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UX – A Checklist for Real Websites
Boost the User Experience of your website with these easy-to-follow, real-world examples and best practices! Don’t abandon the project after launch – analyze and iterate to improve the UI and usability of any website.
Performance, Scale, and WordPress
How do you make WordPress scream when you have thousands of posts or millions of visitors? How do you keep things fast when running complex searches or taking post relationships into account? How can you keep users engaged and avoid any lag while loading thousands of data points on a map or scanning millions of posts in a search?
Join Paul for real-word solutions from sites like TED.com and platforms like WordPress.com VIP. When content is massive and speed is king, you have the resources to make solutions instead of compromises.
Media Temple After-Party!
The after-party will take place in Mary Gates Commons on UW’s campus, close to the HUB.
After a long day of learning we hope you can join us for drinks and snacks from 5:30 – 9 pm.
Thanks to Media Temple for sponsoring this party.
Zero Hour Networking
This will be an informal opportunity to hang out and meet your fellow WordCampers.
Responsive Agile WordPress Workflow (RAWW)
While a traditional waterfall workflow might have a designer handing static comps over to a developer, this no longer works in the age of responsive design and frequently causes friction between both parties. This workshop will help designers learn how to “design in the browser”, create a responsive style prototype, allow better communication with developers, and explain responsive design to clients. Stop making static photoshop comps and learn a more contemporary, agile workflow today.
The WordPress Community + Relationships = A Booming Business
There’s nothing sexy about WordPress support, but there’s plenty of work to be done and WP Curve does it. 24/7.
In this presentation, Alex will share actionable insights gained from growing the WP Curve business from 0 to 250 customers in one year. Specifically, you’ll learn:
- How relationships can help you build your business
- The 3 key types of business relationships you should work on
- How and where to find potential business relationships
- The non-sleazy approach to building relationships
Create your first WordPress website – an introduction to WordPress
This session is everyone from bloggers to business owners who is an absolute beginner (or just needs a refresher) on their first journey in the wonderful world of WordPress. Join Nancy West Johnson (Rampant Web Designs) to find out how WordPress can help your website project and how to choose which version of the WordPress platform (WordPress.com or self-hosted [aka WordPress.org]) is best for you. We’ll also take a tour of the dashboard and learn five essential settings to get you started. Feel free to bring your laptop and follow along on your own domain.
I Started A Blog! Now What?
When I started my first, third, and tenth blog, I was excited about the topic, I spent hours obsessing about the design, I’d write a ton of posts, launch my social networking pages and then….Nothing.
Where are the comments? Am I even on the Internet? Umm, what do you mean by keyword research? An editorial what? There’s a difference between WordPress.com and .org? Is this thing on????
If you’ve just started a blog, or are considering one, I’m going to share with you the easy steps I took that helped me take Keep the Tail Wagging from a Me Too Blog (I’ll explain what that is) to a blog owned by someone who regularly chats to the CEOs of major brands, networks with local business owners, and speaks and blogging conferences – in less than 2-1/2 years.
Opening Remarks and Keynote – Designing WordPress: A Drama in Four Parts
Design in an open source project isn’t easy. Complaints about “design by committee” abound. Everyone is afraid of “too many cooks”. It takes blood, sweat, and tears to craft a design that gets the approval of a community.
This is the story of WordPress’ admin. It’s a heart-breaking, heart-wrenching tale of how, through immense trials and tribulations, WordPress’ admin was born, and how it became what it is today. How through ten years of trying, WordPress managed to craft not just a design, but a design process
Keynote
Creating a Plugin from Scratch
This is a workshop that will walk through the steps for creating a WordPress plugin to customize the Jetpack social icons with FontAwesome. The workshop will touch on WordPress and plugin coding best practices, WordPress coding standards, actions, and filters. Users should be familiar working with PHP and CSS and should come prepared with a laptop equipped with an IDE or text editor.
Making Sense of SEO for WordPress
This panel discussion will focus on SEO issues specific to WordPress and, particularly, blogs. In addition, it will attempt to illuminate the lastest in Google goofiness and other peculiarities of SEO. It is not a basic tutorial in SEO, but is still a good choice for beginners.
Migrating WordPress Sites
Ever need to move WordPress sites between hosts, from a production site to a local development site, or vice-versa? If moving WordPress sites causes you fear, pain, or hives, this workshop is for you.
We’ll explore three different methods for moving, or deploying, WordPress sites including:
We’ll also illustrate common problems that occur during site migrations and how to troubleshoot them, including the evil white screen of death, permalink problems, memory issues, .htaccess snafus, and more.
Panel: How to Become a Better WordPress Developer
There’s a LOT of interest in WordPress development, but getting started can be overwhelming, and you may sometimes feel like you’re flailing around and “doing things wrong.”
Four accomplished WordPress developers will talk about their experiences with WordPress development, answer questions, and share tips on how they keep sharp, including:
- What they did to get where they are,
- How they maintain and improve their skills,
- Time-saving tips for novice developers to help avoid heartache and get you on the right track.
Themer Lightning Talks
Advanced Custom Fields – Beyond the Basics, Merrill Mayer
This talk will cover use of ACF in non-blog oriented websites. It will focus on using ACF in a custom post type. It will demonstrate custom queries along with custom prev/next posts. The talk will also show how to display ACF fields in the dashboard for the custom post type overview. Examples will be taken from a live, working website.
A responsive web design workflow: more than just ‘mobile first’, Taylor Dewey
Designing a website for the modern age is a much more complicated endeavor than the term ‘mobile first’ lets on. I’m going to reject the notion of ‘mobile first’ and proffer the replacement buzzword, ‘humans first’, along with a series of specific steps to achieve that goal.
WordPress Accessibility – building WordPress websites that EVERYONE can use, Jordan Quintal
The focus of this quick presentation will be on website and WordPress accessibility. I will briefly explain what web accessibility is and what it involves. I will also demonstrate a popular web accessibility evaluation tool that any develop can use to test their website’s accessibility.
Images for WordPress Done Right, Nancy Thanki
Whether you’re setting up a portfolio page, a site for realtors, or for a professional blogger, images are important. But how do you use images that look great and don’t slow down visitors to your site? What are some important considerations you need to have in mind? This talk will cover things like how WordPress handles images and what you need to know about that (thumbnails, regeneration); how to compress your images; how and when to use progressive jpegs, for instance, or pngs; and what you can do to help images on your site load faster (Photon, CDNs, static asset caching, parallel downloading, etc).
SASS — It’s more than just variables in your CSS
Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets make working with CSS really freakin’ fun. Although variables (yeah, variables in your CSS, how cool is that!) are often highlighted when talking about CSS preprocessers, SASS is so much more. We’ll discuss, with practical examples, other major features of the language such as functions, mixins, placeholder classes and selector nesting.
WordPress Basics
WordPress is not just a blogging platform. It is a content management system that entrepreneurs and small business owners looking for a way to easily launch a website that they can maintain themselves, should take full advantage of. This presentation offers everything you need to know to get started using WordPress from finding a hosting company to creating a post to organizing your navigation.
Topics Covered:
- What is the Difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?
- Installing WordPress
- Installing a theme
- How to create a page
- How to create a post
- How to setup a navigation menu
- What is a Widget?
- What is a Plugin?
Business Lighting Talks
All the Things (That Aren’t WordPress), Julie Kuehl
So you’ve learned WordPress and are ready to make it a business. You’ll quickly find that you’ll need to get some systems put in place to make that happen. From CRMs to IDEs, we’ll got through a brief overview of the pieces needed to make it all work.
Planning a Successful WordPress Site, Kronda Adair
I’ll provide a blueprint for investing your time and money wisely to end up with a site you love that is also useful, effective and easy to manage. I’ll talk about finding a good developer, asking the right questions, and what you as the site owner should be prepared to contribute.
5 Stages of a Startup, Alex Bean
This is a pre-built outline that helps people think through the business, creative, and technical elements they need to think about before they start a online business. Each stage (ideate, validate, build, etc..) comes with actionable steps to think about as your investing time and money into a idea you have.
Website Woes: What To Do When Nobody Clicks, Claudia Smith
A visually pleasing website is a thing of beauty, however, if your message is supposed to be selling “widgets” and it looks like a “cruise in the Carribbean” site, it’s time to do some planning. Here are tips for preparing to start your website using a business and marketing approach to attract your target market!
Small Changes toward Big Things
Large projects often change scope rapidly, hence the use of ambiguous words like scale and platform.
In this session, we’ll cover general strategies around approaching your project with an incremental mindset. Version control, environment, collaboration, and deployment all play key roles when pushing a platform to serve big needs. By laying out a strategy at the start and making consistent small changes, your platform will scale before anyone realizes.
How to Pick a Theme That Doesn’t Suck
There are a lot of WordPress themes out there. Some are free; some are not. Some are chocked full of bells and whistles while others offer little to no additional features. But how do you know which one is right for you? This talk will answer that question and get you on the right track to finding the right theme for your business or blog and will teach you how to avoid some of the most common pitfalls you can encounter during the theme selection process.
Speed as a Feature: Getting a Handle on Page Load Time
Understanding why your page is rendering slowly is the first step to improving your page load speed. The faster your pages load, the better the site will convert and the happier your clients will be! In this talk, Zack will introduce you to concepts that affect your site’s performance, including network connectivity, CSS rendering, and latency. Comprehension of these core performance concepts will then be used to inform sensible recommendations for overcoming these problems. Throughout the discussion, tools for exploring your site’s performance will be demonstrated to show how to optimize your site through proper measurement.
Branding the WordPress Twenty Fourteen Theme: An Overview for the Non-Technical
The latest WordPress theme, Twenty Fourteen, has a lot of new features and options that were not available in earlier themes. Because of this the theme is an attractive choice for starting a new WordPress site or modifying an existing site. With a few, mostly non-technical steps, this theme can be easily modified to meet the basic needs of many website branding tasks. This involves making changes through the dashboard as well as adding custom CSS. This workshop will walk through the steps we took to modify the out-of-box Twenty Fourteen theme to closely match one of our existing, non-WordPress websites.
Developer Lightning Talks
Revising WordPress Revisions with Backbone, Adam Silverstein
WordPress revisions got a jolt of Backbone and a complete interface overhaul in WordPress 3.6 (as did media in 3.5 and themes in 3.8). Hear the revisions rewrite story and description of the effort involved, plus a code overview and ideas for leveraging Backbone (and Underscore) in your WordPress project.
Bulletproof Your WordPress Development, Elisha Terada
Prevention can be more valuable than a cure. Bulletproof your WordPress with WP development best practices, task automations, and safeguarding tools.
Heartbeat API Jump-Start, Mike Schroder
As of WordPress 3.9, the Heartbeat API is no longer experimental! It’s intended to help developers synchronize data between the browser and server without manually sending individual AJAX calls. Attendees will learn Heartbeat basics and have a quick runthrough on how it’s used by WordPress’ core.
Hidden Treasures of WordPress Core, Kailey Lampert
There are a lot of hidden, little-known, and under-documented parts of core that can be really handy to have in your toolkit. Let’s take a look at several of the most-loved and under-used parts of core that will make us all better developers.
Free And Low Cost Ways To Grow An Amazing Blog
When you’re on a budget, you don’t have the time or money to waste on growth tactics that go nowhere. Learn strategies for growing your blog that just plain work. We’ll go over ways to boost traffic through targeted content, how to apply keyword research, how to build an email list of loyal readers, and even how to start leveraging your content to make you money. Find out how to make your amazing content work for you, whether you’ve got $1 to spend or $1000.
Passwords: The Weakest Link in WordPress Security
“The weakest link in the security of anything you do online is your password. It’s the key to your site, your email, your social networking accounts or any other online service you use. If your password is easy to guess, your online identity is vulnerable.” – The WordPress Security team
When we talk about WordPress security, it’s easy to get caught up in the technical details that give us the craziest hacks that make the best stories. In reality, though, most WordPress sites are hacked because bad habits — and, more specifically, bad passwords. It’s easy to recommend better passwords, but this talk will cover the technology that is changing how the password battle is being waged. Background on botnets, two-factor authentication, SSL, and password rot will accompany actionable advice any user can follow to secure their WordPress site.
Speaker: Brennen Byrne
Translate the Geek: Teaching Clients How To Use WordPress
Technology can be intimidating. From the tools to the geek speak, many clients glaze over when they think about working with WordPress. By embracing the role of geek translator, you can train your clients to work within their site or at least be comfortable in knowing what they want done. Everyone has skills they bring to the table when working with a website but those skills may not be in understanding the terminology or function of WordPress. We will go over some simple steps and resources to help make the process of educating clients about WordPress go more smoothly and be more effective. By utilizing multiple training methods and tailoring your training to his/her level of understanding you can give your client the space in which to build confidence and understanding. Build long-lasting, healthy client relationships (and make money!) by learning how to translate the geek!
Speaker: Heather Johnson
What Vladimir Putin Can Teach Us About Responding to Trolling
Vladimir Putin is currently the bad guy of the world. Recently his actions are similar to that of an internet troll, whose primary objective is to instigate a negative response and disorder.
