Our Awesome Speakers!
Alex King
An original contributor to the WordPress project, Alex started his web career in the mid-90s in Silicon Valley. He has created dozens of popular WordPress plugins and themes. His experience includes enterprise and consumer start-ups, roles in design, user experience, development and web application architecture. In 2003 he relocated to Denver, CO where he founded Crowd Favorite, one of the world’s largest WordPress development firms. Crowd Favorite is proud to have pioneered drag-and-drop page layouts for WordPress with Carrington Build and have solved WordPress content deployment with RAMP.
Alex is also the co-founder BackupMoxie and CloudMoxie – providers of bespoke WordPress backup and hosting solutions. Previous, Alex co-founded FeedLounge, created ShareThis and founded WordPress HelpCenter.
Session: Core Competency: Things You Might Not Know about How WordPress Works (But Should)
Angela Bowman
Angela Bowman of Boulder, Colorado, got hooked by WordPress in 2007 after an instructor mentioned it during a CSS class at Boulder Digital Arts. She went home that night and attempted the famous “15-minute install” which took until midnight to figure out. Ever since, she’s been evangelizing WordPress, teaching classes at Boulder Digital Arts, and assuring web designers that, “Yes, you can do anything in WordPress!” Well, just about anything. When not trying to “do it all” in WordPress, Angela is
gardening, hiking, and chasing after her backyard chickens.
Session: Common Myths About WordPress Security
Beth Hayden
Beth Hayden is a nationally known speaker and social media expert. Beth is a Senior Staff Writer for Copyblogger Media, and she regularly contributes to the web’s top social media blogs. Beth’s book, Pinfluence: The Complete Guide to Marketing Your Business with Pinterest was the very first book on Pinterest marketing printed by a major publishing house. Beth works with all kinds of businesses (from Fortune 100 companies to solopreneurs) to help them define and implement effective Pinterest marketing strategies. Beth frequently speaks about blogging, content marketing and Pinterest at conferences and events across the country.
Panelist: Sources of Engagement: Social, Email and More
Bethany Siegler
Bethany Siegler of UniqueThink Online Marketing & Web Design helps build your complete online presence. Bethany has created marketing campaigns for musical artists as distinct as Frank Black (Pixies) and Bonnie Raitt, comedians such as Stephen Lynch, software developers as diverse as Wild Divine & OfficeTime, and local businesses like Boulder Weekly. She has also represented major corporations from Fender to SONY, in campaigns like Get Bud, Get Music.
Bethany started using WordPress in 2005, as a blogging platform. She soon realized she could use it to create full websites for her clients, to let them maintain their own sites. She teaches WordPress for Non-coders at Boulder Digital Arts, and has done instructional trainings for the University of Colorado at Boulder. Bethany is an online marketing consultant, speaker and instructor on the subjects of Email Marketing, Social Media, Marketing Partnerships, and WordPress. Find out more about her at http://UniqueThink.com
Chrissy Scivicque
Chrissy Scivicque (pronounced “Civic”) is the founder of EatYourCareer.com, a coaching and consulting company dedicated to professional development and career advancement. A corporate trainer and career coach, Chrissy is a regularly featured expert on Fox 31’s Good Day Colorado and a featured blogger for Forbes.com and U.S. News & World Report. Chrissy believes work can be a delicious, nourishing experience; she loves helping professionals figure out what that means for them and how to achieve it. Her programs, offered online and in-person, service private individuals and corporate clients locally and globally.
Session: Panelist, Sources of Engagement: Social, Email and More
Deborah Beckett
Deborah Beckett lives with her husband and two kids in the Land of the Sky (western North Carolina). She earned a degree in Journalism, specializing in Multimedia & Web Design, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been building web sites and training users for over 15 years. When not engineering happiness, she enjoys running, travel, and spending time with her family.
Session: Happiness Bar
Evan Solomon
Evan is a Growth Engineer at Automattic, he works mostly on WordPress.com building tools to test new features and figure out whether users actually like them. While running experiments on WordPress.com, he’s touched almost every part of WordPress core: client side HTML and JavaScript, WP query, caching, user management, etc. Before Automattic, he played professional poker, caddied for Bill Clinton, and wrote a congressional testimony — not all at once. Evan is from suburban New York and hopes the Yankees are well on their way to the ALCS by the time WordCamp Denver rolls around.
