Introducing Our WCSTL 2018 Speakers – Round 2

Posted on by Nile Flores

We’ve got more speakers to announce for WordCamp St. Louis! While we do like to look for people from the St. Louis area, we’ve found some some outside of our region that are excited to share their knowledge in all things WordPress.

Please welcome our speakers listed below. You can find out a little about them, where they’re from, and how to connect with them.

Our WCSTL 2018 Speakers

Heather Acton

Creator of Josh and Addy. Founder of Helio Interactive. Lover of WordPress. Busy crafting web solutions that help people.

Where Heather is from: Chicago, Illinois

Connect with Heather:

Dane Morgan

Dane is a freelance WordPress website builder. He’s been using WordPress since 2004 and he’s been creating custom themes and plugins for small businesses and entrepreneurs full time since 2008.

Where Dane is from: Bloomfield, Missouri

Connect with Dane:

Clay Mosley

Clay Mosley was fired from every job he ever held. His first job out of college was working as an insurance fraud investigator. It didn’t take long to realize that job wasn’t for him. For the next 10 years, Clay hopped from job to job, getting fired from each one. But he didn’t get fired because he was lazy or not good at his job. He worked for traditional people and figured out how to do the work in half the time. Clay wasn’t traditional so the traditional jobs didn’t work for him. In January 2014, a year before Clay would be fired from his last job, he set out to build websites part-time. After realizing he was unemployable, Clay convinced his wife to give him 1 year to make a go out of freelancing. In February 2015, he started Rock City Digital ‚ and it’s worked out ever since. But that doesn’t mean Clay has been making money the entire time. It wasn’t until about 8 months in that Clay took a more disciplined approach to his business, created some processes, and started to treat the business like a business. Clay takes an unorthodox approach to his business, but what he’s done has worked for him and the team that works along side him. Clay allows his employees to work in the creative environment that best suits them. They are given flexibility, whether that be from home, a coffee shop, or late into the night. He now employs a team of 14 people at Rock City Digital. All in just a span of less than two years.

The boring description of what Rock City Digital does is that they do all things digital including website design, search marketing, but they are mostly a social media and branding agency. The real description of what they do is that they take a very unorthodox approach to marketing and take things to the level of edgy and outside-the-box.

Where Clay is from: Little Rock, Arkansas

Connect with Clay:

Monica Pitts

Monica Pitts is the founder and Chief Creative Officer of MayeCreate Design. She spends her days constructing a marriage of form and function; creating art with her design team to grow businesses through websites and online marketing. Monica considers herself an artist, marketer and web dork with the ability to speak geek and English.

Where Monica is from: Columbia, Missouri

Connect with Monica:

Dave Navarro, Jr.

I am a paid WordPress Geek. I work for a large public library as a WordPress developer where I write custom plugins and child themes. I am a social media expert. I am a photographer and multimedia geek. I have the most amazing fiance in the world that I do not deserve. I am a father of three amazing children and the grandfather of three even more amazing young girls.

Where Dave is from: Topeka, Kansas

Connect with Dave:

Jennifer Swisher

A native Michigander, Jennifer moved to St. Louis in 2008 for college and decided to stay. Currently, she provides website support to insurance companies in 27 states. In her spare time, she helps plan WordCamp St. Louis and WordCamp US, and spends time with her dog, Loki.

Where Jennifer is from: St. Louis, Missouri

Connect with Jennifer:

Matt Decrevel

Since teaching himself to create websites by writing HTML in notepad nearly 20 years ago, Matt has had a passion for digital content creation. Over the past six years Matt has designed, developed and overseen the development of multiple iOS and web applications as well as created websites and maintained content for various St. Louis-based organizations including: Saint Louis FC, St. Louis Surge Women’s Basketball and The Post Sports Bar & Grill. After finding his passion for WordPress development, Matt left his sales career and committed to full-time development in 2015. Today, Matt is a front-end web developer for St. Louis based company goBRANDgo! specializing in highly custom website development.

Where Matt is from: St. Louis, Missouri

Connect with Matt:

Nick Mantia

Nick Mantia is a front-end WordPress developer with a passion for creating things that are both beautiful and useful. During Nick’s junior year in the graphic design program at UMSL, he interned at St. Louis-based marketing agency goBRANDgo!, where he continued to hone his design and development skills. Nick earned his BFA with emphasis in graphic design from UMSL in 2016, and upon graduating, joined the goBRANDgo! team as a full-time developer.

Nick has zero interest in creating “just another WordPress site” He not only cranks out beautiful PHP; he is heavily invested in every project from idea to whiteboard, wireframe and execution. Nick, along with the goBRANDgo! team, creates websites that in addition to being really, really ridiculously good looking… are essentially living, breathing aspects of a company’s sales and marketing team.

In addition to his background in design, Nick has also obtained his certification in Google Analytics. Nick’s strength is in leveraging the intersection of design, development and analytics. To him, this intersection is essential to creating something that is both aesthetically pleasing and functional as a business tool.

Every new website project presents Nick with an opportunity to innovate and to use new advanced functionality to help clients reach their goals. On top of new site builds, he helps maintain goBRANDgo!’s 100 hosted WordPress sites.

When Nick’s headphones come off, he enjoys playing rec volleyball, flexing his art/design muscle, and watching stand up comedy.

Where is Nick from: St. Louis, Missouri

Connect with Nick:

 

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 2009 his company has serviced over 72,000 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.

Jarrett Gucci also know 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 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, Quicksilver is most commonly know as the owner and founder of WP Fix It where he and his superhero team have serviced over 72,000 WordPress issues since 2009.

Where Jarrett is from: Irvine, California

Connect with Jarrett:

Want to meet any of our speakers in person and pick their brain? You can do that May 12 & 13, 2018, at Washington University! Click here to purchase a ticket today to WordCamp St. Louis.