Speakers

Bob Barker

Bobby Bryant

Before jumping into the WordPress Community, I spent 13 years managing high performing teams of electronic technicians, while serving in the United States Marine Corps. During that time I witnessed a lot of technological change, and know first hand the importance of learning new skills.

Recently, I fell in love with all things WordPress. Over the past two years I have spent an unhealthy amount of time, learning everything there is to know about WordPress. During this time, I have worked with a number of clients who have picked WordPress for their primary website, and I find it exciting, that more and more Enterprise clients are using the platform too. Helping clients, solve tough problems, with custom tailored solutions built on WordPress, is what makes me excited to start each and every day.

In September of 2014 I joined a WordPress Development Agency called 10up. At 10up I am currently serving as a Project Manger. I spend my days coordinating the efforts on a number of WordPress projects, and my nights improving my skills as a WordPress developer.

Brad Wester

Brad Wester is passionate about helping others achieve their dreams. As the owner of St. Louis Social Media Consultants, he has been able to connect his passion with his talent for digital marketing. Brad has helped many small business owners succeed with their entrepreneurial dreams by growing their customer base through social media marketing, blogging and search engine optimization.

Brian Goldstein

Brian Goldstein has been using and building sites with WordPress since 2010.  First as a content manager, then as a developer, and now as a client liaison, Brian has seen WP from many of the perspectives you’ll come across.  Currently, Brian is the business development partner and 1/3rd of the new design consultancy Our Collective, with designer Billy Frazier and fellow WordPress impresario Justin Chick.  We believe in transparency and collaboration, and you can find all sorts of code goodies at our github profile. A St. Louis native and Mizzou grad,  Brian lives in U-City with his amazing wife Meg and the furball who bosses them around, Tigger.

Cameron Barrett

Cameron (@camworld) has been blogging since you were in grade school (well, some of you). He pioneered the blog format in the late 1990s and remembers an eager, bright-eyed young man named Ma.tt being excited to meet one of the “founding fathers of blogging” in 2003.

He’s designed and built web sites for presidential candidates, the U.S. Army, the World Economic Forum, Teach for America and lead the migration of 70+ web sites from a terrifically-bad, proprietary SaaS to WordPress Multisite for New Jersey’s largest public school district.

He hails from Northern Michigan and currently lives in Northern NJ with his family. He is leading the charge for embracing “WordPress in Schools” and his goal is to eventually have all 14,000+ public school districts in this country using WordPress in some way through a services-based company called SchoolPresser.

Chase Replogle

Chris Carter

Chris Koerner

Chris is a long time WordPress tinkerer. He’s been writing with WordPress since 2005 and is a co-organizer of the St. Louis WordPress Community Meetup group. Chris enjoys working with local small business and non-profits to build a sustainable and well-designed web presence – using WordPress of course.

During the day he’s lucky enough to work at Mercy – a non-profit healthcare system headquartered in St. Louis. Chris helps with UI and UX standards for data visualization efforts and helps manage documentation for Mercy’s Data Analytics and Reporting team.

Christoph Trappe

Christoph Trappe is a career storyteller who has worked as a journalist, nonprofit executive recognized nationally for his digital initiatives and currently helps hospitals across the United States share their authentic stories.

He often speaks at conferences across North America on such topics as authentic storytelling, content marketing and WordPress.

Christoph leverages his digital marketing experience to guide client engagements and ensure successful outcomes through communication, creativity, and careful management.

His diverse background includes content marketing, marketing communications, and journalism making him a valuable team member for hospitals across the country as they implement complex digital initiatives and patient acquisition strategies. @CTrappe

Drew Bell

Drew Bell has designed and developed for the Web since 1998. After brief careers running a small Etsy empire and teaching web design and illustration, Drew has returned to St. Louis, where he now fights Rails and WordPress applications.

Gregory Ray

Gregory Ray first dealt with early versions of WordPress as a system administrator for a regional ISP, and consequently learned about the ways it could go wrong before discovering how it could be done right. Ever since, he has sought to help developers and users keep their sites safe, stable, and current. For the last ten years, he has owned and operated a technology consulting firm called Dot Gray, often supporting clients who have chosen WordPress. 

Gregory also participates in the St. Louis WordPress Meetup group, manages the St. Louis Apple Professionals Meetup, and presents on various Apple topics.

Heather Acton

Heather Acton is the founder of Helio Interactive, a WordPress-centric digital agency in Chicago, IL. She’s passionate about good practices, mentoring others, and drinking craft beer with colleagues and friends.

Hilary Fosdal

Hilary Fosdal is the founder of Bring Your Own Stuff. She also serves as the Digital Strategist at the Better Government Association (BGA).

Prior to joining the BGA, Hilary was the digital managing editor for the Chicago-based Cumulus Radio stations 89 WLS AM and 94.7 FM. She earned her M.A. in journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

You can get to know her better online at http://hilaryfosdal.com.

