This month’s WordPress Meetup in review:

WordPress Meetup Attendance:

Members of the WordPress Meetup October 2016

Members of the WordPress Meetup October 2016

It was mostly the “regulars” who showed up to the October’s WordPress meetup group. As a result, I was able to address an issue that has, in my opinion, been plaguing our WP meetup group…  “the dwindling attendance numbers”.

You see, I have a “WordPress” t-shirt and I proudly wear it around all the time during the summer months. I realized quickly that there really isn’t brand recognition for “WP” or it’s logo outside of the super tech/nerdy group of people that I know. My girlfriend and I discussed it (Even she had no idea what WordPress was until she met me), and I proposed to the group that we made a change to the name of the group to “Modern Website Design and Blogging with WordPress” or something like that.

People know what web design is. The average person, however, doesn’t know what WordPress or content management system (CMS) is. During my time wearing that t-shirt I only had one person come up to me and say “YEAH Dude, I love WordPress”. There was one other person that commented on my shirt that said “Isn’t that a blog software” and I politely corrected him and explained that it’s really a powerful CMS that is used for web design on large brands all the way down to blogs. Needless to say, I felt our group is missing out on multiple potential new members who don’t know what they should be looking for. And as a result, often people go to some of WordPress “competitors” that market themselves better (i.e., SqureSpace, Wix, Weebly and GoDaddy). In my professional opinion, all are substandard to a self-hosted WordPress installation (all though Wix just got caught “stealing” GPL code from WordPress was just caught stealing WordPress code).

So my goal as the new WordPress Meetup leader is to increase the numbers and saving people from making a mistake by going to sup-par competitors by marketing our meetup group as “Learn Modern Web Design” rather than “WordPress” alone. Needless to say the group members in attendance that night completely agreed. We get to see if attendance rates go up.

Question And Answer Time:

Nate Houstman changing colors in a theme using CSS at the October 2016 WordPress meetup group

Nate Houstman changing colors in a theme using CSS at the October 2016 WordPress meetup group

Nate Houstman (owner of xiphos) had an issue with with one of the themes he was working for a client. The background color of the dropdown menu wasn’t what he (or the client) wanted it to be. So the group was able to explain how to find the CSS that controls the color using “view source” in Chrome and drilling down to the html hook then cross referencing it in the CSS. Long story short, I also recommended that you take a screen shot and check out the hex code and search the CSS using that code. It turned out to be the much quicker way of finding the CSS that needed to be changed.

The WordPress After Party:

From left to right Nate Houstman, Mike Irvine, Clint Baxter and Aaron Van Noy after the October 2016 WordPress meetup group

From left to right Nate Houstman, Mike Irvine, Clint Baxter and Aaron Van Noy after the October 2016 WordPress meetup group

As always several of the “regulars” went out to dinner after the event. This time we headed to Tanners Bar and Grill, in Cedar Rapids, IA. It’s often not that busy and we are able to talk even more “shop” and trick of the web design trade. Needless to say, that is exactly what happened. Unfortunately, I had the settings wrong on my camera and the pictures that were taken came out extra dark.

Video from the WordPress event: