News

With the recent news in Las Vegas, the organizational team wanted to reach out to reassure our WP friends and family that we’re still working hard to make WCLV 2017 a great camp.

The communities to which we belong are the driving force that keeps us all participating in life, even when we don’t much feel like pushing through another day. This is a tough time for Las Vegas, and even if our closest friends and family aren’t among those directly affected, the whole city is coming together to deal with the aftermath.

It has been deeply moving to see hundreds of people lined up to donate blood, truckloads of supplies donated to first responders and families, and millions of dollars raised to help those who are still struggling to recover.

We invite you to reach out to your friends and neighbors no matter where you live, because our connections with other humans are more valuable than any of us realize. People across the country and the world are hurting right now, and your kindness could make all the difference.

As Las Vegas citizens, neighbors, and supporters, the best thing we can do for our city is to pick up the pieces and keep moving forward. Our economy in Vegas is almost entirely supported by tourism and events like WordCamp Las Vegas, so cancelling or postponing WCLV would only hurt those of us in the community even more.

That’s why we’re still having our WordCamp, and we hope you’ll join us to support the WordPress community and the people of Las Vegas who just want to keep on living.

In the meantime, you can help Las Vegas just by showing up. We’ll see you on October 14th and 15th.

We on the organizational team also want to especially thank our speakers, sponsors, and volunteers who are still coming together to make WCLV 2017 a success. We appreciate all of you more than you know.

Thanks for everything.

-The Organizational Team
Robert Gillmer (lead)
John Hawkins
Manny Costa
Chris Rogers
Russell Aaron
Michele Cheow
Kitty Lusby

If I could relearn WordPress, here’s what I’d do

Russell Aaron

Learning WordPress is hard. Do you start with Core, themes or plugins? What are updates? Can you hire someone to teach you? Why is this so difficult to understand? In this session, we’re going to relearn WordPress from the ground up. After 10 years of developing WordPress, I have a few tricks and tips to easily understand the most popular content management system.

A Business Owner’s Guide To Manage A WordPress Website

Matt Campbell

Describe basic aspects of WordPress an entrepreneur should know so that they can hire someone to do the work and be able to manage them to do it.

Setting Up Your Own Podcast and Vlog on WordPress in One Day

Bill Conrad

The 20 to 30 minute presentation will go over how to create and setup your first podcast, best WordPress Vlog practices and how to monetize your podcast and Vlog.

Becoming a Bug Exterminator!

Joshua Copeland

Spotting bugs is a skill developed over time with practice, but this session will put you on the fast track to being a bug exterminator! One day, your production environment will break and you have to reproduce it on your local box. Worst yet, getting XDebug wired up to step through isn’t very straight forward when using Docker, Vagrant, or remote machines. In this session we’ll cover how to properly setup XDebug in various situations. We’ll cover how to use PHPStorm to step through your PHP and JavaScript code, and other neat features. We’ll also cover how to profile your code to find slow bottlenecks in your app. Joshua will also share war stories of battles he’s endured and what caused these issues.

Easy A/B Testing with Google Analytics For WordPress Sites

Manny Costa

Should this button background color on my website be orange or blue? Should I use a large hero image or just a 90 pixels banner? What is the best copy: Get eBook or Buy eBook? If you have a website, you have activities that you want your users to complete (e.g., make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter) and/or metrics that you want to improve (e.g., revenue, session duration, bounce rate). With Google’s Content Experiments, you can test which version of a landing page (or any page) results in the greatest improvement in conversions (i.e. completed activities that you measure as goals) or metric value. In this presentation I will show you that anyone should be using this free A/B testing tool to improve the performance of your WordPress site with a realtime demo.

WordPress Security 101

Michael Cremean

WordPress is the most popular CMS, so it is also the most targeted. This talk will cover how easy it is to secure your WordPress website. Covering some best practices for server, firewall, password and WordPress security plugins, following these simple steps can give you peace of mind and avoid having a really, really bad day. (5 other talks are available)

Finding Focus as a Freelancer

Scott DeLuzio

When a freelancer starts out, it’s easy to feel like they need to be everything to everyone. When you first get started, you want to offer every type of service imaginable – SEO, design, copywriting, graphics and video, plugin development, theme designing, maintenance and support, analytics, PPC ads, e-commerce…dog walking… but it quickly becomes overwhelming.