Join Steve Roy from Disqus as he breaks down the patented behavioral methods that trolls of all kinds use. Showing you both technical and human approaches to creating a cleaner, and more civil online community space supported by data from Disqus powered communities, this talk will give you practical do’s and don’ts when it comes to dealing with online incivility.
Speaker: Steve Roy
Web Design Is A Process
Web design does not start with a Photoshop comp. Web design does not start with a Photoshop comp. Photoshop is step 7. Or 10. Or 50. Before you draw a single pixel on your canvas there are a myriad of things that need to be covered. This talk is an exploration of the web design process, all the way from the first client meeting to the shipping of the final product. The audience will learn about IA and UX techniques, card sorting, personas, concurrent development, agile process, version control, the works. This will be a hyper-intensive flyby to give people who work in or want to enter the field of professional web design and development a better understanding of all the roles they’ll have to play and all the ground they’ll need to cover if they want to be truly successful.
Speaker: Morten Rand-Hendriksen
What you don’t know can hurt you: Legal considerations for bloggers
As a blogger, you post photos, and probably quotes from people you interview (or, maybe you borrow quotes and content from other websites). If you have a transactional site, you’re making marketing claims. Every single one of these things can get you into legal trouble, and many bloggers are doing them horribly wrong. Which photos are illegal to post on your blog? What is “fair use,” and how does it affect bloggers, exactly? To what degree can you tweak a direct quotation from someone? What about libel and slander? And what constitutes over-promising from a marketing perspective, and how can it get you into hot water with the FTC? What you don’t know about communication law can hurt you. I’ll present examples writers who’ve found themselves stuck in a legal quagmire, and give practical guidelines and resources for keeping your blog in line.
Speaker: Erica Jorgensen
Joyce Grace
Joyce was recently listed as one of the Top 20 WordPress Bloggers you need to follow and one of 25 Awesome WordPress Women To Watch In 2014.
Joyce now calls herself an Internet marketer, however it is hard to classify her into one specific talent pool because, well, it varies! However, all her backgrounds come together perfectly to complement the job she now does, which is to help businesses and organizations market themselves on the Internet.
In January, 2011, Joyce started her own company, Clicks Online Marketing, where she specializes in working with graphic designers and marketers to produce WordPress content management systems and to perform successful search engine optimization (SEO). Her company aims to provide complete transparency, clear communication, organized processes and high ethical standards to all of its clients.
Sonja Leix
Sonja is a New York based WordPress front-end designer and a co-organizer of WordCamp NYC. She has a strong design background and is passionate about UX, the WordPress community and traveling.
Claudia Smith
Claudia D. Smith, Principal at CSConsulting and Professional Career Manager, offers Business Consulting and Career Coaching Resources for businesses and individuals. She is available for public speaking events featuring the “nuts and bolts” of running a business, marketing or managing your career and interactive skill building workshops.
She represents Target Public Marketing as the Director of the Northwest Region developing business and establishing a client base in the Pacific Northwest Market.
She is adept at practical business solutions & is an intuitive career coach specializing in Career Discovery & Transition for professionals & students, Job Search Preparation, Branding – Resume, Cover Letter, LinkedIn Profile, Elevator Pitch, Personal Story for Interviewing & Networking, Strategic Networking Training, Interview & Negotiation Training & Drills, Accountability Coaching as well as Professional Development for Individuals & Entrepreneurs.
Paul Clark
Paul is a TEDx speaker, WordPress core contributor, and Director of Recruiting at 10up.com, which is home to 30 Core Contributors and the project lead for WordPress 4.0.
He has created intuitive and scalable solutions for clients including TED.com, The Wall Street Journal, and Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP platform.
Alex Bean
Jennifer Bourn
Jennifer Bourn is the Creative Director and Digital Strategist for Bourn Creative, a full service design company based in Sacramento, California that specializes in custom, lead generation WordPress sites. As a Genesis recommended developer, Bourn Creative works with clients around the globe on on branding, website strategy, web design, WordPress, as well as a wide range of graphic design projects. The company also provides consulting on blogging for business, content marketing, and online marketing.
