WordCamp St. Louis is proud to host a terrific group of speakers for our 2017 event.
Andy Nathan
Most digital marketing companies understand all the jargon, but have trouble conveying their clients message to the intended target. As an internet marketing veteran and former teacher, I not only understand how to use social media, blogging, and search engine optimization for your business. I know how to explain it to your audience in a clear and concise manner.
I am the founder of Smart at the Start, a digital marketing strategy company that helps small businesses grow through bite-sized internet marketing services. I successfully worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs in over 80 different industries over the past seven years. I wrote the books Start Up Gap and eMarketing Experience.
Jarrett Gucci
Jarrett Gucci comes from a retail background that started at Home Depot in Buffalo NY as cashier and 18 months later was asked to be a project manager based out of Carson California with a goal of opening 12 stores in 14 months. This goal was accomplished. He has also been an area manager at Big Lots and Bed Bath and beyond. He left his very last retail career as a district manager at Linens & Things in 2007 to pursue a hobby of website development as hope he could make some money doing it. After 4 years of building and managing WordPress sites, he founded a company called WP Fix It and since 2011 his company has serviced over 30,000 WordPress support tickets. Something you may not know about Jarrett besides all this, is that when he was 15 his neighbor gave him a 1962 dodge dart and he completely took it apart and rebuilt it.
Paul Gilzow
Paul is a Programmer Analyst. a Web application security and accessibility evangelist and a Software instructor. Conference lecturer and presenter. Runs on passion and coffee.
Julia Eudy
I have spoke to small business owners through Chamber and Networking Events on such topics as SEO, WordPress Best Practices, Content Writing, Social Media Marketing and Implementing an Effective Online Marketing Strategy. I currently teach Content Management Systems and Social Media Marketing as an Adjunct Instructor at St. Charles Community College.
Joe Duffin
Joe is a seasoned marketing executive with 20+ years experience in providing digital strategy and integrated marketing solutions for regional, national and international brands in a wide variety of verticals.
In his current role as Creative Director at Spry Digital, Joe is directly drives all things strategy and oversees all aspects of owned, earned and paid media for agency clients.
Since building his first professional website in 1996, Joe has operated in the digital space in both agency and corporate environments, spanning creative, marketing, strategy and development. He has had the opportunity to be not only an active participant in the ever-changing digital world, but a pioneer in multi-channel/platform marketing.
Joe’s diverse experience gives him the unique ability to understand where and when to reach multiple target audiences at various points in the conversion cycle. Applying this holistic approach to content and marketing, he has developed many successful B2B and B2C multi-channel strategies and integrated marketing solutions.
Bruce L Chamoff
Speaker at WordCamp Jacksonville 2016, WordCamp NY City 2016, WordCamp Cincinnati 2016 as well as a speaker at various business networking events from 2005 to the present.
David Needham
I have a lot more experience talking about Drupal, but I’ve been getting more and more into WordPress the last 2 years and I’d like to share my experience in the WordPress community. I’ve been a speaker DrupalCons at Chicago, London, Denver, Munich, Portland, Los Angeles and New Orleans (http://speakerrate.com/davidneedham). Most recently, I presented “Using Paragraphs to Weave a Beautiful Content Tapestry” at BADCamp. Here’s a video of that same presentation co-presented with Les Limá at Drupalcon New Orleans https://events.drupal.org/neworleans2016/sessions/using-paragraphs-weave-beautiful-content-tapestry.
David Evans
I’m a developer at Red8 Interactive, an interactive startup that specializes in WordPress development, and have been there for almost 5 years now. I do everything from WordPress development to HTML email development, but mainly focus on WP. Grew up in St. Charles, MO, and graduated from Missouri State with a Bachelor’s in Mass Media Production back in 2011.
You’ll always see me in basketball shorts, drink of choice is Pepsi, prefer really bad movies to really good books (mainly because I don’t read) and am an avid STL sports fan. Humor is my defense mechanism, so be prepared for a lot of bad jokes and animated GIFs.
Steve Stewart
Steve Stewart launched his first podcast in 2010 on a self-hosted WordPress site. More than six years later, he is now the leading podcast engineer in the personal finance space – producing award winning shows like Stacking Benjamins, Martinis and Your Money, and the brand new podcast by FinCon Conference Founder, Philip Taylor (PT Money). Steve is also Organizer for the St. Louis Podcasters MeetUp Group and Editor of Podertainment Magazine.