When trying to do everything as a freelancer, you lose sight of what you’re really good at or passionate about. If you’re great at SEO but terrible at graphic design, it’ll show in your work. You’ll soon start to hate the work you do and resent the clients who ask you to do it. Not to mention your clients will be less than thrilled with the work they’ve just paid you for.

Finding focus is all about evaluating what you’re good at, and focusing your efforts on those activities. You’ll love the work you do, your clients will be thrilled with the results they receive, and you will get more (and better quality) referrals as a result.

Podcasting Auto Posting to WP

Kevin Dunlap

The use of podcasts to improve your SEO and brand awareness and how you can put those podcasts directly into your blog or creating a separate blog.

Correctly Configuring the Yoast SEO Plugin

Kenny Eliason

The Yoast SEO plugin is your best bet when it comes to optimizing your WordPress website to rank higher in the search engines. But who has time to understand all the settings provided from the plugin? We’ll go over all the default settings to help ensure your site is ready to rank!

Legos for Developers – A modular approach to WordPress Development

Joshua Giowaya

Let’s explore the benefits of thinking in re-usable blocks. Modular Development improves productivity, enhances UI and empowers authors. Leveraging the WordPress templating system and Advanced Custom Fields we can achieve modularity in our WP themes.

Creating a Blogging Schedule Using The 20/30 Rule

Jarrett Gucci

Ever thought about creating a Blogging Schedule to really take your blog to the next level? If you have you maybe asked yourself “How many post per week or month should I write?”. This is a tricky question and I want to help answer it with a method I developed called the 20/30 Rule. We will come back to that in a moment. First I would like you to imagine having an engaged audience that loves to read every new article you publish.

It has been proven that the best way to become an expert in your field is to write. So, what is holding you back? I bet the first thing is time and a close second for some is what to write about. For the purpose of this talk, you are going to be helped with the time portion of your blogging fear.

TBD

John Hawkins

TBD

Coming Soon Pages

Jason Janes

Coming Soon Page and Maintenance Mode Plugin for WordPress

The Seven Core Competency Framework to Become a WordPress Web Professionals

Judi Knight

Frustrated with trying to make a living doing WordPress websites? Think you just need to find the right theme for a project or learn a few more design tips? This presentation will let you in on what you don’t know you don’t know. I will present a framework you can follow to become a skilled WordPress pro who can price, close, create, and deliver amazing, effective WordPress websites for happy clients!

How to create landing pages for lead generation using WordPress

John Larson

The importance of landing pages in the lead generation process, how to create landing pages using WordPress, and tips for increasing landing page conversion.

Taking the Stage: Improving the quality of your life through a staging workflow

Thomas Levy

We might all have staging sites but it’s clear we don’t all use them. Why not? Are we negligent or lazy? Or do we simply not understand the true valued of a test and deploy workflow? We’ll cover the whys and hows staging.

How The ***** Do I Get People To Read My Stinkin’ Blog?!

Kitty Lusby

After all that work you put into picking your topic, building your site, and writing your content, you look at your stats and discover that a whopping 12 people visited your blog…and at least 2 of them were your mom. Keep putting in that consistent work and sharing your posts on your social profiles, and you might even get that number up to 26 unique views.

What’s going on? Why aren’t people reading your blog? As it turns out, sending traffic to your website and getting people to read and engage with your content isn’t as simple as writing a post and announcing it in your Twitter feed. The vast majority of bloggers give up without ever topping a couple of hundred readers total, but if you’re willing to learn a few basic skills and focus your effort where it matters most, you can start attracting droves of readers who actually care about what you have to say. In this session, we’ll talk about making the transition from a blog with tens of readers to a site with tens of thousands of monthly views.

There might be special effects, so only sit in the front row if you have a healthy heart and can handle sudden loud noises, flashing lights, and having small objects thrown at you. This is WordCamp Vegas, after all, so you should be ready for anything.

17 Things Marketers Wish Developers Knew (& How to Communicate Inversely with Marketers)

Dustin Nay

We’ve seen this story over and over. Your client’s marketing agency wants you to do something… or you need to talk to them about a problem they are causing, and there is this gap where you don’t know how to get through to them.
I’ve been on both sides of this fence and have gotten pretty good at bridging the gap. I’d like to help you close the gap with your clients or within your organization too.
We’ll discuss, among other things:
Site architecture and related SEO topics pertinent to WordPress
Design & UX considerations
Site speed
Tracking / analytics and what to do with them
How to prioritize
Don’t get stuck in games of politics when solid, clear, concise communication will do! Improve your marketing know-how and impress your clients and higher-ups too.

The connection between WordPress, Social Media and SEO

Robert Nissenbam

A simplified explanation of SEO – Showing the importance of and how a well built website, quality, well written content and social media are interconnected in driving search placement and long term SEO. I do this via slides and an easy to understand comparison with the way people refer others.

Authoring plugins

Aaron Overton

Learn how to create a new plugin from scratch, along with some of the most common tasks handled by plugins: admin settings pages; adding custom post types; handling Ajax calls; and whatever attendees might ask about specifically. (This is a summary of the class described here: http://www.learnpress.vegas/authoring-plugins/)

Our Hybrid Future: WordPress As Part Of The Stack

Josh Pollock

WordPress has grown from blogging tool, to flexible CMS to an application platform. As the web development world embraces micro-services, how does WordPress, which is normally implemented as a monolithic solution fit in and evolve? In this talk, I will look at what makes WordPress a good choice for application development, as well as where it is lacking. To put these questions in context, this talk will be framed around a case-study of a hybrid web app, built using WordPress and other tools including VueJS, Laravel and Amazon Web Services.

Supercharging WordPress for Nonprofits

Nathan Porter

WordPress and other opensource platforms have been constantly evolving to provide more and more sophisticated tools for today’s nonprofits. Things that were, in the past, only available through commercial applications or expensive custom applications are now being made available through free and opensource platforms, supercharging the impact potential that nonprofits have. Sophisticated email and SMS automation campaigns, membership management, donation management, event management, and much more. In this session we’ll take a look at some real world examples of these tools in action.

How to Make Your Blog the Best of Its Kind in the World

Scott Roeben

Scott Roeben’s blog, VitalVegas.com, was recently named one of the best travel sites in the world by The Independent, a British online newspaper, and has consistently been named the best blog in Las Vegas since its inception in 2013. During his time at Caesars Entertainment, the world’s largest casino company, his Pulse of Vegas blog generated millions of dollars in revenue and was named the best blog in the country by PR Daily. How is that possible? Find out at this session where Scott shares the secret sauce (hint: it includes rum) of creating personal and corporate blogs that reap massive reach and influence, garner accolades, crush the competition and make the world a snarkier place.

Video in your WP website

Chris Rogers

Creating video is hard enough! Chris will show you how to easily get your freakin’ video file into your WordPress website. He will also show you how to create video content with equipment you (probably) already own, ie: mobile devices, software, yada.

Video & Slides:
chrmedia.com/work/video-in-your-wordpress-website/

WordPress Lightning Fast

Ian Rogers

Learn how to optimize a WordPress site for maximum speed and efficiency. Learn how I’ve achieved scores of 100/100 in Google’s page speed insights.

Creating and Marketing Your Own Website For Your Retail Store

Richard Sheffield

Creating and Marketing Your Own Website For Your Retail Store
– Describe the process we went through to create our retail store. ie: Market Research, Demographics, Location, Financial Resources, etc.
– Explain our rationale for not just creating our website, but the process we went through to arrive at using a WordPress/Woocommerce site. This includes why we excluded other non-Wordpress platforms. Also explain the process we used to flesh out the layout, which with the help of Quadshot, helped us arrive at the current site layout.
– Further describe how we have continued to tweak the layout to make it a better experience, at least for our needs and market.
– Describe the plug-ins we added by trial & error and by recommendations to set up our SEO and analytics.
– Explain how all this work has paid off with a growing customer base with has benefited both the internet sales but has also fed our Brick & Mortar sales.
– Discuss what our future plans are for the site as we continue to grow.
This will be a very non-technical talk. No code, no CSS, just a “Here’s what we did and why it worked” talk.
Since my background is Marketing & Advertising, Finance and Business Consulting to Family Businesses, I’ll be passing on some ideas which might help the start-ups some which might help them mesh the retail and internet worlds.

