Lisa Linn Allen
Lisa Linn Allen is Team Lead for the the Intranet at SAS, the largest independent software vendor in the Business Intelligence market.
She has worked on the SAS Wide Web since she marked up the first graphical version of its home page 18 years ago, and she is currently leading the team through the process of moving all employee-facing Intranet content into WordPress.
Follow Lisa on Twitter: @LisaLinnAllen
Scott Saunders
Session: WordPress beyond Websites
Track: Developers
Hello, My name is Scott. Currently I’m the senior front end developer for Red Letter Marketing in Greensboro NC where I’ve been for the past 9 years. Nearly every site that has been built by RLM has been done in WordPress. We have moved from not just using WordPress for websites but for developing web based interactive sales tools for iOS, and our framework for digital signage. I also run Dieselpunk Industries where I host a constantly growing library of 400+ feature length films, 400+ serials, 111 shorts and cartoons, and 25,291 radio shows, a Roku channel, and a web based streaming movie channel all maintained using WordPress.
Code samples and snippets: https://codepad.co/scottthebuilder
Dieselpunk Industries: http://www.dieselpunkindustries.com
Kevin Dees
Session: Build Custom Themes with Less Code using TypeRocket
Track: Developer
Howdy, I’m Kevin Dees. I’m the founder of Robojuice. It is a web strategy company focused on delivering a refined experience to partners. I’m also the creator of TypeRocket for WordPress. TypeRocket was created to help developers and designers of WordPress sites build beautiful custom sites with less code. I have been blogging since 2009 on various sites. I was a host of the SitePoint podcast for their last year on air from episode 140 – 192. I was also the cohost of the Web Weekly podcast which started in July 2010 and aired close to 100 episodes.
Evan Mullins
Session: WP API, what is it good for? Absolutely Everything!
Track: Developers
Evan Mullins uses WordPress daily at the office as well as for his own projects. He is currently the Lead Web Developer at Brown Bag Marketing, an integrated marketing agency in Atlanta. He blogs at circlecube.com and has even been known to dream in WordPress. With a background in digital media art, he now embraces the dark side and has found a strong creative outlet programming websites. Evan loves the problem solving aspect of web development and shines at harnessing WordPress as a true CMS & making interactive designs interactive. He strives to make the web a prettier, more pleasant and all-around better place for you & your grandma. Outside of work, Evan is a dedicated husband, father of four and soccer coach who loves rock music, audiobooks, chocolate and good pizza.
Brian Reed
Session: Creating SOLID (not STUPID) Plugins and Themes
Track: Developer
A software development consultant hailing from Virginia Beach, VA, Brian’s passion for the web began in 1996 while building his high school’s first website. Since then Brian has served in the U.S. Army, started a family of 6 and has taught himself multiple frontend and backend programming, markup, and domain-specific languages. Brian helps organize his local Meetup group focusing on advanced WordPress Development.
Patrick Stox
Session: Google Tag Manager Can Do What Now?
Track: Power User
Patrick Stox is an SEO Specialist for IBM, an organizer for the Raleigh SEO Meetup (the most successful SEO Meetup in the US), author for leading industry blogs, and SEO conference speaker.
Kyle Laverty
Session: The Power of the WordPress Editor
Hey yinz! I am Kyle Laverty, founder of Laverty Creative, a small one-man-show of a web design company in Apex, NC. I am the one man, and I design and develop effective, brand powering WordPress websites. I am self taught, and have been honing my skills as a web designer and developer since 2012. Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, I am also a veteran of the United States Air Force where I served as an Aircraft Mechanic (on F-16’s and F-15’s) for 4 years. When I’m not developing websites I enjoy learning more about web design and development, and spending time with my family. I live with my fiancé and our children of which she has 3 (future stepchildren of mine) and we have 2 together, as well as our 2 dogs. I am also currently pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at Penn State World Campus (Only 2 semesters left!).
Jonathan Kay
Session: Troubleshooting for Beginning Developers
Track: Power Users
Jonathan has spent his professional life as a Linux systems administrator and has focused the past half a dozen years on making his servers take care of many WordPress sites. Most recently he has developed WP Stagecoach to make staging site for WordPress simple. He somehow manages to get some work done despite the pets who constantly want all his attention all the time, and really enjoys his time outdoors in the beautiful Pacific Northwest with his standard poodle!
David Grubb
Session: WordPress Operations / Management – A Reality Check
I started using WordPress for my clients in 2008. I converted all the original website designs that I had made into WordPress themes. Then I emailed my clients and told them they could now login and edit their website through their browser. This was a huge game changer for my small business which I sold to Brightmill in 2014. Since 2008 I have leveraged WordPress as a Content Marketing Software to help my clients achieve their goals. Currently, I work for Brightmill as their WordPress Expert, Sr. Marketing Technology Consultant, building the Brightmill’s Brand and Shepherds Loft’s WordPress Management Service Solutions.
Calvin Powers
Session: Lies, Damned Lies, and Google Analytics
Track: Power User
Calvin Powers is a media producer for IBM’s developerWorks TV, which is based on WordPress. He’s also an amateur blogger, podcaster, and DIY media mogul (in his own mind). He uses WordPress extensively for his media projects and is keenly interested in evidence-based content marketing.
Peter Baylies
Session:Using Shortcodes In WordPress
Track: Beginner
Peter has been a programmer for as long as he can remember. He started coding on a Commodore 64, and after attending the NC School of Science and Math, he went on to graduate from NCSU with a degree in Computer Science. Now at Rivers Agency, he is their in-house WordPress expert. Previously, he worked on developing the All in One SEO Pack plugin at Semper Fi Web Design.
Linton Hale
Session: To Democratize Publishing! – An Introduction to the Basics of WordPress
Track: Beginner
Linton Hale is a WordPress developer living in Sebastopol, California, who enjoys building beautiful and effective websites for small to mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. He’s a serious believer in the principle of free speech, and is thrilled with the mission of WordPress “To Democratize Publishing!”. To support this mission, he loves working with clients who are inspired to learn how to publish their ideas on the internet. He also loves being a husband and father, a flute player and a drummer, and teaching the basics of world music.
Corey Freeman
Session: Common Sense SEO
Track: Beginner
Corey Freeman has been working with WordPress for over 10 years, helping users of all experience levels build the website of their dreams. She excels at breaking down difficult concepts into simple terms that anyone can understand. She also owns the world’s most ridiculous dog.
Alisa R. Herr
Session: Captivate your audience with data-driven storytelling
Track: Beginner
Alisa Herr is an award-winning web developer and the founder of Unity, a digital agency for organizations driven to serve the common good. Alisa learned HTML in 1996 — the really early days of the Web — and has spent 20 years honing her skills in a variety of programming languages. She is a judge for the SXSW Interactive Innovation Awards, and regularly speaks at events across the state. Before founding Unity, she was the chief technical officer of the nonprofit EducationNC where she designed and developed the customized platform in WordPress, featuring industry-leading multimedia content design and data visualization. Alisa was born and raised in Cary and Apex, has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Appalachian State University, and a master’s degree in library and information science from UNC Chapel Hill.
Adam W. Warner
Session: Using Curated Content in WordPress—Why and How.
Track: Beginner
Adam W. Warner discovered the world of WordPress in 2005 and has been working within the community ever since. To feed his entrepreneurial spirit, he founded several WordPress-focused businesses that provide education, plugins and consulting services for online business owners. He is a true product evangelist for WordPress in spirit and personality, and that also happens to be his job title at SiteLock. In addition to WordPress, Adam is passionate about his family, robots and of course, life, the universe and everything.
Thomas Griffin
Session: How To Build a Sustainable WordPress Product Business
Track: Business
I’m a partner and CTO at Awesome Motive, Inc. and built OptinMonster, Soliloquy and Envira Gallery. I also created the TGM Plugin Activation class for dependency management in WordPress. I love creating products that are incredibly powerful yet simple to use for the average person!
Sharon Dawson
Session: Not One And Done
Track: Business
Sharon Dawson is a Marketing Communications Manager at TheeDesign. She and her team plan and execute marketing campaigns to help small, local, and national companies get more customers and sales. She manages social media for her customers as a piece of this strategy, and especially loves educating them on the many benefits of Instagram and Pinterest to reach more potential customers. She also helps non-profits with social media such as Toastmasters for the state of NC and the recent TEDxRaleigh event. She’s recently been a speaker at the Raleigh SEO Meetup Conference and last year’s Digital Marketing for Business Conference.
