2010 WCC Speakers
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Amanda Blum Amanda Blum is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, and Creative Director of Howling Zoe Productions (HZP), a creative strategy firm involved in design, development, marketing and PR. She is a founding partner of Are You Socially Acceptable which teaches social media, technology and marketing classes, Chief Executive Redhead at WordCamp Boston, and is currently working on making WordCamp Phoenix 2010 kick ass. Helping microbusinesses, startups and non profits find new ways to reach their target demographic for over 10 years, HZP bridges the gap between old school techniques and bleeding edge tech. Her parents still don't understand what she does for a living. Amanda has been active in community volunteering for almost 20 years and is dedicated to helping non profits utilize online tech tools to help further their mission (like WordPress). She is also a darn good cook and is contemplating cutting her hair. |
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Josh Byers Hi, I'm Josh and by day I'm a graphic designer and web developer living by a beautiful lake and some golden cornfields in Polk City, Iowa. Its not heaven, but its a pretty cool place to live and work. Make sure you wave next time you fly over! For the past 13 years, I've owned my own business, Red Letters Studio, and have had the privilege to create web sites, logos, and other media for a-list movie stars, major universities, small businesses and churches. I discovered WordPress in 2005 and life has never been the same! I've developed a whole bunch of themes, a few plugins, built my business around it and along the way became a certified WordPress consultant. I’m really passionate about creating content that is professional, easy to use and beautiful to look at. When I'm not designing I'm all about my church, my family, the Broncos, and potatoes. |
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Nile Flores Nile Flores (@blondishnet) is a web and graphic designer from Centralia, Illinois, who exclusively designs using WordPress. She will design for other platforms on occasion (if you beg.) She blogs at Blondish.net, a site that likes to help people rock out their site by covering topics like web design, graphic design, social media, and even blogging. Nile is a fan girl of WordPress and dedicates some time to running WPAddict.net to share news about people in the WordPress Community that make it rock, as well as share tips and tricks for WordPress users. She can also be found on occasion helping out in the WordPress Support Forums. Aside from WordPress itself, Nile is passionate about blogging and is a Twitter addict. When Nile is not online blogging or working, she is spending time with her son, painting, crafting, and even studying for a degree in business. |
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Jacob Goldman Jake is a web developer / strategist with over a decade of experience. As Director of Client Services at C. Murray Consulting, Jake has overseen dozens of advanced WordPress implementations, including two on the official showcase, and one of WordPress VIP’s highest traffic blogs. His “WordPress Power Tips” articles for Smashing Magazine consistently make the front page of Delicious. Between supporting clients, he has found the time to contribute 10 highly rated plug-ins to the community. He’s an organizer for WordCamp Boston, the founder of the Providence WordPress Meetup, and has spoken at WordCamps around the country. This past April, he co-hosted four episodes of the WordPress Weekly podcast focused on commercial WordPress business models. |
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Jeremy Harrington Jeremy Harrington oversees user experience design for Voce Communications. He's a coordinator for WordPress Happy Hour and has been designing experiences for national brands and products for over 12 years. His background includes enterprise application UX and design for customers like Apple, NASA JPL, BWM and Boeing. When not spending time with his wife and two young children his passions include music, photography, architecture and all things Disney. |
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Chris Jean Chris Jean has been the lead developer for iThemes.com since 2008. He has authored several WordPress themes and plugins, including iThemes Builder, Billboard ad plugin, among other WordPress related community projects. He has over six years of programming experience, having previously worked for a custom web design firm where he maintained a propertiary CMS before switching to WordPress. |
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Aaron Jorbin Born and raised in suburban Chicagoland, Aaron and has been taking things apart and figuring out how things work since he was a young child. After graduating Northern Michigan University where the only of computer related courses he took involved the proper use of Microsoft Office, Aaron moved west to Portland, OR and began a journey to grok the internet. His interest in WordPress began when he talked a friend out of using iWeb, and into a site he could update himself from anywhere. For the past three years he has been a freelance Web Developer who builds and manages custom websites, applications, and WordPress plugins. His main contributions to WordPress core are much of the inline documentation for Twenty Ten and a handful of other bug fixes / enhancements in 3.0. |
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Pete Mall Pete is a self-described WordPress ninja and has been contributing to WordPress since 2005. He provides WordPress consulting services through Joint Forces Technology Solutions (jointforcestech.com). Pete has worked with multiple Fortune 100 brands, as well as smaller companies. He is known for turning around troubled development projects and improving the productivity and dependability of the team. You can follow his rumblings on his personal blog at developersmind.com or catch him on Twitter @petemall. |
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Cory Miller Cory Miller is the founder of iThemes.com, PluginBuddy.com and WebDesign.com, all focused on providing high-quality WordPress products and training. Based in Oklahoma City, he started the company in Jan. 2008 and now has a team of over 14. He got his start with WordPress for a professional blog and started dabbling in WordPress theme design before starting his current business. |
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Daisy Olsen Daisy Olsen is a Genesis Theme Framework Specialist for StudioPress and also works as a freelance WordPress developer and consultant from WP Mama. She's been a WordPress enthusiast since 2006 and has specialized in working with Parent/Child theme frameworks since 2008. She calls the New York Hudson Valley home and in the rare moments that she's not at her computer she can be seen running behind one of her 3 young boys. |
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Jason Pelker Jason David Pelker has a history of coming into aging and unfriendly website situations, but he's always made efforts to learn quickly and significantly improve these sites' look and usefulness. In 2006, he was hired by United Way of Metro Chicago to manage their web content and one year later, he had earned his own Interactive Media department. His earlier content management responsibilities were supplanted with leading the Communications department in the charge to revamp the organization’s entire web strategy. This was also where he discovered WordPress, which he continues to advocate today. Since February 2009, Jason has turned his focus to running his own WordPress-based web development company, Item-9 Consulting. By taking on so many different project types over the past year, he has become much more adept at design, marketing, project management and of course, finding the perfect WordPress extension to complete a given job. He offers his expertise at http://item-9.com and http://twitter.com/jpelker. |
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Andrea Rennick Andrea Rennick is one half of the dynamic RonandAndrea.com duo, specializing in all things WordPress MU and WordPress Networks. She writes at http://wpmututorials.com and helps out in pretty much every WordPress related forum you can find, answering questions about multiple sites, networks and domain mapping. When not eyeball-deep in code, she tends to tweet about bacon. |
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Ron Rennick Ron Rennick is the other half of the dynamic RonandAndrea.com duo, specializing in all things WordPress MU and WordPress Networks. Ron is a WordPress Contributing Developer and has written or contributed to over 20 free GPL plugins (downloadable from either http://wpmututorials.com or http://wordpress.org/extend). He is the author of GenesisBuddy which is a BuddyPress enabled child theme for the Genesis Theme Framework by StudioPress. |
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Scott Robbin Scott Robbin currently leads the development effort for Weightshift, a design studio based in San Francisco and Chicago. Prior to joining Weightshift, Scott was the co-founder of Songza, a successful online music search engine; co-founder of SitBy.Us, a social scheduling service; and owned and operated a Chicago-based web development firm for 12 years. In this time, he has customized many notable WordPress installations including the Mozilla Labs, Deadline.com, BagNews and Humanized. |
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Chris Ross Chris is a technologist and entrepreneur with over 20 years experience in software development, marketing and consulting. When not seeking out Texas Hold ‘Em poker games, he manages Carina LLC, a technology consulting and software development company in the Chicago area. He is also a partner in the stealth startup tiskits, which is beta launching this summer (fingers crossed). |
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Scott Stawarz Scott Stawarz (@scottstawarz) is the principal technologist of Octavity.com, a technology studio in Lake Zurich, IL. At Octavity, Scott helps businesses solve problems with e-commerce, blogging, search engine optimization, social media marketing, networking architecture, and software development. In addition to consulting, he provides training to technology training centers and businesses. Scott is an adjunct faculty member at Harper College, in Palatine, IL where he teaches internet technologies, SQL Server databases, and social media optimization. Scott is a 10 year Microsoft Certified Trainer holding numerous technology certifications. In 2004, Scott co-founded Simpleweight.com with his brother as a way to manage their fitness and challenge others to do the same. It gave Scott an opportunity to meld his passions for helping people, technology, and fitness. Scott uses simpleweight as a way to experiment with new technologies, internet marketing, and experimental search engine optimization techniques. On the internet, you can find Scott blogging at simpleweight.com/blog/, octavity.com, and scott.stawarz.com. When he is not on the internet, Scott can be found building lego houses with his two young children, cooking for his runner wife, or researching and reading (typically on the internet). |
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Shannon Steffen Shannon Steffen (@SKSDesigns) has been involved in web development and web marketing since 1995 and has been avidly involved in organic SEO and social media since 2004. She is also a forerunner in embracing social media and has worked extensively on small business web sites and blogs. Shannon has been a successful Internet entrepreneur with primary focus on organic SEO, social media & online reputation management since first opening her own e-commerce website. Shannon believes success is meeting the customers, clients and community where they live – on the Internet. Shannon has been mentioned in #TwitterWorks, given numerous presentations on how SEO can benefit web developers and businesses, and is the Milwaukee Social Media blogger for Examiner.com. Shannon is also an active and enthusiastic member of many social media communities such as Facebook, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. With all the changes in search engine indexing and the inclusion of real time search results, Shannon understands the importance of SEO and SMO to small businesses, non-profits and the individual blogger – creating strategies to harness available tools to create awareness, branding and community. |
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Hal Stern Hal Stern is a co-author of "Professional WordPress" and has been blogging about sports, technology, food, the number 8 and life in New Jersey since 2004 at http://snowmanonfire.com. He enjoys getting WordPress to do things that people say shouldn't be possible. After 20 years with Sun Microsystems, he is once again a technology free agent working on data intensive computing, cloud architectures and enterprise content management. |
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Jim Turner Jim is head of One By One Media, which he began in 2004. He is a respected social media consultant and professional blogger who is well-connected in advertising, public relations, marketing and other business circles, consulting with Fortune 500 companies, large agencies and startup companies. More than 20 years of working in the law gave Jim the management and leadership skills needed to successfully guide companies through the Web 2.0 business space. Jim has been a conference director and social media director in the event space, and consults trade shows, events and and conventions on the use of social media. He also serves on the advisory boards of several companies, helping them adapt to the new social media environment. Jim is a veteran Daddy blogger living in Colorado with his wife and four children. |
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Brad Williams Brad Williams is the CEO and Co-Founder of WebDevStudios.com. He is also a co-host on the SitePoint Podcast. Brad is also the co-author of the WROX book Professional WordPress. He was one of the original co-hosts on the WordPress Weekly Podcast and still joins the show on occasion. Brad has given presentations at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, Montreal, New York City, and Boston. He is also the organizer for the New Jersey WordPress Meetup Group. Brad has been developing websites for over 14 years, including the last 4 where he has focused on open-source technologies like WordPress. |
