What is the Happiness Bar?

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Nearly every WordCamp has a Happiness Bar. No, it’s not about getting refreshments, and definitely has gotten plenty of jokes about that. It’s about getting answers to your WordPress questions. WordCamp St. Louis will once again, have the Happiness Bar. We love to help, and part of the reason why the WordPress community has grown throughout the years, is because of people helping each other.

The Happiness Bar is free,  however, we’ve noticed some things that need to be addressed on what is acceptable and not acceptable for gaining help. Our help, are volunteers, and are professionals in their field, but we certainly don’t want to abuse their time. WordPress Support, in the Support Forums is used as a method to showing or guiding people to their answer, because in the end, you are the one learning to take control of your website, and to fix it. The Happiness Bar is an in-personal version of that.

What the Happiness Bar Is:

  • If you’re having a problem understanding a feature for WordPress. (Example: Adding and editing images, or optimizing images, or customizing text in a post or page, or setting permalinks, understanding custom menus or widgets,…)
  • Guiding your thought process on how to accomplish a development process. We won’t do it for you, but we will guide you to answers or show you some possible methods to achieve what you may want to do with designing a plugin or theme.
  • Plugin or theme suggestions.
  • Guide you on how to troubleshoot a problem you’re having for WordPress.
  • Guide you to articles or existing information to solve other issues, like SEO or gaining traffic, or social media issues.
  • Guide you to existing information if you need to configure a plugin or theme properly.

Over the past few years, we’ve noticed some things happening with the questions being brought in, and this year, we’re addressing it.

(credit is from Chris Koerner – see link to album at bottom of post.)

 

What the Happiness Bar Isn’t:

  • Major SEO advice if you’re having problems getting traffic. A simple comb over of a website won’t solve deep underlying SEO issues. We advise you to seek a SEO professional to look into your issue more deeply.
  • Unhack your website. You may want to hire someone if you’ve been hacked. This isn’t a simple process.
  • Design your website for you.
  • Go into depth about social media marketing. We’ll certainly be happy to send you to some extremely reliable resources so you may learn that.
  • Advise you on how to make money blogging. Again, we’ll certainly be happy to send you to some extremely reliable resources so you may learn that.
  • Installing SSL for you
  • Fixing an underlying host problem (we can certainly send you to the right people to get help for your issue)
  • Migrating your website for you, from one web host to another

Some Happiness Bar volunteers may choose to share some of their own knowledge with you, that may be a little bit above and beyond what is normal for support at the Happiness Bar. We have enough people that have experience in design, development, blogging, and more, that can help, so if anyone scheduled to volunteer at the Happiness Bar, doesn’t know the answer, they will help guide you to someone at the event, who may be able to help.

Again, we’re here to help, but we ask that you be respectful of our time, and our volunteers.

(photo credit: from Chris Koerner on Flickr)