Speakers

Peter Baylies

Peter Baylies has always been a programmer, a childhood hobby led to a career that he is absolutely enjoying. Peter graduated from NC State University with a Computer Science degree, and worked as a web developer using PHP and MySQL until he found WordPress and fell in love with it. Peter works primarily on WordPress plugin development at Semper Fi Web Design. Peter loves music, science fiction, and “just smart stuff in general”, as he puts it.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Speed up that site: A guide to caching plugins
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Users

Steve Mortiboy

Steve Mortiboy is the COO and Service Delivery Manager for Semper Fi Web Design. He leads the team that develops plugins such as All in One SEO Pack. He has been working with WordPress for over 4 years and devotes much of his time to helping people get the most from WordPress. When not hard at work he’s working on DIY project at home or off traveling.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: SEO for content authors
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Users

Alicia Duffy

Alicia Duffy has been a web designer/front-end dev for about 5 years and works at PETA in Norfolk, VA. PETA is in the process of transitioning a lot of our sites from .Net to WordPress and they are big fans of the platform. Alicia is presenting with her coworker Ben Bond, who is a PHP developer. They will share a mapping technique they came up with recently for a college vegan dining options website.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Making Responsive Maps in WordPress
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Developers

Zac Gordon

Zac Gordon has a background teaching web design, development and WordPress at levels from middle schools, high schools, colleges and Universities. Today he teaches WordPress at Treehouse, the online technology school.

Zac also owns a web design company that specializes in $975 WordPress sites for small business owners

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: How to Learn Web Design and Development Using WordPress
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Power Users

Brett Bumeter

Brett Bumeter is a corporate whistle blower, writer, blogger, videographer and WordPress developer for small businesses, artists and non profits.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Tools that Add Drag & Drop Design in Any Theme
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Power Users

Heather Curtis

Heather Curtis is the Associate Marketing Director at TheeDesign Studio in Raleigh. She works directly with web design clients to help them achieve their online marketing goals. While not a developer herself, she has nearly a decade of experience in training customers of all skill levels how to use custom web platforms and routinely serves as a translator for dev talk to layman terms.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Teach Me WordPress: How to Train Your Clients
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Users

Ed Nailor

Ed Nailor has personally developed and overseen well over 200 website projects for over 100 different companies and clients. These websites have included smaller budget 2-3 page informational websites, full-fledged e-commerce websites, mobile websites and large websites with well over 100 pages of content (including budgets well into the 5 digit range).

Ed does an extensive amount of work with WordPress and has become well versed in the WordPress system. Ed can install WordPress, create WordPress themes (both parent and child themes) and write WordPress plugins. He also works with PHP, HTML, CSS and jQuery in most of his projects.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: The Intimate Framework
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Developers

David Herrera

David Herrera is a web developer at Religion News LLC, a nonprofit journalism organization providing non-sectarian coverage of religion, spirituality and ideas. He has been developing WordPress sites since 2009.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Unit Testing for Nearly Intermediate Developers
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Developers

Michael McNeill

Michael McNeill is a WordPress developer, consultant, and service provider who has worked with numerous companies ranging from the smallest startups to large corporations. He is a partner in Digital Strategy Works, a digital strategy agency focused on end-to-end digital strategy, with a focus on WordPress development, design, and maintenance.
He has worked with hundreds of clients and loves showing off what WordPress can do. During the day, Michael works for Carolina Athletics as their Student Director of Technology and Development, helping to drive engagement through technology to the Carolina Athletics brand. Between all that, Michael is a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a co-organizer of the WordPress Chapel Hill Meetup.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: BuddyPress: Social Networks with WordPress
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Power Users

Alisa Herr

Alisa Herr is the head of the development team at Cuberis. As a programmer she loves the magic of weaving together websites with nothing but a string of characters. She leads her team to define technical solutions that solve business problems and to build websites people want to interact with. She has been coding since 1996 and pushing WordPress beyond its limits since 2009. She’s coded 100+ WordPress sites and they’re all different.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Jailbreaking WordPress: That’s what you’re supposed to do
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Power Users

Adam Sewell

Adam Sewell is a wearer of many hats – a father, husband, entrepreneur. Most of his time is spent with his IT support company, MyGeek Technologies, and then split among his other projects, which include Shopp Toolbox, which develops and consults for e-commerce sites based on the WordPress plugin Shopp, and tinyElk Studios, a full fledged WordPress development and design firm. Adam is also the organizer of the Salisbury WordPress Meetup group.

