPress specific speakers and people with interesting stories, ideas and interests. You don’t have to be technical to speak and we want interesting talks on publishing, social media, internet law (especially internet law, if you are a lawyer we really want you to speak), accounting and of course WordPress.
- Helpers, we already have a some lovely helpers but if you can spare some time to help with managing the site, helping set up in the evening, acting as a runner for lost souls, helping with videoing etc. then we need you!
- Sponsors, WordPress Leeds currently has one sponsor, the wonderful Duke Studios who provide our space and we couldn’t run the meet ups without them! We would love to be able to offer food and refreshments at meetups but to do so would require additional sponsors, if you or your company might be willing to sponsor then we should talk.
TL;DR
WordPress Leeds is back.
We have a new venue, the wonderful Duke Studios.
Our first meeting is 24th June 2014.
We are looking for speakers, helpers and sponsors.
The new site will be up “soon” until then, you can get hold of us on twitter @WPLeeds, comment below or drop me an email. We would love your feedback on what sort of talks you want to see, what you think about “Dev Nights” concept as well as a maybe publishing non WordPress specific nights as a counter balance?