We are pleased to announce the speakers for WordCamp Las Vegas 2017!
Session descriptions to follow soon!
Russell Aaron
Russell started out like many others. He was building MySpace band layouts. He would create table based layouts all day. He would use the blog feature on MySpace to share his triumphs and failures. After writing his first 50 blog posts, a friend of his showed him WordPress.com. He signed up for free and started to blog over there. After my next 50 blog posts, the same friend showed him how to install WordPress on my own website. Since that day, He’s spent every minute of every hour learning WordPress. He’s obsessed, to say the least.
He’s on a mission to become a better Role Model. He used to be the guy who showed up and heckled a speaker. That was fun for him. Now, he wants to become a better teacher and show people how to build websites and make a name on the internet.
Matt Campbell
Matt has been a web developer at Horizon Web Marketing since 2014. He is also the founder and webmaster of My Wedding Songs for the past 14 years. My Wedding Songs is ranked in the top 200,000 websites according to Alexa. Matt’s other likes include craft beer, baseball, and traveling.
Bill Conrad
Bill is a professional podcaster and trainer. He is the founder of Podcaster’s Home and the National Association of Podcasters. After returning from Afghanistan in 2012, Bill discovered podcasting and the power of WordPress.
Some of the podcasts that Bill has launched are Timelines of Success, WP-Tonic, EO Secrets and Meet the Voter to name a few.
Joshua Copeland
Joshua Copeland is a full stack developer and the CTO of Research.com. He found his way into the PHP arena where he has been actively developing with it for nearly a decade. Joshua is also knowledgeable with setting up continuous delivery pipelines in Jenkins, managing AWS cloud infrastructure with Terraform, utilizing Docker, and getting his hands on anything new and cutting edge. Joshua is the leader of the PHP Vegas Meetup group and speaks regularly at other user groups and events. Outside of the technical arena, Joshua prioritizes spending time with his wife and two children and enjoys hiking, skateboarding, and creating software!
Manny Costa
Emanuel Costa built his first website back in 1993 and still passionate about helping companies with their online initiatives. In 1997, he built an eCommerce site from scratch, using Perl and text files as database layer. In 1999, he relocated to work for a dotcom company in South Florida. In 2005, Manny started to work directly with Online Marketing. He is also a web entreprenuer and owns many websites that he built himself, of course, 🙂 and very large social media accounts (over 2 million combined followers). Currently, he wears many hats and oversees his company’s (High Tech Web, INC) day-to-day operations, specifically Digital Marketing initiatives and Web Development tasks. He is a co-organizer of the Las Vegas WooCommerce meetup and the Las Vegas Digital Marketing and Online Sales meetup groups.
Michael Cremean
Michael Cremean has over 25 years of Technology Leadership, Architecture, Security and Scalability expertise, having led many successful high tech products from conception to launch. An advocate of using open-source technologies, he has led teams to deliver products in diverse industries, including Web, Robotics, Gaming, Mobile, Social Networks and Education. Teams under Michael’s leadership have won industry recognition and awards, including the Inc/Cisco Growing with Technology, USDLA awards, InformationWeek Feature , Smithsonian Digital and PDN Website Design.
Michael is the founder of Quadshot Digital, a consulting company that specializes in development, security and scalability of websites, focusing on the WordPress and WooCommerce platforms since 2009. His consulting focus is with startup to mid-sized companies to develop their product development and growth strategies.
He holds 6 patents and speaks at events and private companies about security, architecture, scaling and other geek topics focusing on open-source software. As the founder and co-host of the Las Vegas WooCommerce Meetup, he helps people plan their eCommerce strategies and gives back to the community. With a belief in helping people as a core principle, Michael also helps non-profit and startups, as Board Member or Advisor. He also consumes entirely too much coffee, plays in a few Vegas bands and has very cute dogs. Michael and Quadshot are based in Las Vegas, NV.
Scott DeLuzio
Scott DeLuzio is a WordPress plugin developer from the Phoenix, AZ area. He began working with websites while in college in the early 2000s while studying to be an accountant. After graduating college, Scott worked in accounting for several years while continuing to build websites in WordPress. Scott has since made development his full-time job.
Kevin Dunlap
Kevin Dunlap owns and operates two different companies. One is real estate related and the other is for his coaching, author, speaking and training platform. He has a varied background including world travel, stunt work for both stage and film and used to be a college math teacher.
Kenny Eliason
Having grown up the son of a marketer, the skills of the trade are pumping through Kenny Eliason’s blood. When you couple that with his programming and computer knowledge, you get an explosive combination. Kenny has been an avid digital marketer for over 6 years now, often being the first to recognize the hottest trends coming to the market.
In his free time, Kenny loves downhill mountain biking. He calls it his “old man sport” since BMX was what he did as a teenager and it’s not quite as easy to ride those little bikes anymore. Kenny is also a huge technology enthusiast, specifically when it comes to Apple products – did someone say, fanboy? Those close to him are often asking for help solving tech-related problems which often results with them saying, “man, you can fix anything!”
Amongst his current responsibilities, Kenny is founder and CTO of NeONBRAND, Co-owner of Work In Progress, and operates the #VegasTech website.
Joshua Giowaya
Joshua Giowaya is passionate about creating well-crafted, visually engaging and highly usable digital experiences. He has 10+ years in web design & development at advertising and digital agencies, plus a number of years running his own consultancy. He also has an extensive background in design that has proven invaluable when contributing to the design process and communicating with creative teams. Currently, he’s a WordPress consultant and extremely active in the WordPress community. Joshua regularly attends and speaks at local WordPress Meetups. His hope is to give back to a community that has shared so much knowledge with him.
Jarrett Gucci
Jarrett Gucci, also known in the WordPress support world as Quicksilver, has the superhuman ability to troubleshoot WordPress issues at great speeds. He is a mutant that was born in the darkest depths of open source with superhuman support powers. He is the product of a genetic experimentation with the goal of solving WordPress issues as fast as possible. Jarrett Gucci (cough) Quicksilver is most commonly known as the owner and founder of WP Fix It where he and his superhero team have serviced over 58,000 WordPress issues since 2009. Clap as fast as you can for Jarrett Gucci and WP Fix It.
Jason Janes
Jason Janes has an extensive background in hospitality management (Hotels & Restaurants). He has worked for himself since 1995. He started and sold several business. In 2005, he got into website development as an affiliate in the gaming industry. Instead of paying other people to build websites, he began developing them himself.
John Larson
John Larson, founder of Las Vegas based John Larson Marketing, is an online marketing strategist. His combination of psychology and analytics based approach has helped small and medium size business owners and entrepreneurs generate leads, attract customers and drive sales using the internet, social media and online advertising.
In addition to running a digital marketing agency, he is also an instructor at University of Nevada – Las Vegas teaching courses on search engine optimization, social media marketing, Google AdWords, and content management systems.
Outside of providing meaningful campaigns and marketing services, John has made it his mission to educate entrepreneurs on how to take advantage of the digital world.
Thomas Levy
Thomas is a self-taught programmer, a published poet, and he takes his mediocre amateur-level competitive weightlifting very seriously. He’s the architect and lead developer at LifterLMS and definitely has more chest hair than you.
Kitty Lusby
Kitty Lusby is a full-time professional blogger and content marketer based in Vegas, where she works at a digital marketing agency during the day and does even more content marketing during her off hours because she’s a huge nerd. She enjoys skidding around hardwood floors in her socks, eating tacos, and winning bar trivia games with all of the useless knowledge she’s amassed as a long time pro blogger. You can find Kitty’s personal blog at KittyLusby.com, or see more of her work on the blog at NeONBRAND.com.
Dustin Nay
Dustin Nay plays Dungeons and Dragons on the weekend and binge watches documentaries on Netflix, but that’s not why you’re here…
He also founded White Glove Digital in 2014, and has been in the marketing industry for nearly a decade. With hands-on experience in almost all aspects of digital marketing and web design and development, he’s just dangerous enough to know what he’s talking about.
Dustin has spoken at conferences and meetup groups, and enjoys teaching marketing and marketing technology concepts. A particular passion is website speed. He loves working with clients on marketing strategies, and putting together the marketing technology puzzle for companies.