Ironically, Adam rarely wears an actual hat.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Beyond SEO: Alternative methods of promoting your WordPress web store
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Users

Julien Melissas

Julien Melissas is a 20-year old web developer from Asheville, NC with a passion for clean, efficient code, and re-doing things until they’re just right. Julien loves to learn about new up-and-coming technologies and development workflows. While he works mainly in HTML, CSS (including preprocessors like LESS and SCSS), JS/jQuery, and PHP, Julien has dabbled in JS Frameworks and Ruby on Rails. He has been working with WordPress for almost 4 years now and has grown quite fond of it. Julien now works as a Freelancer and Independent Contractor for a few local companies, where he builds custom WordPress themes and solutions tailored to the client’s needs. Julien loves custom post types, the Roots framework, and of course, Elliot Condon’s Advanced Custom Fields plugin. Julien is also a huge supporter and user of Responsive Web Design, and specifically the Twitter Bootstrap framework, which he has presented on in the past. When Julien is not in front of the screen, people can find him making music, cooking, or out in the yard gardening with his girlfriend, Hana, and their dog, Dina.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Pushing WordPress further with Advanced Custom Fields
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Developers

Lee Blue

Lee Blue is the founder and lead developer of the Cart66 WordPress e-commerce plugin and Mijireh, the secure hosted checkout platform. After getting his degree in computer science, Lee worked for the United States government doing bio-terrorism surveillance and managing electronic medical records. In 2008, with a heightened awareness of security Lee approached WordPress e-commerce and developed one of the first e-commerce plugins, Cart66. For over 5 years he has been learning what people need for e-commerce and delivering solutions to the WordPress community.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: WordPress E-commerce
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Power Users

Tom Harrigan

After college, Tom moved to New York City as the co-founder of Rootbuzz, a startup in the online community space. As a bootstrapped startup, he inevitably started using WordPress for client sites. After some time, Tom began using the themes and plugins from WooThemes and fell in love. In 2012 he was fortunate enough to join WooThemes and has been growing with and learning from a team of fantastic Ninjas and developers based all around the globe.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Sliders: The Good, The Bad and The Technical
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Developers

Will Haley

While growing up in Gainesville, Georgia, Will always had a fascination with all things web. However, he remained a self-described “shady tree geek” while he obtained a business degree from Furman University and started a career in the banking industry. Four years later, he decided to hang up his suit and tie to pursue a career in web development by attending graduate school at North Carolina Central University where he graduated Summa Cum Lauda with both a Masters in Business Administration and Information Science.

Since graduate school, Will has collected over five years of experience with designing, developing and deploying web applications using technologies such as PHP, Javascript and SQL – along with many others.

While at Atlantic BT, Will has become one of the top WordPress Developers for the organization and has been the developer on over 50 custom WordPress sites Atlantic BT has built.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Can’t Beat Gravity: How to extend Gravity Forms to make clients happy and your life easier
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Developers

Tony Zeoli

Nights and weekends, Tony Zeoli operates Digital Strategy Works, a WordPress consulting and development shop focused on developing WordPress powered sites for the media and entertainment, publishing, music and fashion industries. By day, Tony is Director of Product Development, Music Services for Market America, where he heads up development of an independent artist platform where artists can sell music and merchandise direct to fans. In addition to his product development and information architecture experience, Tony is an accomplished tech and deep house DJ and has been active in the music industry for over 25+ years. A former Billboard Dance Chart Reporting DJ, he lead the “innovation and advancement of dance music online” in 1995, when he launched Netmix.com, the first streaming DJ mix show site in the world. As volunteer Director of Interactive for the fledgling National Museum of Hip-Hop, Tony was responsible for architecting the start-up museum’s digital and social media strategy. Tony is also an advisor to 8tracks, the 4th largest streaming music service behind Pandora.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Using WordPress to Power Music Sites
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Users