With more than 15 years in the design trenches, and 9 years as co-owner of Bourn Creative (with her husband Brian Bourn), Jennifer is an award-winning designer with a penchant for writing, marketing, chocolate, and Legos (yes, Legos not logos). She built her first WordPress site in 2008, fell in love with giving clients the ability to make their own content revisions, and went all in with WordPress pretty much the same day. Now with more than 300 custom WordPress sites under the belt at Bourn Creative, Jennifer now shares her expertise and lessons learned as a dynamic speaker and avid blogger.
Erik Fadiman
Erik Fadiman is freelance designer and developer who specializes in branding and identity, user experience design, and WordPress development. He is also an instructor at the Seattle Central Creative Academy. He spends a lot of time researching and reading articles to keep up on the latest trends in web design. When he’s not in front of a computer, he likes riding his bike to work, and teaching his two small children about the importance of web standards and semantic markup.
Alex McClafferty
Alex McClafferty is the co-founder of WP Curve – a 24/7 WordPress support service for business owners. Alex lives in San Francisco with his beautiful wife Brittany. This is Alex’s first WordCamp and he’s excited to share what he’s learned in the first year of building a WordPress business. Alex thinks of Seattle as his second home in the USA – he was actually going to move there… Two things stopped him: the rain and the Sacramento Kings. Follow him on Twitter @alexmcclafferty.
Kailey Lampert
Kailey wrote her first line of HTML in 2000, and the years following were filled with some really, really terrible stuff (her words). Then in about 2005/6 she was finally introduced to CSS, and a few months later, also to PHP and MySQL. Those were dangerous times. Putting this new found knowledge to use, she actually managed to cobble together something like a custom blogging system. Code so terrible, it has since been banished from existence. For the next couple years, she continued writing code for all sorts of little things, playing around with it all until she eventually got hired as a web developer.
Shortly following, in late 2008, she had her first WordPress task, create a custom theme for a client’s new blog. Kailey’s first question: What’s WordPress? (though she probably said it with a lowercase p). With a lot of help from Google, she did eventually complete the custom theme, which was really just a heavily modified version of the default Kubrick theme. In 2009 she attended the first Seattle WordCamp, and around this time, her interest was piqued. Since then, she’s started doing all sorts of things with WordPress, including just reading through core. Countless code snippets, a handful of plugins, and a few WordCamps later bring her to today, as a full-fledged WordPress geek.
Nancy West Johnson
Nancy West Johnson has been online since AOL.1 and designing websites soon after that. When she found WordPress it was love at first site. Nancy is the owner/creative director of Rampant Web Designs where she works with clients to help them develop and brand their online presence with a blog, group, or business. Nancy also enjoys teaching in-person classes for WordPress beginners in the South King County area. In her spare time she attends various Celtic events and is a volunteer with the Seattle Highland Games Association (SSHGA.org) where she designs and produces the 80-page program magazine for the annual highland games event held in Enumclaw on the last weekend in July (shameless plug!). Sláinte! {Gaelic for Cheers!}
Kimberly Gauthier
Kimberly Gauthier is the big mouth behind Keep the Tail Wagging, a pet blog inspired by her love of her dogs. Launched in December 2011 in protest of the barrage of ASPCA commercials during the holidays, Keep the Tail Wagging has grown swiftly as Kimberly found an audience who connected with her desire to raise healthy, happy dogs. She waves her Dog Mom flag proudly, faces of critiques with a smile (most of the time), and is open about her wins and losses. A leader in both the pet blogging and raw food community, Kimberly is using the foundation she has built with Keep the Tail Wagging to create a business that will help dog lovers who want to go raw learn the ins and outs, ups and downs, of this “so not a fad” diet!
Author of Standing out in a Popular Blogging Niche (available on Amazon), Kimberly also writes bi-monthly for TPPV.tv (Pets Teach Us So Much), she’s a regular contributor to BlogPaws, has presented at the BlogPaws annual pet blogging conference in 2013 and 2014, and speaks locally to aspiring bloggers about the business and lifestyle of blogging. And if that’s not enough, she also manages multiple Facebook groups that support bloggers and small business owners in the pet industry. All of this while working a full time job, raising 4 dogs and being bossed around by 2 cats with her partner in crime in Marysville, Washington.
Mary Ann Chapman
Mary Ann Chapman has been involved in web work since the days of flashing type and bouncing balls. Her primary emphasis is online marketing strategy, but recently she has been working with a WordPress author to develop a new WordPress blog, for which she is doing the SEO. Her lengthy career has included ownership of businesses in a variety of areas, always with a strategic perspective in mind.