If there were an anonymous group for whiteboard junkies, he could join it, but then he’d have to agree that having 11 whiteboards in his office was a bad thing (which it obviously isn’t).
Dustin lives in Utah with his wife and two daughters.
Robert Nissenbam
A writer, social media consultant, educator and public speaker.
Robert works with solopreneurs and small to midsized businesses helping them effectively use content and social media marketing to build relationships, improve brand awareness, drive web traffic, improve SEO and generate leads through an organic process.
What he teaches, implements and speaks on has its roots in traditional, old school networking and cold calling. His techniques have been developed over a decade of building his personal brands through social media and relationships.
He focuses on a relationship based approach; that content is less important and plays a supportive role; that business, long-term, repeatable and sustainable business, is driven by relationships. Whether your business or organization is business-to-business or business-to-consumer, for profit or not for profit or service-based or retail-based, the principles Robert teaches are highly effective and get real results.
Aaron Overton
Aaron Overton has been a programmer for the last 25 years. He has worked with WordPress for about 10 years and continues to work with WP professionally as the Owner/Producer of Heatherstone.
Nathan Porter
Nathan Porter is passionate about empowering social good organizations through technology. Today’s open source software community offers unique opportunities never before possible including the flexible and accessible WordPress platform. In his day to day Nathan leads the team at Wanna Pixel Inc. to provide solutions and support to nonprofits around the world. He is also an active participant in the open source CRM projects, CiviCRM and UkuuPeople.
Scott Roeben
Scott Roeben is an award-winning blogger, podcaster and digital marketer. His personal Web site, VitalVegas.com is consistently named the most popular and influential in Las Vegas. Accolades include being named “Best Las Vegas Blog” by the Las Vegas Interactive Marketing Association and being named “Best Blog” in the Trippies Awards for four consecutive years. His @VitalVegas Twitter account receives 1.6 million impressions a month. He’s also an accomplished content marketer, formerly creating a blog for Caesars Entertainment and currently for Fremont Street Experience. His work for Fremont Street Experience garnered the Las Vegas Interactive Marketing Association award for “Best Social Media” in Las Vegas in 2016, and he has grown Fremont Street Experience’s Facebook audience from 60,000 to 560,000 during his tenure.
Chris Rogers
Chris Rogers is the Co-Organizer of WordCamp Las Vegas 2017 and 2014 and Co-Organizer & Frequent Speaker of the Vegas WP Meetup Group. He has a degree in MultiMedia from West Los Angeles College. Chris is a professional actor with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting & Minor in Voice from University of Louisville and started his dance training at the Louisville Ballet. Yesterday, he launched CraftYada teaching people in the Entertainment Business how to create websites for their career. He got the idea from Kim Shivler’s inspiring presentation at WordCamp 2015.
Ian Rogers
Ian Rogers helps companies create better WordPress websites. He has authored Websites that Win and hosts the WordPress Developer Podcast.
Richard Sheffield
Richard Sheffield has been in the financial services industry for 35 years and has owned a financial services company for 27 years. He was in bank management for 6 years before that. And he was in the retail industry for 7 years before that.
He and his wife, Cheryl created Sheffield Spice & Tea Co. in 2012. They opened for business almost 5 years ago and have had their store website up for over 2 years. Sales from both brick and mortar and their site have been growing steadily from day 1. He handles all the tech, website and other marketing, advertising and other functions for their company. He creates and maintains all product content for the site as well as handles all SEO and Social Media.
Richard has an undergraduate business degree in marketing from the University of Michigan-Dearborn and an MBA in finance with minors in marketing and advertising and international business
In his current financial services business, he consults to family-held and closely-held businesses on creating, running then succeeding the business to the next generation or other options.
He helped start and run a Family Business Center at Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, where these same family business principles were taught to the companies.
Richard created and taught numerous other seminars, classes, lectures other events, and was a popular speaker on several Speakers Bureaus over the years.
Kim Shivler
Kim Shivler, M.Ed. has worked as a writer, instructor, developer and serial entrepreneur for over 20 years. Her business experience includes computer network and database administration, technical training and writing, project management, web development, and work as an aesthetician and spa owner. She also worked for large corporations including Tivoli, an IBM company, where she was part of the worldwide technical sales and marketing team.