Jarrett Gucci

Jarrett is the founder and owner of WPfixIt.com, based on the Apple support model of offering instant WordPress support for a flat fee. Since 2011, they have serviced over 10,000 support tickets. Jarrett has taken his passion for people and excitement in technology to create success around him.
Long before he started his own business, hard work and ambition were traits that were well ingrained. By age 25, Jarrett already had been promoted to executive, sales and management positions in the fortune 500 retail industry throughout various parts of the country.

Not afraid of risk and motivated by the potential to give back, Jarrett turned his 7 year hobby of HTML and PHP play into a business. The key to his success was networking. “Getting myself out there is what kick-started my business. I didn’t make a lot of money, but it helped me create credibility and my reputation.” A few years into his first WordPress development business , he made a commitment to help others to enhance their on-line presence through the power of WordPress.

When Jarrett goes off-line, you’ll find him setting up camp and roughing it under the stars at the local beach side campgrounds with his wife Tarn and 5 daughters.

Jason Yingling

Jason Yingling is a lead developer at Red8 Interactive. He was schooled at Missouri State University, and now resides in St. Charles. He began teaching himself WordPress in 2009 and his comment history on WordPress.org ranges from his first post that, to this day, he could not tell you what he was asking to answering support issues on plugins he has released. He currently develops custom WordPress sites for Red8 Interactive ranging from basic promotional sites to full-fledged ecommerce stores. He is not especially adept at writing about himself in the third-person. Jason is a huge fan of the Cardinals. He is after all from St. Louis. Birds.

Joe McGill

Joe McGill hails from St. Louis, MO, where he works as a web designer and developer at Washington University. He is an avid WordPress user, a core contributor since WordPress 4.1, and a participant in the RICG effort to bring responsive images into core. Find him online on Twitter or via his blog at joemcgill.net.

John Richards II

John Richards is an avid cat lover who also develops WordPress websites. He started building websites for a living in 2007 and specifically in WordPress in 2013 when he started working at Washington University in St. Louis. His favorite part of web development is innovating simple solutions for complex problems. Originally from Pennsylvania, he now lives in St. Louis with his wife and a clowder of kitties.

Konstantin Obenland

Konstantin is a WordPress developer, and Core contributor based in Southern California. You might remember him from projects like Twenty Twelve, Twenty Thirteen, or the new WordPress Theme Directory. At Automattic he’s is part of a team that contributes back to WordPress full time. He enjoys craft beers and good food — sometimes so much that he blogs about it.

Lucas Lima

Lucas is a Technology Project Manager and an advocate of the Free Software and Open Source projects. He’s co-owner of a Brazilian start up company based in São Paulo called Brasa Design where he was able to acquire some background managing WordPress projects. He’s been working hard to learn and spread the world of the free software and free web, trying to be an active member of the Brazilian and St. Louis WordPress community since 2012.

Mary Baum

… IS your mom, if your mom were a geek.

A veteran creative, degreed designer and somewhat-recent convert to the principles of direct marketing, Mary Baum runs a branding practice called Marginhancers that starts by building sites on the Genesis framework – now with Foundation!

An aspiring WordPress theme reviewer, she occasionally writes and speaks on topics at the crossroads of design and code.

Nuts about: Macs, tech, type, tennis, iOS, CSS and cats.

Pet peeves: Cold weather, dead copy, cottage cheese, sour cream, mayo and the Mac app Preview.

Mary is married to Dick Moomaw, an aerospace engineer, and they have 2.5 grown children: a sportswriter in New England (part of a couple, hence the .5) and a Mizzou freshman/sometime Sugarfire staffer.

Megan Harris

Megan Harris is a passionate marketing professional with nearly 4 years’ experience in copywriting and search engine marketing. She began her career as a freelancer and has since worked in marketing on both the agency side in numerous industries, and the client side in healthcare and transportation.

Megan currently uses WordPress regularly to host her website geared towards editing and writing services for authors and small businesses. When she occasionally has free time, you can find her trying her hand at sewing, doing DIY home projects, and generally handling the chaos that comes from being a wife and a mother to a toddler. You can find Megan on Twitter @MHarrisEditor.

Michael Cain

Michael is a Portland, Maine-based Theme Generator for Automattic‘s Theme Team. He spends his days creating, converting, and improving the theme experience on both WordPress.com and WordPress.org, his evenings blogging about food and travel on mapandmenu.com, and his nights dreaming about how to make tomorrow’s WordPress blogs and sites even better.

Michael Cremean

Michael Cremean is the Founder and CEO of Quadshot Software, LLC (“Quadshot”), a WordPress and eCommerce development company based in Las Vegas, NV.  Since 2009, Quadshot has helped customers ‘full stack’ creating WordPress websites including planning, design, development, launch and beyond.

Prior to founding Quadshot, for the preceding  years Cremean was a Director/CTO/CEO of several startups, delivering products in Online Learning, Wireless Networking, Gaming, Robotics and more.  He holds 6 patents and his teams have won several awards from Inc, Cisco, Smithsonian and the USDLA.  His dogs are super cute as well.