Jason Yingling
Jason is the Director of Development at Red8 Interactive leading a team that builds custom WordPress solutions for companies of all sizes. He discovered WordPress in 2006 trying to create a custom blog. Since his first non-sensical post on the WordPress.org forums he’s released 3 plugins, built many a custom theme, blogged about WordPress, and spoke at 4 WordCamps.
Heather Acton
Heather is an agency owner and developer in Chicago. She gets her kicks from engineering brilliant and efficient solutions for her clients using WordPress. She organizes WordCamp Chicago and speaks at learning-focused events around the midwest. In her personal time she enjoys losing to her kids at Skip-Bo, eating avocados, and listening to jam bands.
Emanuel Costa
I have been building professional websites and helping companies safely grow online for over 20 years. I help organize meetups (Las Vegas WooCommerce and Las Vegas Marketing, SEO, Social Media) and whenever I can I attend tech events, specially WordCamps.
Dane Morgan
I’m an Arizona expat living in Southeast Missouri for the past decade and a half. I’m a full-time freelance website developer with a near 100% focus on WordPress based solutions. I’ve been working with WordPress since version 1.2 and I’ve been earning my sole income from it since 2008. I primarily make full custom websites for small businesses and small ad agencies who do not have in-house developers. I code themes for websites, adhering as much as I understand to WordPress best practices and I write custom plugins to add features that should not be built into themes. Recently I have started getting involved in the WordPress community and have joined the WordPress ThemeReview Team, where I learned that my understanding of best practices was, at best incomplete. and I am working to improve my code based on what I am learning daily as a part of that group.
Nile Flores
Nile Flores is an 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.
Nile recently took up the position as WordPress Infection Cleanup Specialist at WPFixit.com, where she cleans up and secures websites.
Nile founded and runs a 8,800 member Facebook group 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.
Joe McGill
Joe McGill is a Senior WordPress Engineer at Human Made and is a Contributing Developer to WordPress Core. Find him on online at joemcgill.net at on Twitter as @joemcgill.
Aaron Graham
Aaron is one of the luckiest WordPressers in St. Louis since his day job is doing theme and plugin development for Washington University’s WordPress sites.
Outside of work he enjoys being a foster dad and spending time with his awesome wife while they play with their dogs (a German Shepard mix and a Yorkie), hike, fish, and camp.
In an alternate universe, he ended up becoming an auto mechanic since his 4th love (behind his wife and the dogs) is his 1972 Chevrolet Chevelle which he spends more time tinkering with than actually driving.
Tim Sisson
I love WordPress and enjoy leveraging it to meet businesses needs. I lead the Customer Community Team at BoldGrid. I’m passionate about nonprofit usage and e-commerce. When I’m not creating with WordPress I spend my time on adventures with my awesome wife Lisa, three daughters Autumn, Stella, & Petra.
Mike Hale
Mike Hale is a developer at Rainmaker Digital where he helps build the Rainmaker Platform. He has worked in software development for almost 20 years, and started working with WordPress in 2010, specializing in developing custom plugins and sites using the Genesis Framework. He is also a writer, puppeteer, podcaster and co-organizer of the WordPress Naperville Meetup.
Michele Butcher-Jones
Michele hails from the beautiful Southern Illinois and is the SLA Lead ensuring a five star support experience at Valet.io. Michele is also the Support Guru for Give, the donation platform exculisivly for WordPress. During the evenings she is a WordPress instructor for John A Logan College. In Her free time she is the Lead Organizer for the Southern Illinois WordPress Meetup, loves traveling with her family, enjoys reading, and a lover of fine food and drink.
Jennifer Swisher
Originally from West Michigan, Jennifer came to St. Louis in 2008 to pursue a degree in music education. Four years later, and a college major change, Jennifer graduated with a degree in Web Design. Since then, she has worked as a PR/Web Dev/Graphic Designer/Marketer/Jen-of-All-Trades. Currently, she works for a local company as a web content manager where she provides ongoing support for over 75 public websites.
When Jennifer isn’t leading or speaking at WordCamp St. Louis, she volunteers at Blank Canvas Studios, where she helps adults with developmental disabilities create art and access their community.
Mary Baum
Mary Baum is the founder and principal of RacquetPress, which builds Genesis child themes, full sites and bespoke branding solutions for a variety of verticals in the tennis industry. A veteran creative (since 1979!) and degreed designer, Mary speaks on WP design and development and runs the Antelope Valley WordPress Meetup. An organizer of WordCamp St. Louis, she probably should NOT be telling people her latest ambition, which is to be the Phyllis Diller of the WordPress Community.