Kim learned HTML in 1995 building help files as a UNIX system administrator and opened her first web development company in 1996. Since then, Kim has worked as a business owner and employee in a variety of fields including a few years as part of an IBM worldwide team. Between 2008 and 2012, she worked with a variety of Content Management Systems and ran an online membership site for skincare professionals using Drupal. In 2012, Kim found WordPress and never looked back at any other CMS. She has been creating online courses in WordPress since 2013 and currently combines her background in education, years of business experience, and WordPress experience to teach others how to build membership websites, online courses, their first WordPress site, and full-blown learning platforms.
Kim’s workshops focus on business, technology, and communication skills designed to help teams communicate better and businesses increase sales and improve customer service.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and Master of Education degree in secondary English education from the University of Florida.
Kim is also the co-host of the WP-Tonic podcast.
Seth Shoultes
Seth Shoultes have been married for over 15 years, has two kids and hasbeen working in web development for over 16 years. Before that, between 1999 and 2000, Seth was homeless and worked his way up in various day jobs. During that time, while he lived on the streets of Salt Lake City, Utah, he saved his money, eventually found steady work, a place to live and built his first computer after enrolling at ITT Technical Institute in 2001. Today, he has made a life for myself where he can spend time with his wife and children, play with Legos and make the lives of event managers everywhere better with WordPress.
Cemal Tashan
Cemal Tashan is an enthusiastic WordPress proponent who is an active participant in the WP community. He is one of the Moderators of WordPress TV, has been a speaker at three Word Camps, and attended many WordCamps. Cemal is an experienced WordPress website designer, specializing in small businesses and Seniors. Cemal can be found at Orange County WordPress Meetups, Women Who WP meetings, as well as contributing to WP Watercooler and WPBlab and @tashan on Social Media. He is a regular guest on Turkish radio discussing “all things tech.”
Anne Watson
Ann Watson started out in journalism and ended up on the launch of the Wall Street Journal Online site as a news editor. Family took her to Phoenix, where Ann got into online marketing and creating WordPress sites. Her clients often need Infusionsoft assistance, so she specializes in helping with integrating Infusionsoft with WordPress sites. She often creates landing pages for her clients’ campaigns — for social media, e-commerce or lead generation. Her one-eyed cat Guapo keeps her in line and she likes to putter in my garden.
Barbra Wolfe
Barbra Wolfe has a BA from SUNY Stony Brook, MBA in Marketing Management from Baruch College, 35+ years corporate marketing experience at the Director and VP levels. She’s spent two and a half years as a WordPress designer and running her own company.
Andrew DiMino
Andrew DiMino is the publisher, president, and founder of CarbSmart, Inc., the publisher of CarbSmart.com.
In his own words:
Since 1999, 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 1 hour than I did in a year (you know who I mean) took the fun out of growing my business. 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 on publishing a multi-author online magazine and 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!
Mae Bueta
Mae Bueta is a Licensed CPA in the Philippines, super model in Asia and has been asked to walk NYC Fashion Week. She’s also a proud animal rights advocate. She has held positions as CFO and Senior Accountant and is the current proprietor of Forevermommy.com.
Maximiliano Lopez
Maximiliano Lopez was the designer and project manager for ForeverMommy.com. He has a Masters of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and currently works and has a consulting practice.
Alex King
I have built myself to be the most invaluable asset I know.
Over the years, I’ve grown and perfected my craft to be able to create full suites of Creative & Marketing content for my clients.
I’ve worked with some of the biggest names in a variety of industries including Tony Robbins, Eric Worre (Network Marketing Pro), Alex Jeffries just to name a few.
I take passionate people with profitable ideas and make their dreams a reality.
I’m the guy that the other experts call when they don’t know what to do.
I take on an extremely limited amount of projects and dedicate my full attention to my high paying clients.
My mission is to serve and create amazing content that moves, teaches & inspires people while creating wildly profitable business systems for my clients & partners.
Jansen Henschel
I am an 11 year old homeschooled programmer. I code in HTML, CSS, Javascript, C#, Ruby, Rails, Python, and WordPress.
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