Siobhan McKeown
Siobhan McKeown is a Word Ninja at Audrey Capital where she writes about WordPress, deals with documentation, and has nightmares about the Codex. She’s currently working on an open source book about the history of WordPress. She spends her days delving into the brains of its early developers and community members. When she’s not worrying about the finer details of forking and the GPL, she’s helping out with the project’s future by wrangling WordPress’ documentation.
Andrew Nacin
Andrew Nacin a Lead Developer of WordPress, squashing bugs, mentoring contributors, and spearheading new development — including leading the 3.5, 3.7, and 3.9 releases. He has strong feelings about the core philosophies of WordPress, among them “decisions, not options” and “designing for the majority” — software should be opinionated in lieu of burdening the user. In his first appearance at WordCamp Seattle since 2011, he’ll be sharing what the community has been working on, where we are headed, and how we’re going to get there. Bring your questions as there will be plenty of time for discussion.
Mike Schroder
Mike, known as Shredder to most of his colleagues, is a cross-cultural
kid, coffee-drinking sailor, and lover of Open Source. He currently
works at DreamHost, contributing to the WordPress core and community
projects including WP-CLI. You can find him blogging on various geeky
things at http://www.getsource.net
Tanner Moushey
Tanner has been engineering solutions with WordPress for over 2 years. During that time he has been able to work on a wide variety of projects from startup blogs to complex applications for Fortune 500 hundred companies both as a contractor and as a Web Engineer at 10up. He now runs iWitness Design, a WordPress consulting agency focused on creating elegant solutions for complex WordPress challenges.
Scott Eklund
Scott Eklund is a results-driven marketer with a wide range of experience. He has worked with authors, doctors, entrepreneurs, and small businesses to improve their traffic and conversions. His combination of SEO and PPC experience allow him to dramatically improve the results his clients receive.
Nancy Thanki
Nancy takes photos, shoots film, designs stuff, and tries not to be too pretentious about it. Her very first client was a woman in her eighties running a spectacularly successful cancer non-profit program…who didn’t really use email, let alone anything else. Nancy trained her to set-up and maintain a WordPress site. Throughout undergrad she gave regular talks to prospective students and parents on the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of college. Now as both a web designer and filmmaker, she has realized that she’s teaching very similar lessons to many of my clients, especially those that haven’t worked much with visual design, on how to avoid the pitfalls of “en vogue” to create products that can withstand the test of rising and falling fashions in typography, photography, film, and design.
Kronda Adair
Kronda Adair is an independent WordPress developer and consultant who loves helping people make their sites better. She’s spoken at Open Source Bridge, WordCamp Portland, and recently gave an Ignite talk titled, Stop Making Senseless Websites. In her spare time, she crusades against tiny web fonts and restaurant sites that suck.
Elisha Terada
Elisha is the ‘ninja’ front-end developer. He has developed over 70 client websites in small to mid size projects. Elisha specializes in WordPress development including custom theme, plugin, and admin UI. With tech, design, and business skills, Elisha plans and executes on digital missions from start to finish.
Eric Amundson
Eric Amundson founded IvyCat in 2002 and is the team’s lead web strategist, user-experience designer, and server geek. Once he began developing on WordPress in early 2005, he had found his niche.
Eric’s company specializes in WordPress development, hosting, and maintenance and support. His experience with security, and the intricacies (and headaches) associated with hosting, deploying, moving, and troubleshooting WordPress has made him a helpful resource to happy WordPress users throughout the world.
In his spare time, you might catch him participating at a local WordPress Meetup, writing documentation for the WordPress Docs Team, hacking on themes or plugins, or herding wayward sock monkeys.
Eric is a co-organizer of the Seattle WordPress Documentation Meetup and stays active in the WordPress Community in the Pacific Northwest by sponsoring, attending and speaking at WordPress Meetups and WordCamps.
Jordan Quintal
Jordan Quintal is a successful Online Multipreneur, a seasoned Web Developer, as well as a WordPress Contributor and Community Member. Jordan is the current President at The Genius Web Media Inc. that was founded in 2007, and he has over 15 years of web development experience. His skill, intelligence, and ambition have allowed him and his company to flourish in a very competitive Media market.
Taylor Dewey
Taylor is a full time user interface engineer with 10up. Every day, he gets to work on really big and really cool WordPress installations. But it’s not just a job and WordPress is more than a tool: It’s people. It’s a community. It’s a group of folks that love the web, love publishing, love technology, and love open source software.
