London Bloggers Event - July 1st

You may have noticed we’ve been at more events, meetups and conferences over the past year or so. We’re written about several on our blog and often use and update our social media channels while we’re at the event itself. And last night we celebrated our partnership with www.LondonBloggers.net by attending and sponsoring their July event.

Our partnership with LondonBloggers is one on several levels. Our main priority is to provide members of the LondonBloggers meetup group and social influence sphere with options for reliable and secure WordPress hosting. These are two of the most common complaints we see online from WordPress webmasters, and the team at LondonBloggers underlined this by confirming it is frequently asked question by members of the group.

Bloggers looking to use WordPress and host their blog generally have several options. For novice or less tech savvy bloggers, the starting point is often WordPress.com. For more advanced bloggers, or blogs that have developed over time, a fully fledged hosting package is usually a better option. Self-hosted WordPress, such as the package we provide with LondonBloggers, is more powerful and infinitely more customisable. You can also use your own domain at a sensible cost; WordPress.com is very expensive for domain registration.

The package we’ve developed in conjunction with LondonBloggers includes WordPress pre-installed and ready to go. You also get a fully working hosting account (supporting email, ftp, databases and more) and is ideal for small and mid-sized blogs. Full information on the package can be found at http://www.webhostingbuzz.co.uk/londonbloggers.php

So in addition to the WordPress hosting package, we’re also becoming involved in the meetup events. This gives us a chance to meet bloggers from all walks of life, answer questions about the best hosting platforms for WordPress, answer questions on what bloggers would like to make their lives easier and become a closer part of the WordPress and blogger community. We hate the idea of being a faceless, unapproachable and non-communicative web host and love the idea of being closely involved with our customers and potential customers - to both of our benefit.

Last night’s event was held at an informal venue; a Kings Cross pub. We took over the function room and I, along with some other speakers, participated in a Q&A session

We fielded a lot of questions about SEO, WordPress plugins, hosting and some misc blogging questions. One of them was on the Ghost blogging platform. I more thoughts on Ghost here.

It’s only fair I give a mention to Judith Lewis of MostlyAboutChocolate.com who fielded the majority of the questions from the audience. We knew SEO would be popular; bribing the audience with delicious chocolate only furthered this! In general, it was a thoroughly enjoyable couple of hours and we’re looking forward to be part of the community and group moving forward.

The last part of our sponsorship is sponsoring LBM’s podcasts. I believe a blog post will go live on this over at www.LondonBloggers.net, so I’ll save news about this for later.