Speakers

Josh Gellock

Josh is the SEO and Content Strategist at Expander Digital, an SEO studio he founded in 2014. He helps other businesses drive website traffic from organic search. When he’s not meeting with clients, you can find Josh fishing, hiking, or biking on trails.

Ryan Erwin

Ryan is a web strategist and business development lead at Orbit Media Studios. Before joining the company and becoming an Orbiteer, Ryan founded a web design, development, and digital marketing company called Internet Marketing Chicago. His passion is learning about different digital operations and applying them to further ROI and success for his clients. His skills are rooted in analysis, strategy, problem solving and mobilizing all parties involved around the accomplishment of the objectives.

He brings years of experience with WordPress, ranging from speaking at and organizing WordCamps to building and marketing successful enterprise websites. Ryan is the current lead organizer for both WordCamp Chicago and the Greater Chicago Food Depository Hackathon called hackhunger.

Tyler Kelley

Tyler Kelley is Co-Founder & Chief Strategist at SLAM! Agency, a content marketing agency that helps brands realize and reach their highest potential. With 18 years in the results-driven marketing space, Tyler has earned a reputation for anticipating user trends and developing proactive strategies to drive brands forward.

Mary Baum

Mary Baum is the founder and principal of RacquetPress, which builds Genesis child themes and more for the tennis industry.

A veteran creative and degreed designer, Mary speaks on WP design and development and helps organize WordCamp St. Louis.

She’s partial to rare steaks, hard serves and high-contrast serifs; Also, homemade hot fudge, high backhand volleys, Genesis hooks and Joshua trees.

Joshua Giowaya

Joshua 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 my own consultancy. Joshua also brings an extensive background in design that has proven invaluable when contributing to the design process and communicating with creative teams. Currently, he is a WordPress consultant extremely active in the WordPress community. He regularly attends and speaks at local WordPress Meetups. Joshua’s hope is to give back to a community that has shared so much knowledge with him.

David Needham

David Needham is a Developer Advocate at Pantheon and serves on the board of directors of Enjoy Creativity. David has been a public speaker since 2008, and an entrepreneur since 2000. David is based out of Champaign IL, enjoys photography, and playing board games with his wife and kids.

Paul F Gilzow

Programmer Analyst Principle at the University of Missouri. Web application security and accessibility evangelist. Software instructor. Conference lecturer and presenter. Runs on passion and coffee.

Wolf Bishop

I have been involved in WordPress since 2005. I have devoted my professional life to WordPress as a freelancer, in my career at Pressable, and now in my own company WP Top Hat. I am married to an amazing woman and together we have 3 beautiful children. When I am not working in WordPress, I am with my family, riding my 4-wheeler, or airgun hunting on my Ozark mountain paradise.

Nathan Ingram

Nathan is the Host at iThemes Training where he teaches WordPress and freelance business development topics via live webinar.

He is also the creator of >ADVANCE Coaching, working with WordPress business owners individually and in groups to help them become more successful in their businesses.

Nathan has been a freelance web developer since 1995, and is based in Birmingham, Alabama where he is the lead organizer of WordCamp Birmingham and co-organizer of the Birmingham WordPress Meetup.

You can learn more about Nathan at https://nathaningram.com.

Jamie Schmid

Jamie Schmid has a particular passion for creating excellent content experiences. Originally from Milwaukee, WI, she has been working as a WordPress freelancer and consultant since 2012, regularly taking sites from conception through a well-managed build process that encourages communication, planning, and smart use of content. She has a background in Information Architecture and Content Strategy, a passion for all things WordPress, and a whole lot of cats back home in Portland, OR. In her role as SiteLock WordPress Evangelist, Jamie helps build awareness of website security, best practices, and solutions.

Kip Raske

Kip works as a Web Developer at Washington University in St. Louis.

Nile Flores

Nile Flores is a 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. Nile also works as an Infection Cleanup Specialist at WP Fix It.

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 founded and runs a 9,000+ 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.

Sam Hermes

Sam is a senior web developer at Washington University, creating and maintaining WordPress themes and plugins for university websites. His focus is on the front end, where he enjoys working with CSS and JavaScript.

Michele Butcher-Jones

Michele is a WordPress Technical Specialist at Thrive Internet Marketing Agency and runs her own WordPress security and maintenance shop at 13Core.

When not working, Michele is an organizer for WordCamp St Louis, WordCamp US 2018, WPKids Lead, and the Lead Organizer of the Southern Illinois WordPress Meetup. She also teaches beginners WordPress.

When not logged in to her computer, she loves traveling with her family, enjoys reading a good book, taking pictures, and a lover of fine food and even better drinks.

Paul Androuais

As business manager for St. Louis’s own IQComputing, I’m deeply involved in the many facets of decisions that drive WordPress choices for businesses including security, scalability, and ROI.

Jason Yingling

Jason has been developing with WordPress for a decade. He’s currently the Director of Development at Red8 Interactive. You can find him blogging about WordPress development tips and the plethora of side projects he attempts on his cleverly titled site jasonyingling.me.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy

Since college, Josepha has gathered together people with similar interests to learn more and create better communities. In 2008 that passion for connecting people spread to technology, and she’s never looked back. With a training in music, and a background in data, Josepha is a digital literacy advocate who talks about WordPress, the Open Source Software community, and non-traditional paths to STEM fields. Josepha works at Automattic as a community organizer for the WordPress open source project and can be found on Twitter as @josephahaden.

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.
Saint Ann, MO | @JenSwish

Chance Strickland

A true jack-of-all-trades digital, Chance started his career as a graphic designer and PR practitioner. After working in various agencies as a project manager and marketer, he discovered a love of code and has been a self-taught, full-time web developer ever since. His newly launched podcast, Chance the Developer, focuses on mentor-ship and career growth for junior developers.

Connect with Chance:

Website: https://chancestrickland.com/
Twitter: @TheNameIsChance
LinkedIn: /in/chancestrickland/

Karissa Skirmont

Karissa Skirmont tames technology for women entrepreneurs who are overwhelmed and tired of trying to figure it out by themselves. She does this through through WordPress websites, branding and strategic systems. As an experienced web developer/graphic designer & business strategist, in her business Kissa’s Kreations, she has helped hundreds of small business owners and entrepreneurs build and improve their businesses since 2005. She has over 10 years experience working with WordPress, specializes in WordPress Mulitsite & founded the first WordPress Multisite Community Facebook Group, has been a co-organizer for WordPressKC and WordCampKC since 2013 and is obsessed with all things purple. Connect with Karissa Website: MeetKarissa.com Twitter: @MeetKarissa LinkedIn: /in/MeetKarissa Facebook: @MeetKarissa

Heather Acton

Creator of Josh and Addy. Founder of Helio Interactive (https://heliointeractive.com). Lover of WordPress. Busy crafting web solutions that help people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Matt Christensen

Matt Christensen is a freelance developer and professional digital analyst from central Illinois. He has been using WordPress since 2004 when it was a great fit for his personal blog.

Since then, he has developed themes and plugins for a fortune 1000 company as well as smaller companies and organizations as a freelancer.

Travis Pflanz

Travis Pflanz is a search engine optimization strategist and owner of WebWorks of KC. Travis specializes in SEO for small businesses who target local customers and clients.

Travis is also a co-organizer of WordPress KC – the Kansas City area WordPress enthusiasts Meetup group – and has been on the WordCamp Kansas City organizing team since 2014, serving as Lead Organizer in 2015 & 2016. When not building WordPress websites and creating SEO strategies,

Travis volunteers at Wayside Waifs Humane Society, serves on the Spay & Neuter KC Advisory Council and organizes the Kansas City Dog Club – a social club for dog lovers and their pooches.

Connect with Travis:

Website: webworksofkc.com
Twitter: @TravisPflanz
LinkedIn: /in/travispflanz
Facebook: WebWorksofKC

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.

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.

 

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.

Michelle Schulp

Michelle is an independent graphic designer and frontend developer in Minneapolis. Prior to beginning her career, she studied Visual Communications, with minors in Psychology and Sociology. As her work progressed, she also branched into front-end development and user experience design to round our her skillset. This combination of disciplines led her to adopt a strategy-based approach to design, focused on solving tangible problems and achieving real goals based on how people think.

She loves the open source community, and when she is not working on projects she speaks/volunteers/organizes at events and workshops around the country. Her passions are communication and empowerment, and she believes in the power of “Why?”

Connect with Michelle:
Website: marktimemedia.com
Twitter: @marktimemedia
LinkedIn: /in/michelleschulp
Facebook: marktimemedia

Will Hanke

Will Hanke has two passions: supporting our US veterans and helping businesses tell their story online – providing them with increased exposure, more customers, and higher revenues. For over twenty years, his company, Red Canoe Media, has helped mom & pops, startups, and multi-million dollar companies with their digital marketing strategies.

Will teaches monthly classes and speaks at events throughout the area on a wide variety of topics from analytics to ecommerce. Along with his daughter Amber, he also holds coaching and training sessions for small business owners in his private membership group, ‚”Red Canoe Elite‚”.

He is an avid business & marketing blogger and has published several ebooks including an Amazon Bestseller in Marketing.

Connect with Will:

Website: willhanke.com
Twitter: @techlh
LinkedIn: in/techlh/
Facebook: @RedCanoeMedia

Joe McGill

Joe McGill is a St. Louis native, a Contributing Developer to WordPress, a maintainer of the Media component, and is a Senior WordPress Engineer at Human Made.

Connect with Joe:

Website: joemcgill.net
Twitter: @joemcgill

Michelle Ames

Overextended, overcommitted, entrepreneur, volunteer, and social butterfly. Avid Scrabble player. Tea snob. Photographer. School board member. Marketing enthusiast. 11th hour expert. WordPress fanatic. Lead organizer of WordCamp Rochester, NY. WordPress Rochester meetup organizer. Co-organizer of WordCamp Buffalo. Michelle is the Implementation Partner Manager at GiveWP.com.

Connect with Michelle:

Website: marketedbymichelle.com
Twitter: @michelleames
LinkedIn: /in/michellefrechetteames/
Facebook: MarketedByMichelle

Dwayne McDaniel

Dwayne has been working in tech and open source sales since 2005. He knew as soon as he started working with Java middleware developers he never wanted to work outside of open source ever again. Dwayne first started building in Drupal and WordPress for the San Francisco Improv teams and projects.

He fell in the love the community and then found a position at Pantheon at the end of 2013. As a Community and Agency Success Manager, he has had the privilege of presenting at dozens of community events from Paris to Iceland to MIT and Stanford.

Outside of tech he loves producing and performing improv theater, reading webcomics and singing karaoke!

Connect with Dwayne:

Website: https://mcdwayne.com
Twitter: @mcdwayne
LinkedIn: /in/dwaynemcdaniel/

Chris Wiegman

Chris is a senior developer for UF Health at the University of Florida who has been working on WordPress since 2008. Over the years he built one of the largest security plugins on WordPress.org as well as numerous other plugins, themes and other solutions. When not coding Chris loves to teach and has presented at numerous WordCamps and other conferences as well as taught computer security for St. Edward’s University and other University courses ranging from computers to aviation.