Lisa Kruczynski
Lisa K. is a digital media consultant, helping small businesses connect with the digital universe. She uses a holistic approach to examine ways that businesses can become more social and use all aspects of their internet presence to create and cultivate new business. She works closely with clients to develop customized strategies for website design and social media interactions as well as convergence of their online and offline marketing plans.
“My favorite part of the process is the exchange of knowledge that comes from working directly with business owners. I love to teach, I love to learn and I love to problem solve and because the internet is constantly in a state of change, these elements show up in every project.”
Lisa holds a Master of Science Degree in Information Technology and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business. She is a member of WE Rotary Club, District 5000, HI, and co-hosts a WordPress workshop for beginners called ‘Tech-it-Easy-with-WordPress’. Lisa has also served as a volunteer with the Tarrant Literacy Coalition and on the Marketing Committee for The Women’s Center of Tarrant County.
Adam Silverstein
Adam started programming by learning assembly code on his Radio Shack color computer (with 4k!), and started a software company from his college dorm room. After years building custom solutions he embraced WordPress as his platform of choice, building sites for clients large and small.
Adam is a contributing developer to WordPress and was recognized as a “Rockstar” for his role in the revisions rewrite for WordPress 3.6. Adam currently works as a Senior Web Engineer at 10up. He loves long rafting trips, playing mbira, travel, taking walks and tending his over sized garden.
Julie Kuehl
Hi! I’m Julie Kuehl. I’m an emerging WordPress developer that’s hell-bent on learning. Sometimes from books and websites. Sometimes from friends and colleagues. Sometimes from successes and failures. I’m happy to share that learning with others, and learn even more in the process. I’ve taught myself WordPress and some of the coding that goes with it (HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, etc.). Recently, I was named to a list of 25 Awesome WordPress Women to Watch. I own straightFORWARD Web Solutions.
Jeremy Felt
Jeremy is a senior WordPress engineer with the central University Communications team at Washington State University. After moving to Pullman and becoming a Coug last year, he’s excited to invade Husky territory and spread the word about the cool web stuff being built at WSU. He loves using and creating open source software, is a recent dabbler in open source hardware, and when WCSEA comes around will have just bottled home-brew number six.
Stacey Lane
Stacey is a seasoned web developer who not only enjoys making websites but also enjoys teaching others how to make their own sites! She has been developing websites since the ripe age of 13 and specializes in front-end technologies with an emphasis on WordPress theme customization. Stacey has enjoyed working for many industry leaders including IGT, Microsoft and HasOffers.
Zack Tollman
Residing in Portland, Oregon, Zack longs for the cold, snowy days of his Alaskan youth. He enjoys strumming his guitar, playing hockey, and spending time with his wife and dog. Otherwise, you’ll find him at his computer meticulously spinning lines of clean WordPress code as a developer at The Theme Foundry.
Michelle Castillo
Michelle Castillo is the President and CEO of Castillo Media Group, a Vancouver BC based web development and internet marketing company.
Michelle passion lies in helping business owners to establish meaningful web presence that helps them achieve their business goals, attract more clients and increase their revenues. She discovered WordPress when she needed to promote her own real estate investment business and fell in love with it. Michelle has recently published an eBook titled “8 Actions You Can Take RIGHT NOW to Optimize Your WordPress Website”, the eBook can be downloaded for free in her website WpInsider.org
Michelle has always been a techie. She holds a Masters degree in Mechanical engineering and has spent 10 years leading software development teams in Tokyo, Paris and Michigan leading the delivery of complex software development solutions to companies such as Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, BMW, Dell and GM.
Naci Seyhanli
Naci (pronounced Najee) Seyhanli is the video production specialist at the Spokane Regional Health District (SRHD), Spokane, WA. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in radio and television as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree in professional accounting from Eastern Washington University. Mr. Seyhanli left a fifteen-year career in broadcast television and his position as supervising director at KING 5 Television in Seattle, WA to return to Spokane in 2008. Mr. Seyhanli works with SRHD staff to produce public health-related audio and video content designed for SRHD staff, partner agencies, and the general public. As a member of the SRHD Information Systems department, he also supports the maintenance of SRHD computer and voice networks. Mr. Seyhanli resides in Spokane with his wife Alicia, his son Kaya, and his two rat terriers.