Ryan Duff

Ryan Duff has been working with WordPress since early 2004 and was the original author of WordPress Contact Form. As a long time community member, he enjoys exploring new ways to make use of WordPress. Making things simple for clients and pushing the envelope of what’s possible is at the core of that. Ryan is a developer by nature so he focuses primarily on back end architecture and less on design. He’s also an experienced linux sysadmin with 6+ years under his belt. Over the past few years he’s given various WordCamp talks highlighting these skills.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Extending Your WordPress Toolbelt with WP-CLI
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Developers

Doug Cone

Doug Cone is happily married to Kristi Cone, they have two cats, Monki and Alf. Doug has been a web developer since 1997 and is passionate about programming and strategy. One of the advantages of Doug’s current working situation is the ability to work from anywhere. He has used that to become a frequent responder to disaster relief efforts across the United States. Doug has spent time helping people recover from hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires. In addition to volunteering, Doug also tries to contribute to several open source software projects. He is a passionate advocate for the open source model. Some of his favorite open source projects are: Ubuntu, PHP, WordPress, Drupal and many others. Doug also loves to make things, both to make life easier and to take on challenges.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: WordPress and Embedded Computing
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Developers

Ray Mitchell

Ray Mitchell is the owner of SixFour Web Design, which specializes in websites for small businesses and non-profit organizations. He regularly consults with small businesses and non-profit organizations on improving their online presence and enhancing engagement with potential customers and donors through their website and social media. Active in his local community, Ray sits on the board of several non-profit organizations.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Mind Your Own Business (website)!
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Users

Melodie Laylor

While studying music in college, Melodie discovered her inner geek working part-time in the computer lab. Melodie has been working with computers and the Internet ever since. Melodie married a geek guy and we went into business troubleshooting and repairing computers. Along the way they had four geektastic kids. She discovered WordPress in 2007, fell in love with it and never looked back. Melodie branched out as a freelance web designer in 2010, and has been an organizer of the WordPress Hampton Roads Meetup since 2011. Melodie and her husband are currently rebranding themselves as PajamaWeb.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Branching Out with Multisite and BuddyPress
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Power Users

Marty Martin

Marty Martin has been working with WordPress since it was forked. He is widely considered an expert on the topic of WordPress SEO (beyond plugins) and has consulted with the smallest of businesses to Global 50 international corporations on their WordPress installations and custom use scenarios.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Duplicated & unique content to rank your WordPress pages with Google
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Power Users

Steven Slack

Steven Slack moved to Rio de Janeiro in 2007 to work with the non-profit Mundo Real. He quickly became their communications and technology person, building their website, social media, and newsletters. Steven was living in Rio de Janeiro’s largest urban slum, Rocinha, and that is where he learned how to create websites following tutorials, online training, and of course debugging all while living in one of his favorite neighborhoods in the world, Laboriaux.

Steve was introduced to WordPress in 2008 as he was handed a project that contained an install of WordPress version 2.2 which he then updated to version 2.6. Since then he have been working in WordPress developing themes and plugins for clients.

When Steven is not in front of the computer he enjoys riding his bicycle, exploring Western North Carolina’s beautiful wilderness, traveling, and the company of his wonderful friends and community.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Developing Custom Themes for Clients
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Developers

Corey Freeman

Corey Freeman has been working with WordPress since she was 12 years old, and now runs Headway101.com which trains people to use headway themes, and develop and design client websites.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Tips for a Great Website Foundation
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Users

Hal Goodtree

Hal Goodtree is the editor and publisher of CaryCitizen and more than two dozen other websites including AmericanTobaccoCampus.com. Since 2009, Mr. Goodtree has been intimately involved in community publishing revolution. He’s been a featured speaker at WordCamp RDU, WordCamp Richmond and WordCamp NYC. CaryCitizen is a Knight Foundation Fellowship winner and has been written about in the Columbia Journalism Review and The New York Times.

WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Session: Power Content for Publishers
WordCamp Raleigh 2013 Track: Power Users