Speakers

Alex King

I am a Creative Expert specializing in developing content for Businesses & Entrepreneurs.
I create spectacular content for individuals, businesses and organisations to showcase their products and services.

I’ll be brutally honest with you and say that I prefer to discover and explore other’s ideas that resonate with me. When I find these people, I then contribute my skill set to the pursuit of their media goals rather than focus on my own interpretations.

Nothing excites me more than finding an idea, a concept or a service worth sharing with the world. When I find people with flair and passion I work tirelessly to help them achieve their goals through presentation and design using spectacular video and great websites.

I take on a limited amount of clients at a time to focus my creativity and design selectively to exclusive clientele.

My mission is to serve and create amazing content that moves, teaches & inspires people and that leads my clients to their desired outcomes and success.

Andrew DiMino

Andrew DiMino is the Publisher, President and Founder of CarbSmart, Inc., publisher of CarbSmart.com.

For 14 years I ran multiple online stores selling sugar free and gluten free foods. I used to enjoy my mission of helping those people that want to get healthier with foods that are right for their metabolism/body type until competing against HUMONGOUS online retailers that did more sales in 3 hours than I did in a year (you know who I mean) took the fun of growing my business from scratch. Thankfully from day one, having a content creation strategy that included a section of my web sites dedicated to educating and informing my customers about their chosen lifestyle through articles and informational guides set me up for an awesome transition in 2012.

After I closed the online stores, I focused my attention to serving my target audience by publishing a mulit-author online magazine and gluten free & low carb books and cookbooks. WordPress gives me the freedom to reach my target audience with a platform that is easy to use, easy to maintain and easy to add content to. And for the little bit of eCommerce I still do, fuhgettaboutit!

Ben Fox

Ben has been building a business with WordPress for three years and in that time has merged his passion for education with a love of technology. In 2012 he co-founded of FlowPress, a WordPress focused development agency as well as WPUniversity.com. His current project is the Sidekick platform which provides real-time, guided help and learning from right inside the WordPress dashboard.

Ben Weiser

In 2009 I began using WordPress as a personal blog. In 2011, I was earning a full time living with SEO and affiliate marketing. Since 2013 I have been building and developing WordPress sites for clients using the Genesis Framework. I blog over at http://benweiser.com

Bet Hannon

After 20 years in nonprofit management, I have built a thriving small business building WordPress sites for nonprofits and small businesses on micro-budgets, doing lots of client-training along the way. I serve as a volunteer moderator in the wp.org support forums, where I tend to focus on multisite networks.

Billie Hillier

Billie Hillier is a solutions consultant, event producer, and educator.

Billie has been using and recommending WordPress to clients for almost (or over) a decade. She loves the flexibility WordPress offers users and the control users have with owning their site.

Being passionate about all things related to online marketing – and WordPress being a huge component of a successful online presence – she is always trying to help others make the most of the WordPress site for their business goals.

Bobbie Wilson

Bobbie began programming very young, when she went with her mother to her college courses in programming (with punch cards then) and later to computer lab shifts. Bobbie’s first computer, the Timex/Sinclair 1000, only ran BASIC. Fast forward a few years later, and Bobbie was getting started in HTML during the browser wars, still connecting to the Internet through AOL (after a brief stint connecting to USEnet and BBS). Her first design tool was PaintShop Pro, creating filters and using the dreaded lens flare. Her favorite site was Dr. Ozone. She followed the up and down security risks of Javascript and was thrilled when CSS made the scene.

Some years later, a blog post by Chris Spooner about WordPress caught her attention, just as she was about to use Joomla. She liked PHP, but wanted to focus more on the front end. WordPress was this perfect solution. Bobbie created a web server on her machine, installed everything and fell in love. Only a few months later, a close friend reached out for help with working on a site for a company in New York. This led to that company contacting Bobbie again for her expertise with WordPress for the Lord & Taylor blog site. WordPress ran on all of her personal sites, including the site for her EQ2 guild (yeah, Bobbie is a gamer too!).

Now, Bobbie loves helping people learn how to use WordPress as much as she can, in addition to building sites and maintaining them. Bobbie helps out in the Austin WordPress Meetup, and in the Advanced WordPress and Advanced Woocommerce Facebook groups.

Cemal Tashan

Cemal Tashan is a Turkish-American businessman and Electrical Engineer. Being an early adapter and technology lover, Cemal has designed, developed and tested software for all kinds of computers and mobile devices since the dawn of the computer era.
He ardently believes in the participation of the seniors in today’s high-tech world.
Cemal has published three books on photography and travel.

Chris Webb

Cliff Seal

Cliff is a Senior UX Engineer at Pardot, a Salesforce company, where he’s also the resident WordPress nerd.

He’s the co-founder multiple profitable side projects, such as Evermore and TuneDig. He co-organizes amUX, a morning meetup focused for local UXers. He’s an accomplished speaker who’s given talks around the world.

Cliff lives with his wife, April, in Atlanta, where he can be found at a concert, cycling around the city, or playing guitar.

Danny Santoro

Hey everyone! My name is Danny Santoro, and I’m a Cincinnati, Ohio native with a passion for anything digital – code, video, gaming, and everything in between… Though I can’t pass up a good firework, either. 🙂
I went to school for Electronic Media, making me a bit of a jack-of-all-trades – this brings a unique perspective to WordPress development, as I always try to find a creative way to bend the system to make something entirely new. As a side note, I also make movies which you should check out! To see what I’ve done and follow my blog, be sure to visit http://danielsantoro.com.

Devin Walker

Devin Walker is the founder of WordImpress, a San Diego based WordPress development company. He and the WordImpress team also serve as WordPress Community Consultants for Media Temple.

Walker has extensive experience creating free, premium, and commercial WordPress plugins and themes. Popular plugins include Give WordPress Donations Plugin, Google Maps Builder, Yelp Widget Pro and WooCommerce Quick Checkout. In total, his plugins on WordPress.org have been downloaded more than 100,000 times.

Outside of work, Devin enjoys traveling the world, going to concerts and playing a leisurely round of disc golf.

Dustin Meza

Dustin Meza is the Director of Customer Experience Operations at WP Engine. He has been in the hosting industry for 7 years and has been with WP Engine for 2.5 years. At WP Engine, Dustin oversees many aspects of the WordPress platform including WordPress upgrades for over 100,000 WordPress installs.

Heather Wilde

Wilde brings a passion for innovation, technology and service, as well as experience with government agencies, corporations and startups, to her role at ROCeteer. She approaches business as an adventure to be explored, with new challenges around every corner. Her impressive and wide-ranging educational background includes the University of Alabama, Huntsville for aerospace engineering, St. John’s College, Annapolis for Liberal Arts, and Clare College, Cambridge, for Medieval British Literature. Professionally, she has programmed microcontrollers for the Navy, worked on NASA projects, designed and managed online games for major developers, and run HR departments for small businesses as well as companies with more than 5,000 employees, established multilingual distributed teams for Billion-dollar “Unicorn” Companies, among other ventures. She emphasizes that she is always truly honored to serve the teams she works with and help them focus their strategies and vision.

She is also the author “Fundamentals of Evernote” and working on the upcoming book: “The Birth of a Unicorn.”

Jamal Jackson

Jamal is a full stack web and mobile engineer with 5+ years experience in the space. Currently he works as a web application engineer at Apple. His stack includes: PHP, JS, NodeJS, AngularJS, RoR, jQuery, etc.

Outside of that he is an avid writer, having numerous articles and an Amazon Best Seller to his name.

James Dalman

James Dalman is the CEO and Founder of Happy Joe, a non-profit organization that specializes in helping military veterans launch successful careers and businesses in the web technology industry. He served in the U.S. Army Reserve and Oklahoma National Guard.

James has been in the branding, design, and web media industry for 27 years and has done work for HTC, BMW, Michael Hyatt, Nike Golf, Eskimo Joes, NASCAR, and Arnold Palmer. He was one of the very first premium WordPress theme designers in the industry and has spoken at numerous WordCamps and events across the United States.

Jerrett Farmer

I have been employed as a Producer, Project Manager, Software Architect, Programmer, 2D/3D Production Artist, Art Director, and Lead Technical Artist. I’ve worked for Image Comics: Top Cow, Activision, and FOX studios. I have worked on licensed properties for Marvel, Universal, and Warner Brothers studios.

Currently I work as the Marketing Production Manager at InMotion Hosting. I over see the creation and maintenance of their main websites and WordPress blogs.

John Hawkins

Long time WordPress developer, frequent WordCamp attendee/organizer/presenter, previously ran WordCamp Vegas and the WP Vegas meetup. You may have heard that I do crossfit. Who am I kidding, of course you’ve heard that.

Josh Pollock

Josh, is the owner of, and a developer for CalderaWP, makers of fine WordPress plugins including URL Builder, the visual editor for WordPress permalinks and Caldera Forms, a drag and drop, responsive form builder. He is also a weekly contributor to Torque Magazine, and the community manager and contributing developer for Pods.

Kenny Eliason

Kenny is a third generation Las Vegan. Although programming websites was not quite in his life plan, Kenny developed a love for creating engaging websites beginning in 2009 and now he has what we call “the bug” in the development world. Kenny taught himself fluent Spanish which has helped him in learning all of the different programming languages as well. Kenny has always had a talent for recognizing market fluctuations and trends which makes him a huge asset in the online marketing arena. From 2009 on, Kenny has learned just about every online programming language.

In 2011 NeONBRAND was started because Kenny was looking for a web developer / online marketer for one of his businesses and was unable to find anyone he would trust to hire. His need turned into a passion and he decided to help fill that need for other businesses in Las Vegas (and other places as well). Now known as an expert in all things Las Vegas SEO, Kenny owns and operates NeONBRAND.

Kimberly Shivler

Kimberly (Kim) Shivler, M.Ed. has been a technical trainer and writer for over 20 years. Her business experience includes computer network and database administration, technical training and writing, project management, and web development Aside from being a serial entrepreneur, she also worked for large corporations including Tivoli, an IBM company, where she was part of the worldwide technical sales and marketing team. After surviving the tech burst in 2000, Kim decided to try something different, and in 2002, along with another friend from Tivoli, she went into the spa industry getting her aesthetician license and owning day spas and a skincare clinic. During these years, she kept her technical skills building her own websites, sites for other spas, and an online membership site for skincare professionals using Drupal. In 2012, she discovered WordPress and completely returned to her love of technology. Kim’s current focus is teaching and supporting WordPress with a special focus on using WordPress to create membership sites and online training programs.
Kim holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and Master of Education degree in secondary and adult education from the University of Florida.

Kitty Lusby

Kitty is a full-time pro blogger and taco enthusiast originally hailing from Richmond, Virginia. Most often, she writes about the nerd lifestyle, but she also specializes in blog posts and copy in the firearm industry, travel, and books and literature.
Blogging professionally was never the plan, even though her earliest (admittedly illicit) business attempts, beginning in middle school, involved charging her pre-teen peers a fee in exchange for writing a romantic short story involving the ‘client’ and her crush. After being reprimanded by the school board several times for selling these stories on school grounds, Kitty eventually gave up and started doing English essays for the high school students who rode her bus. Despite the surprisingly good income she made doing black-market writing in school, a career in writing didn’t seem attainable, so she gave it up to pursue a “real job.”
It quickly became apparent that Kitty was never cut out to work a “real job,” so she resumed writing in her early twenties. Now that she’s in her late twenties (and still totally adorable), she makes her living working out of her house as a full-time blogger, and her debut fiction novel is scheduled for release in Spring of 2016. You can find her online at www.KittyLusby.com.

Mari Kane

Mari Kane is a Vancouver writer, blogger and WordPress consultant. She blogs about blogging at her site, BlogSiteStudio.com, and about drinks at TastingRoomConfidential.com, and she also web masters the BC Association of Travel Writers site, BCATW.org

In addition to blogging and designing, Mari tutors business people and creatives about using WordPress. She runs the WordPress Workshop Meetup to help users improve their sites. She also co-organizes the BCATW Meetup for travel writers.

In 2013, Mari wrote a blog series called Create a WordPress Website to give her readers a step-by-step guide to setting up a new site. She soon released it as an ebook, Create a WordPress Website in Ten Easy Steps. The new version, which is updated for WordPress 4.1 is available at BlogsiteStudio.com, on Amazon.com, and on Smashwords.com

In May of 2015, Mari released a much anticipated follow-up ebook, Escalate Your WordPress Website: Twelve Ways to Blog at a Higher Level, which she offers as a free gift to new subscribers.

Matt Cromwell

Matt is Head of Support and Brand Ambassador at WordImpress.com. He and the WordImpress team also serve as WordPress Community Consultants for Media Temple.

He’s the author of many free WordPress plugins, a popular blogger at mattcromwell.com, an Admin of the Advanced WordPress Facebook group, Lead Organizer of the San Diego WordPress Meetup, and a frequent WordCamp speaker and attender.

Michael Cremean

Michael Cremean is the Founder and CEO of Quadshot Software LLC, a WordPress and WooCommerce development company. Before founding Quadshot in 2009, Cremean has led efforts launching products in many markets, including Wireless, Mobile, Robotics, Online Learning, Gaming and Streaming Media.

He has 6 patents, plays a few musical instruments, loves coffee and has super cute dogs named Sally and Maggie, who are the official corporate mascots. Mike also sits on the board of a couple nonprofit organizations and believes in helping others learn and grow.

Michael Tieso

Michael Tieso is a Developer Advocate at WooThemes. He is a representative to the developer community helping to win the hearts and minds regarding the WooCommerce platform. When he’s not online, you’ll often find him traveling around the world.

Nathan Porter

After 10 years in implementing and advising on enterprise software solutions, Nate has ditched the suit and tie for T-shirts, jeans, and a mountain man beard. He’s totally serious about his work though—and the beard. When he’s not teleporting to meet with our clients or speaking at technology conferences, he leads our team of talented designers, developers, content creators, and yoga fanatics through the daily obstacle course of code, pixels, and deadlines.

Nile Flores

Nile Flores is a long time WordPress designer and Developer. While she grew up a military brat, she’s settled in the St. Louis metro east region. Nile blogs at Blondish.net, where she covers topics on WordPress, Blogging, SEO, Social Media, and Web Design.

She also loves contributing to WordPress, and that includes speaking at WordCamps across the United States. She loves helping people and supporting Open Source projects.

In other news, Nile is a proud support member and translation validator in 2 dialects of Spanish at Team Yoast. She also runs a 7,000 member Facebook roup dedicated to helping WordPressers, called All About WordPress. When Nile isn’t knee deep in coding and design, she’s spending time with her son, who is also a WordPress user.

Robert Gillmer

Can I write this later?

Russell Aaron

College was the place that I first found WordPress. I moved to Eugene Oregon and attended The University of Oregon. This is where I learned how to write a blog. I learned how to manipulate the template “theme” of my site. I had all these blog posts and I still did not get hired. After graduation, I moved to Las Vegas and I was selling memberships to adult websites. I was asked to build the website for the affiliate program. I turned to WordPress once again.

In 2011, I attended WordCamp Vegas. I met some really cool people and my love for WordPress was recreated. Since that WordCamp I’ve focused all of my time and attention on WordPress. I started a blog called Russell Aaron Designs. I used to blog over there until the top level domain of Dot Vegas allowed registration. I started speaking at the Las Vegas WordPress Meet up Group in early 2012. I started learning more and more about WordPress. In December of 2012, I had my first opportunity to Speak at WordCamp Vegas. I talked about plugins and it was awesome. In 2013 I spoke at 3 WordCamps. I took a break from speaking in 2014. I made my return in 2015 at WordCamp San Diego, WordCamp Minneapolis and WordCamp Orange County. I’m a huge fan of Coca Cola. My family has had sock in Coca Cola since the 1930’s. So I’m very loyal to Coca Cola. I smoke hookah because it gives me something to do late at night while I program. I used to be one of those emo kids with long hair.

Scott Roeben

Scott Roeben is the Interactive Marketing Manager and corporate blogger for Fremont Street Experience and the SlotZilla zipline attraction. Formerly, he blogged for Caesars Entertainment, the world’s largest casino company. His blog at Caesars was named the best in the country in PR Daily’s Digital PR and Social Media Awards and earned $2 million a year in revenue. His personal blog, VitalVegas.com, was named the best blog in the city by the Las Vegas Interactive Marketers Association. He also serves as co-organizer of the Las Vegas Bloggers Meetup group.

Shayda Torabi

Shayda Torabi is a storyteller, digital marketer, and lover of all things WordPress. From the people to the platform, she’s been using WordPress since 2004 and hasn’t looked back. Working at WP Engine as part of their Marketing team, Shayda focuses on building authentic relationships with the amazing people who make up the WordPress community. Having been to over 30 WordCamps all over the world from Sevilla to Chicago to San Francisco, one thing has remained constant, the generosity of the people of WordPress. She likes loud music, iced coffee and chronicles her life adventures through her food blog, www.DineWithShayda.com.

Steve Zehngut

Steve founded Zeek Interactive in 1995 and he has been the creative technologist behind the Huntington Beach based company since its inception. Under his direction, Zeek has grown from an apartment bedroom to one of Southern California’s leading WordPress and mobile development shops.

Steve is the organizer of the OC WordPress Meetup and has helped build the community to over 1,300 members. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and has taught interactive courses at UC Irvine, USC, the American Film Institute, and Cal State Long Beach. Steve has a BA in Film from Cal State Northridge.

Tabitha Chapman

Tabitha Chapman (a.k.a Tabby) is an Academic Applications Developer at University of California, Irvine where she works on WordPress plugins and themes for the Ayala School of Biological Sciences.

Tamara Floyd

Tamara Floyd is a wife, mother, full-time blogger, multi-passionate entrepreneur and part-time super hero with a simple mission of World Domination.

She created NaturalHairRules.com in 2008 as a creative outlet; currently the site has a social media following of over a half million and receives more than one million monthly page views.

Taylor McCaslin

Taylor McCaslin is a Technical Product Manager living in Austin, Texas. He currently works at WP Engine, a managed hosting platform for websites and apps built with WordPress. WordPress has been Taylor’s platform of choice for over 5 years. He even paid his way through college by freelancing as a WordPress developer!

Since then, Taylor has created custom WordPress themes and plugins for a large range of clients from SMBs to multinational corporations. Previously, Taylor helped people find jobs as an Interaction Designer at the world’s largest job search engine, Indeed.com. Before that, he worked as a Product Design Intern at Bazaarvoice. Taylor graduated from UT Austin in 2013, where he studied business, digital art and media, theatre, and computer science.

When not pushing pixels or coding, Taylor can be found geeking out with the latest tech gadget or experiencing the rich Austin, Texas art scene. You can learn more about Taylor at taylormccaslin.com or by following him @Taylor4484.