Ray Mitchell
Session: Start Your WordPress Business This Weekend
Track: Business
Ray is the owner of SixFour Web Design & Marketing, which focuses on meeting the unique marketing needs of small businesses and non-profit organizations. Active in the local community, Ray is a member of and sits on the board of several community non-profit organizations.
David Bentley
Session: Automate or Die!
Track: Business
A gun slinger turned web nerd. After leaving the sands of Afghanistan in 2010, I embarked in a new adventure – web tech entrepreneurship… naturally! I started ZeroZen Design, a web design company that has worked with over 650 clients around the world. We pride ourselves on creating an automated company that allows us to focus more on producing websites that work and less on the sales and project management processes. In 2013, we started the evolution to the daily deals business model – MobRocket. In 2015 we raised a seed round. We are currently working on a series A. MobRocket is the easiest way for a small business to reach new clients and customers in a short amount of time, wherever they are. Automated! I believe in building companies that are sustainable, scalable, and most of all, profitable! WordPress makes it easier.
Amy Howard
Session: 10 Key Elements Your Website Must Have
Track: Business
Amy Howard started out her adult life as a soldier in the U.S. Army but for the last six years has been a certified webmaster and small business marketing expert specializing in online marketing, search engine optimization, and web design. She currently teaches “Creating Your WordPress Website” class at local community colleges. She is a partner with Print and Web Designer in Cary, NC. She brings the experience of being a small business owner and recognizes the limited resources that small business owners have, and the urgency for every marketing dollar to go farther.
Micah Wood
Session: Using Chrome Developer Tools
Track: Developers
Micah is an Atlanta-based, full-stack developer committed to improving his craft continuously and sharing his insights with the development community. He is currently the dev team lead at Narwhal Digital and specializes in building websites and applications on the WordPress platform for enterprise clients.
Julien Melissas
Session: JS Framework Showdown
Track: Developers
Julien Melissas is a web developer from Asheville, NC. He has been working with WordPress for 5+ years now and has grown quite fond of it. Julien is a co-founder and technical director at Craftpeak, a creative agency in Asheville, where he works on UI/UX projects, as well as full website and web application builds. He’s on the Roots.io development team and works on open source whenever he can get a second away from work.
Dougal Campbell
Session: Get Off My Lawn and Out of My Dashboard!
Track: Developers
Dougal Campbell is a web developer and WordPress ‘Developer Emeritus’. After spending many years doing back-end programming in PHP and Perl, his latest passion is JavaScript (on both front- and back-end). Dougal was one of the original WordPress developers, contributing features such as XML-RPC API support, Post Custom Fields, mass re-enabling of plugins, and Conditional GET support for feeds (among others). When he isn’t hovering over a keyboard and mumbling incoherently to himself, Dougal enjoys spending time with his wife, Susan, and their kids, grandkids, and pets in the sub-suburbs of Atlanta.
Susan Campbell
Session: Teachers Make the Worst Students!
Track: Power Users
Susan Campbell is a Systems Analyst for the Cherokee County School District (near Atlanta). She has worked in IT in some form or another for 18+ years, having done network administration, web monkeying around, taming users, and lots of scripting to automate processes so she doesn’t have to think about them anymore. She also dislikes writing about herself in the third-person.
Steve Mortiboy
Session: Debugging Common Errors in WordPress
Track: Power Users
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 6 years and devotes much of his time to helping people get the most from WordPress. He is also one of the organizers of WordCamp Raleigh and the Raleigh WordPress Meetup Group. When not hard at work he’s working on DIY projects at home or off traveling.
Lauren Jeffcoat
Session: The Power of a Video Library
Track: Power Users
I have been building WordPress websites for over seven years and currently am part of the OnTheGoSystems WPML Customer Support team. I love building WordPress websites and have worn many hats in the world of web development including Project Manager, Customer Service Representative, Account Strategist, and Web Designer. Originally from New England, I now live in Surfside Beach, South Carolina. I enjoy sharing my knowledge along with tips and tricks that I have learned either through furthering my education or personal experience. I have successfully implemented video library strategies on a number of websites and believe this is an untapped marketing channel that is quickly growing. Thinking outside the box can lead to creative ways of utilizing Video Libraries on almost any site.
Adam Sewell
Session: I’ve Been Hacked!
Track: Power Users
Adam Sewell is a father, husband, and entrepreneur. Most of his time is spent with his IT support company, MyGeek Technologies. Though he is also known to develop WordPress sites and plugins as well as providing high performance hosting specific to WordPress. The most recent WordPress plugin is Simple Desk, a ticketing system aimed at service based businesses. You can find it on GitHub.