Quadshot develops most sites using the responsive WooThemes Framework, Canvas and/or WooCommerce. Key people at Quadshot have contributed to both WordPress and WooCommerce code. 

Quadshot is also the creator of several products integrated with WooCommerce, including an open source OpenTickets ticket platform used by Theaters, Venues, Festivals and Event Organizers. (Download OpenTickets Community Edition at WordPress.org ).

More information  at quadshot.com or info@quadshot.com

Michele Butcher

Michele Butcher is a blogger, teacher, designer, and all around awesome person. She is the WordPress Specialist cleaning hacked websites over at WP Security Lock. She is the chief think tank at 13 Core and the brains behind Can’t Speak Geek. Michele is a beginners and intermediate WordPress instructor at John A Logan College and the Lead Organizer for the Southern Illinois WordPress Meetup. When not in front of her Mac, Michele enjoys helping her daughter with her own blog and spending time with her family living life.

Mika Epstein

Mika Ariela Epstein is better known as Ipstenu, the Half-Elf Support Rogue. Working for DreamHost as a WordPress Support Specialist and Manager (aka ‘WordPress Guru’), she solves any WordPress problem that comes up, trains everyone from support to marketing in why WordPress makes your life better, and still finds time to slash unanswered WordPress.org forum threads by night and wrangle plugins by day. A self-taught guru on Multisite and .htaccess, she has a passion for writing and technology and blogs about them whenever possible.

The rumor that she has dice in her purse and tinfoil in her hats is in a constant state of Schrödinger proofs.

Nile Flores

Nile Flores is a sassy Southern Illinois mom who is also a WordPress designer and developer. She’s been helping the WordPress community for years, like since it’s beginning. Nile runs Blondish.net , which talks about Blogging, WordPress, SEO, Social Media, and Web Design. She also runs a nearly 7,000 member community called All About WordPress, which is dedicated to helping WordPressers around the world.

In the news, Nile recently received the 2014 Community Choice award in the Expert category of the Small Business Influencer Awards, hosted by Small Biz Trends. She also recently joined the Team Yoast, same creators of WordPress SEO by Yoast and Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast, as part of support.

When she’s not getting knee deep in WordPress related stuff, she’s hanging with her son, painting, writing poetry, or practicing karate.

Pippin WIlliamson

Pippin Williamson is an avid WordPress plugin developer from Hutchinson, Kansas and the lead developer for several large WordPress plugins, including AffiliateWP, Easy Digital Downloads, and Restrict Content Pro.

Beyond the world of WordPress, Pippin is a devoted father and husband. He thoroughly enjoys brewing coffee varieties from around the world, indulging in craft beers, and riding his bicycle from point A to point B whenever possible

Russell Fair

Ryan Markel

Ryan engineers happiness for WordPress.com VIP from St. Louis, the Gateway to the West. He’s been blogging in some form or another since the turn of the millennium, eventually learning and loving WordPress. He enjoys the study of games, being part of Cardinal Nation, and helping his wife (try to) control his five children.

Sara Cannon

Sara Cannon is Partner and Creative Director at Range. She loves design, typography, user experience, and art. Sara loves giving talks around the globe on web design, responsive design, web typography, and more. A seasoned designer, Sara has done work for clients such as Disney Publishing and Flickr. She loves open source, her pets, traveling, and WordPress.

Find Sara Cannon Around the Web:

Scott Schaper

Scott Schaper is the founder of Revisin Creative, an 8 year old digital marketing agency serving the Kansas City market and the midwest in general. Revisin is a proud open-source shop leaning on WordPress to deliver killer branding and strategic content for it’s diverse clientele

Tim Bishop

Tim Bishop is the owner and founder of WP Master Design, a WordPress centric web services company based in Hartford Iowa. Tim first discovered WordPress in 2005, but didn’t really fall in love with the platform until version 2.1 in 2007. Since then, he has developed more than 3 dozen WordPress websites for himself and for clients. Tim is the co-founder of the DSM WordPress meetup group in Des Moines Iowa.

Tim is passionate about open source software and has been involved in the Linux and Open Source community for more than 15 years. When not working, Tim enjoys time with his 3 wonderful children with his beautiful wife of 9 years.

Timothy Sisson

Tim Sisson loves WordPress and enjoys leveraging it to meet businesses needs. He heads up the Customer Community Team at InMotion Hosting where they act as advocates for software like WordPress.

While a self proclaimed nerd, he’s an avid outdoorsman who loves the crisp mountain air. When he’s not tinkering with WordPress he spends his time on adventures with his wife Lisa, three daughters Autumn, Stella, and Petra.

Will Hanke

Will Hanke is St. Louis’ top independent SEO professional. Will’s company Red Canoe Media works with businesses to help them in all facets of online marketing, inlucing SEO, Facebook advertising and content marketing. Will teaches monthly classes and holds webinars and workshops for small business owners throughout the year. He is an avid blogger and has published several ebooks including an Amazon Bestseller in Marketing. You can always find him speaking throughout the Midwest to local Chambers, Associations and other business groups on everything from link building to generating warm leads through your website.