WordCamp Karachi'19: Evolving the 'WordPress' community in Pakistan

KARACHI: 'WordCamp Karachi', the flagship WordPress conference held across the globe, made its way back in Pakistan for its second instalment on Saturday, after opening doors to a whole new arena of opportunities in the country for the first time last year.The second chapter of the prestigious 'WordCamp' conference was held at NED University of Engineering and Technology (NED UET) with an aim to strengthen further and propel the WordPress ecosystem, gaining momentum in the country recently. The distinct conference featured a number of informative sessions with esteemed speakers from around the country providing viable mentoring sessions for WordPress bloggers, Plugin developers, content creators and entrepreneurs. Audience, speakers interact during a QnA session at the 'WordCamp' conference The event served a major purpose of bridging the gap between budding entrepreneurs, start-up owners and marketers with technological experts and programmers from the web development field having expertise over the global software taking the world by storm. "The unique event fulfils the objective of building awareness around WordPress. It connects like-minded people, the ones doing business around the software. It's an entire ecosystem - you can make websites out of it, start an e-commerce project. If you are planning to introduce a publication, you can use WordPress to launch it, or even use the software to power your own media company," Saad Iqbal, a speaker at the conference explained. He went on to add, "There are two businesses that WordPress is known to empower. The first one is a service-based industry more commonly known as 'agency' which provides services to WordPress. In addition, people also sell WordPress as an infrastructure as well, like customer relationship management (CRM) solutions based on it." Lead organiser and community deputy Usman Khalid went into greater detail, shedding light on the way WordPress operates and the idea behind hosting it in Pakistan."This time around 'WordCamp Karachi' has more than 14 speakers from various cities of Pakistan. The focal intention behind putting together the event is to bring about the evolution of the WordPress community, and to connect onto a common platform all the content, marketing and technology key players in order to create new jobs, collaborations and businesses," he revealed. Khalid further added, "Contrary to popular belief, WordPress is not just a blogging website. The trillion-dollar company powers almost 34% of the total internet, so to say that it has a lot of scope and potential in the future in the digital realm will not be wrong. The biggest chunk of freelance jobs is driven by WordPress. I can safely assert that 60% of the people's earnings in Pakistan revolves around it." So what is it that one needs to launch a start-up?"If you have capital and want to invest in your start-up, you would just need to collaborate with a digital agency to design a website according to your needs. The next step is to integrate social media with your website. You can then roll out promotions to market your website which will help in scoring you orders from clients. The order can be manually processed as well, or you can even partner with a logistics' company. If, in case, you do not have resources, you can start your business by watching a YouTube tutorial on how to install and work on WordPress. The best feature about WordPress is its ease of use. It is highly user-friendly and free of cost, which is why it has captured so much of the digital market. On top of that, it is an open source. No one individual has ownership over it as it belongs to everyone," the WordPress contributor shared. Rabia Ahmed, a content creator who is running two websites based on WordPress for the last two years, shared that conferences like 'WordCamp' offer a great deal of help to beginners who are looking to make it big in the digital space. "I have been blogging and running a website for a digital agency for  quite some time now. The conference helps a lot, specially for people coming from a non-tech background like me. Now that I have learnt so many things out of the event, I have also become acquainted to most of the technical stuff that goes around into running a website," she said.