Melissa Eggleston, Julie Grundy and Marjorie Sample
Session: Improving Your Website’s UX: Your Questions Answered
Track: Beginners
UX professionals Melissa Eggleston, Julie Grundy and Marjorie Sample co-organize the Ladies that UX Durham chapter and teach Intro to UX classes for Girl Develop It.
Lisa Ghisolf
Session: A house with no walls: Creating a site structure for the future
Track: Beginners
Lisa Ghisolf is Gizmo Creative Factory, with 18+ years in print, web & email design, and 13 years in business. She’s worked with big and small agencies alike, creating print work and websites for Kraft, Clear Channel, Allstate & many corporations & organizations. Instead of just putting out fires, she’s now building robust WordPress sites and training clients on website management.
Andrea Olson
Session: The Magic of Funnels: Using WordPress to Turn Visitors into Buyers
Track: Beginners
Andrea Olson is the owner of Go Diaper Free and Tiny Undies, two companies run 100% online, 100% powered by WordPress. She lives in Asheville with her husband, 3 children, and a bunch of animals.
Andrea Ferguson
Session: Choosing WordPress Plugins: Like Being a Kid in a Candy Store
Track: Beginners
Andrea (Andi) Ferguson is Founder & President of AndiSites Inc., a boutique web design and development firm based in Chapel Hill, NC. AndiSites specializes in WordPress, including design, development, support, and maintenance. With 20+ years’ experience in project management, 12 years’ experience in corporate communications, and 10 years’ experience in web design and development, Andi knows what it takes to give clients an effective website–while they enjoy the process. Andi is a WordPress expert who loves sharing knowledge; bringing technology down to earth; and making the web a friendlier, more open, more welcoming place. Andi is also a film/TV actress (as Andrea Powell) and avid world traveler with husband/writer Paul, sweet dog Teddy, and rebellious bunny Dusty.
Cameron Barrett
Session: WordPress for Schools
Track: Business
Cameron (@camworld) pioneered the blog format in the late 1990s. He’s built web sites for presidential candidates, the U.S. Army, the World Economic Forum and led the migration of 70+ web sites from a proprietary SaaS to WordPress for NJ’s largest public school district. He’s now migrating all 14,000+ U.S. public school districts to WordPress, saving millions of taxpayer dollars. He hails from Northern Michigan and currently lives outside of NYC with his family.
Blake Gruber
Session: Making WordPress Work for The Enterprise
Track: Business
Blake is the co-founder and owner of Narwhal.Digital (www.narwhal.digital) — an experience agency based out of Atlanta, GA. Blake has worked primarily with WordPress over the course of the last 5 years — managing projects from requirements and design through implementation with clients ranging from local startups to Fortune 100 Enterprises.
Lee Blue
Session: How To Promote Your WordPress Site For Free
Track: Business
With computer science degree and a background working with the United States Bio-terrorism department, Lee Blue launched Cart66, one of the first WordPress ecommerce plugins, in 2009. Today Cart66 is the only WordPress plugin offering a complete suite of ecommerce functionality including connected services for reliability and PCI compliance.
Tony Zeoli
Session: Social SEO for Business
Track: Business
Tony Zeoli is founder of Digital Strategy Works, a WordPress design, development, and digital strategy consulting firm based in Asheville, NC. Tony has worked with WordPress since its inception and has consulted to a wide range of corporate, nonprofit, startup, and education organizations seeking to leverage WordPress as a digital communications platform. An expert in WordPress multisite networks, Tony also works with his clients on WordPress SEO, social media integration and marketing, inbound marketing and lead generation, Ecommerce, podcasting, and secure hosting. Originally from Boston, Tony moved to New York City in 1996 to launch his first startup, Netmix.com. After selling the company in 2000, he developed a career in scrum/agile product development and project management for a wide range of companies, including Cablevision, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, and the Associated Press. He moved to the North Carolina in 2010 to lead development of digital products and train students on WordPress in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Tony resides in Asheville with his wife, Missy and their son, Hudson. He’s also an accomplished house music DJ broadcasting mix shows for streaming and podcasting over his long running blog Netmix.com. He is 2009 Honors graduate of New York University, where he earned a degree in Digital Communications and Media, minoring in Digital Media Management.