We’re pleased to announce that Eddie Burroughs will be speaking at WordCamp Raleigh 2014. Eddie’s session will be on the Beginners track and will be about Building a Real Estate Website.

Eddie Burroughs is the lead web developer for a Wake Forest, NC marketing and design company Right Foot Forward. He has been building websites since 1999. In 2004 he began working on finding a CMS that he could devote his attention to and build from there. Eddie tried many of the popular systems but ultimately landed on WordPress. Eddie has built many websites for several design agencies before joining the Right Foot Forward Team. Eddie has for several years been actively and passionately involved in Real Estate. So much of his work has been in the real estate industry. In 2006 Eddie became a Realtor in NC. He worked for RE/MAX Point East in Rocky Mount. Along with being a real estate professional Eddie has also served on the board of the Triangle Real Estate Investors Association (TREIA). Eddie knows and understands the real estate market.

We’re happy to announce that Justin Sternberg will be speaking at this year’s WordCamp Raleigh. Justin’s session will be for the Developers track and will be about CMB2: The Metabox Strikes Back.

Justin Sternberg is an established “designeveloper”, a term he coined when he began transitioning from a designer to a… developer. He loves building custom hand-crafted solutions with WordPress. CPTs, custom taxonomies, and APIs FTW! He is one of the Developer Leads at WebDevStudios, and is having a blast!

Join us at WordCamp Raleigh to meet Justin and learn about using custom metaboxes, fields and forms for your WordPress site!

We’re happy to announce that Evan Volgas will be speaking at WordCamp Raleigh this year. Evan’s session will cover Things you should know about WordPress (but were always afraid to ask) and will be on the Power Users track.

Licensed Caffeine Therapist and Data Geek. Huge lover of dogs, tea, coffee, and cantaloupe. Wanders on purpose. Gets lost a lot while driving. Used to tap dance and do ballet. Now, messes around with Scala, Python, Cassandra, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Hadoop/Hive/Spark/Sqoop/etc, WordPress, and R.

This talk is aimed at designers and new developers who maybe have a few PHP tricks up their sleeves, but still don’t really see how all of this stuff comes together. If you’ve never edited functions.php and don’t know what it is, this probably isn’t a good talk for you just yet. If you’ve written a plugin or modified several .php files in your WordPress themes, this will probably be a bit too basic for you. If you’ve set up a child theme before and know what functions.php is, even if you haven’t really used it all that much, or even at all…. you’re probably the exact person who will get a lot out of this talk. If that’s you and you come to this talk, you should be familiar and comfortable with most of the behind-the-scenes mechanics of WordPress by the time we’re done.

We’re excited to announce that Melissa Eggleston will be speaking at WordCamp Raleigh 2014. Melissa will be speaking about What We Know About Website Users and this session will be on the Beginners Track.

Melissa Eggleston is a multimedia specialist who loves economics and business. In 1996, she wrote her first online stories about soccer for a sports marketing firm and surely violated all best practices we now know about writing for the web.

After working as a financial planner and living in San Francisco, San Diego, Costa Rica, and Mexico, Melissa returned to her home state of North Carolina to attend graduate school in 2007. She was formally trained in both written and visual communication at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Melissa gained further experience at Bloomberg News and Duke University before deciding to freelance. She now helps small businesses and non-profits “tell their stories” with clear and engaging communication on user-friendly websites. Melissa has written stories, shot photos, created graphics, and developed websites for clients throughout the U.S. She is equally happy to call both neighborhood businesses and notable people, such as a 2012 Nobel Laureate, her clients.

Melissa is currently working on a book on communication strategy with a Professor at Elon University. She regularly speaks on topics such as usability, content strategy, and multimedia.

We’re happy to announce that Julien Melissas will be returning as a speaker for this year’s WordCamp Raleigh. Julien’s session will be about Roots: the starter theme that will make you a better developer.

Julien Melissas is a 21-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 technologies and development workflows and prides himself on his knowledge as a front-end developer. 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. He was an organizer of the 2014 WordCamp in Asheville, NC. Julien loves custom post types, the Roots framework, the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, and Responsive Web Design – specifically using the Twitter Bootstrap framework, which he has presented on in the past. When Julien is not in front of the screen working on websites or that next big startup/webapp, you can find him making music, cooking, or out in the yard gardening with his girlfriend, Hana, and their dog, Dina.

Get your ticket for WordCamp Raleigh 2014 to learn more about Roots and theme development with WordPress!

We’re pleased to announce that Jake Aull will be speaking at WordCamp Raleigh 2014. Jake’s session is on the Power Users track and will cover SEO Strategy for WordPress Sites & Blogs.

In Jake’s words:
I am principal of Zen Fires; an SEO, web designer, branding digital strategist & good guy if I say so myself. I write digital marketing books for Prentice Hall, including WordPress SEO Success. I teach social media marketing/SEO at Georgia State University part-time, am a panelist and speaker in the industry, have been cited in Atlanta Business Chronicle & was co-founder and Chair for Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association Social Media SIG.

To hear Jake’s session and learn from his experience join us at WordCamp Raleigh!