Todd Miller
Todd Miller is the Program Manager for Information Systems at Spokane Regional Health District (SRHD), Spokane, WA. Todd started using WordPress in 2013. He has found several ways to augment SRHD’s existing websites with targeted WordPress functionality that included web forms, surveys and news forums using the bbPress plugin. Todd has over 20 years of experience working as a database and application programmer. This included working in the Silicon Valley during the dot-com bubble. He most recently enjoyed building OLAP solutions with Microsoft’s SQL Sever Analysis Services. Todd received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics from Brandeis University in 1989. He received a Master of Science degree in Statistics from California State University, East Bay in 2004. Todd is currently training for his seventh marathon. He enjoys running with his brother, hiking with his spouse, and sharing vinyl records with his son.
Merrill Mayer
Merrill Mayer is the founder and web developer at Kool Kat Web Designs. She specializes in creating custom WordPress themes for informational and e-commerce websites. She enjoys working with designers to translate their vision into a working website.
Merrill began her career in technology by studying for a master’s degree in French at the University of Michigan. There she had the opportunity to work on a project to computerize French demographic data from the 19th and early 20th centuries. As a result, Merrill became hooked on technology.
Kate Stull
Kate Stull is the cofounder of Popforms, a company making tools to help superstars shine at work. At Popforms, she oversees content strategy, curriculum development, and marketing. Prior to this role, she worked as a freelance writer, helping tech entrepreneurs build their brands and side projects through blogging, content marketing, and social media. In her free time, Kate enjoys yoga, listening to audiobooks, and blogging about her boyfriend’s outfits at katestull.wordpress.com.
Brennen Byrne
Brennen Byrne is the CEO and cofounder of Clef, a security plugin for WordPress. He speaks about security across the country with a focus on making security approachable and interesting to non-technical audiences. Modern security requires safer communities, not just safer sites, and Brennen is dedicated to helping the WordPress community protect itself. @brennenbyrne on Twitter
Heather Johnson
Heather Johnson is a tech teacher and trainer who focuses on helping people become comfortable and confident online. Until six years ago, she was not a techie. In fact, she avoided tech and didn’t see how it would add value to her life or business. Through the influence of a mentor, she began to learn about coding websites and that led to her learning more and more about the tech world. She gained confidence and skills and started her own business designing websites. Over a year and a half of working with customers, she learned that her passion lay in translating the Geek to English. Now she focuses on teaching people, individually and in groups, to help them to gain confidence and understanding in using tech. Rather than talking at people, she walks people through the process of learning WordPress, social media, programs or apps so they can have the thrill of conquering something new with a supportive mentor standing by to reassure. Tech is a tool: it should not control how you run a business or interact with people. Once people learn how to make tech work for them rather than being a slave to their fears, uncertainty or assumptions of what they “have” to do, they become free. She takes tech from complex to personal.
Steve Roy
Steve Roy is the VP of Marketing for Disqus, the web’s most popular discussion system. He spent 15 years as a brand consultant for a wide range of organizations including Johnson & Johnson, IBM, GE, The National Cancer Institute and Philips among others. Prior to joining Disqus, Steve spent five years in the New York office of Edelman where he co-led the firm’s master narrative practice.
Morten Rand-Hendriksen
Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a staff author at lynda.com and an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and British Columbia Institute of Technology where he teaches WordPress and standards-based web development. WordPress has been the foundation of his client, teaching, and personal web design and development work for the last 8 years and he loves making WordPress do things people thought couldn’t be done. Morten is the co-organizer of the Vancouver WordPress Meetup Group and blogs weekly about WordPress and the web at mor10.com.
Erica Jorgensen
Erica Jorgensen has been writing for the web since the first dot-com boom. She worked for Amazon back when it sold only books; you can still find many of her hundreds of book reviews online. She blogged for MSN.com’s Lifestyles channel, which receives more than 7 million daily visitors, and managed their Fashion Week bloggers. She was also among the first bloggers at Nordstrom.com.
She worked as managing editor for the Seattle edition of Daily Candy Kids and has won journalism awards for feature writing for Seattle magazine. She consults for a number of design and communications firms in Seattle and has written and edited many high-profile projects for Starbucks, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Microsoft. In December 2013, she received her master’s degree in journalism and strategic communication from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. She’s also a board member of the University of Washington’s certificate program in editing and currently blogs for a Seattle startup. Lest you think she’s a total nerd, she got her start as a music reviewer, writing for the late, great Rocket, plus the Seattle Times and Seattle Weekly. She also writes for Draft, a magazine for serious beer enthusiasts. She lives in Green Lake with her husband and two children.