Websites and Workshops – Using Classes and Communication Strategies to Increase Sales and Improve Customer Service

Kim Shivler

Are you a freelancer or small development shop working hard to build your business? Have you ever wanted to make sales come easier? Does customer support sometimes feel like a battle instead of a successful conversation?

In this session, we’ll discover how creating and launching workshops (both online and local) can help build your WordPress business. We’ll also cover how leveraging communication styles can help you sell easier and make customer calls smooth.

You’ll learn to create a workshop that maximizes customer engagement? We’ll look at concrete examples of using workshops or other training to add customers and increase satisfaction within your current customer base.

And you’ll receive a downloadable worksheet with strategies to help maximize communication in order to increase sales and improve customer service.

From the Ground Up – Building a WordPress Business

Seth Shoultes

I’ve been using WordPress for over ten years and running a business around it for eight years. Before that, I worked various construction jobs, then ran a small website development business and dabbled in all kinds of CMS’s, then moved on to work as a front-end developer in a marketing position at an international medical coding and billing education company. While I worked there, I developed their WordPress websites and built various in-house plugins, at the same time I stayed up every night after work developing the early versions of Event Espresso for my wife’s scrapbooking business. Due to the material costs and flaky customers, she wasn’t willing to shell out fees to Eventbrite. Since there weren’t any good plugins (IMO) at the time, I found an abandoned plugin that handled registrations, then added PayPal. Since I never heard back from the original developer, I ended up releasing and marketing my plugin under a different name. After a while, it got to where I was supporting it so much that I had to quit my full-time job to work on developing the plugin, supporting customers, and growing the business around the plugin. Somewhere along the way, I picked up my co-founder, Garth Koyle, we entered the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge in 2011 and won the grand prize of $40,000 for our business idea. At the time, we had just released the first version of our mobile apps, which allowed onsite ticket scanning and attendance tracking. Then in 2015, we launched our software as a service company, called Event Smart, which is powered by WordPress and Event Espresso.

Turning Silver to Green – Marketing to Seniors

Cemal Tashan

The senior age group is now, the largest in terms of size and percent of the population in the U.S. Those aged 50 and older represent 45% of the U.S. population. They are your most valuable potential customer. In this session you will face the demands and thought train of seniors during a sales process.

Landing Pages: An Art and a Science

Anne Watson

Don’t be intimidated when it’s time to create a landing page! We’ll go over easy tips on how to make a landing page with WordPress. We cover the latest trends in landing pages, as well as how design needs will change according to your resources and goals. Common landing page plugins will be reviewed, as well as how to hook it up to CRM or other lead generation tools.

Something advanced developery – TBD

Chris Webb

TBD

Importance of Reputation Management

Barbra Wolfe

You can have the most beautifully designed, professional website on page one of Google (whether by SEO or Google Adwords) but if your competitors have 4 and 5 star reviews and you don’t, no one is going to click on you.

So as a natural extension of my business, to help my customers achieve positive results, I’ve added a Reputation Management service that helps to minimize bad reviews and amplify good reviews. (It’s also a great management tool for companies wanting to compare location performance.)

Way back when, business was done with a handshake because a man was as good as his word. A man’s honor was tied to his word. That was before computers (and women in business :)) Honor and reputation are as important today as it was then (if not more so) only today a company’s reputation is controlled online.

I can speak to the statistics, review strategies, mechanics overview, include quotes from a recent Yoast article (because everyone knows Yoast) etc.

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

Sponsoring WordCamp Las Vegas is a great opportunity to demonstrate your support for the WordPress community. To keep costs down for our attendees, we look to sponsors to help make WordCamp an exciting part of our thriving open-source community.

For 2017, we’re expecting 200 attendees.

Event attendees are made up freelancers, entrepreneurs, small businesses, consultants, designers, developers, bloggers, copywriters, and hobbyists, as well as employees and team members from large organizations and corporations who work with WordPress. Skill level and experience with the WordPress platform range from those brand new to WordPress working on their very first website to savvy-professionals who make their living with WordPress.

Sponsoring WordCamp shows our local WordPress community that you care about their success and about supporting the open source platform we all love.

Sponsorship Levels