Session: Behind the Scenes: Demystifying the Black Box of WordPress Core
Jeremy Green
Jeremy Green started building websites back in 1998 with Notepad and Angelfire. The ability to transform a text document into a web page fascinated him. Now he puts his time and energy into building WordPress sites at Endo Creative, a web design company he started two years ago. After a stint in Seattle he now resides in Fort Collins and also organizes the Fort Collins WordPress meetup. After a long day of surfing the Codex he enjoys roasting coffee, training for endurance mountain bike races, and reading classic novels.
Session: Custom Meta Boxes
Joe Boydston
VP of McNaughton newspaper group, operator of 8 northern California newspapers. Our printed newspappers are powered by WordPress, not our websites.
Joe is an advocate for open source, an evangelist of Journalism and a dreamer of exciting futures for both.
Session: WordPress Is Saving Journalism
Joshua Strebel
Founder at Page.ly Managed WordPress Hosting. New father, do’er of things.
Session: WordPress the Chameleon
Karen Arnold
Karen Arnold (pronounced Car-en) and her husband, 4 children, 4 cats, and approximately 10 chickens, live in sunny Albuquerque, New Mexico. When she isn’t engineering happiness at WordPress.com, she helps her husband homeschool their energetic kiddos, tries to blog regularly, and brainstorms ways to meet every WordPress user in New Mexico.
Session: Happiness Bar
Kevin Conboy
Kevin has the incredible good fortune to be able to work on fun and amazing things at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Polldaddy, VaultPress, Gravatar, Akismet and more. He lives in Denver, Colorado, where the sun shines more than 300 days out of the year, which is good because he’s originally from San Diego. After attending art school for graphic design in the late 90s, he found himfelf caught up in the whirlwind of the web agency world during the dot-com boom. More recently, however, he had spent quite a while doing interface work for the financial industry and knows more about earnings per share than he’d care to admit. Happily married with three kids, he plays in a band and has been blogging for more than 10 years at Alternate.org.
Session: Moderator, Sources of Engagement: Social, Email and More
Mike Van Winkle
Mike Van Winkle is a PHP Developer living in Santa Rosa, CA. WordPress is his first love and weapon of choice. He started fiddling with WordPress in 2004 after Six Apart started charging for Movable Type licenses–not that there’s anything wrong with that. After attending graduate school in a completely unrelated field he decided not to put his expensive eduction to use and instead to devote his time to building websites. Turned out to be a good choice.
His love for WordPress continues today, though he now enjoys digging into other PHP-based frameworks to learn the latest trends and best practice. When he is not coding he enjoys baseball, craft beer, California weather, spy novels and electric guitar. He is currently reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, trying to learn to play All Your Love like Eric Clapton, drinking a Lagunitas IPA, and listening to the Chicago Cubs lose another game … yes, all at the same time.
Session: Developing for WordPress with Git Push
Rona Kilmer
Rona hails from Washington DC where she started her love affair with the web. In 2008, she moved to Denver where she is a web designer and front-end developer at Crowd Favorite. When not totally absorbed in a design project or neck deep in code, she spends her time training for triathlons, travelling, and enjoying all the outdoor activities a state like Colorado has to offer.
Session: Responsive Design & WordPress Themes
Zeke Weeks
Zeke Weeks is a web developer, strategist, and Colorado native. WordPress helped him find his own voice online, and strives to build things that let others do the same. He works with organizations to build Web strategies that further their larger missions, and develops web applications based on open source community projects like WordPress and Drupal. His work spans the fields of academia, alternative energy, branding, civic engagement, e-commerce, finance, marketing, retail, urban planning, and city and state governments.
Zeke currently builds civic web applications at Urban Interactive Studio in Denver, and provides WordPress consulting services through his own company: Blazing Wheel.
Session: Building WordPress Sites to Last