Get to know your speakers:
William Bay is a Wedding Photographer from San Diego, and runs the Flaunt Your Site, specializing in SEO and web design for Photographers, Artists, and Musicians. When he’s not photographing, SEO’ing, or geeking out on WordPress he’s dreaming about surfing the perfect peeling reef breaks in the Mentawai Islands.
Lucy Beer of Web Training Wheels is an online marketing professional of more than 9 years. She has worked with businesses of all kinds including entertainment companies, record labels and a diverse portfolio of small businesses. Her focus is on teaching small businesses and entrepreneurs how to develop their online marketing strategies which of course begins with a solid website. A long time user of WordPress, since 2004, she’s been evangelizing for WordPress ever since! In addition to marketing consulting she provides WordPress training through one-on-one and small group sessions to help businesses build a solid online foundation for their marketing.
Sheri is a designer, developer, and photographer currently living in Saratoga Springs, NY. She earned a Bachelor’s in Business and a Chemistry minor from the University of Utah before spending eight years managing websites for Myriad Genetics in Salt Lake City. She has always considered herself a WordPress evangelist, and now her endlessly positive nature makes her a perfect fit as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic.
Matt Browne is the organizer and founder of SDBloggers. He connects local bloggers bringing them together to collaborate and improve their blog. Formerly, he led the social media team at LendingTree, where they contracted 100′s of bloggers to enhance community interactions on their 10 web properties. Matt has a love for WordPress because of it’s passionate community and rapid advancements in web publishing. He has a passion for all things innovative and has helped private and public companies employ WordPress to communicate with their customers and prospects. He advises NBC San Diego as a local technology correspondent and maintains the SDBloggers blog in WordPress. Currently, he is working on a new social startup in stealth mode poised to launch later this year.
Aaron Campbell is the owner and lead developer at Xavisys, a WordPress focused web development company. He has over ten years of programming experience, and for the last several years he’s been focused on WordPress. This focus has included building sites on WordPress, writing and releasing plugins, contributing to WordPress core, and generally becoming involved in the WordPress Community as a whole.
Wes has been developing websites and online applications for the last 13 years. Though, he has built sites from many platforms, the last three years of web development has been completely dedicated to WordPress. Wes’ passion is Web Development and feels very fortunate to be working in an industry that he cares so much about. Wes is the Owner/Founder of 3GC Interactive. At 3GC Interactive, he runs day to day operations, helping companies achieve their online web development and marketing goals through sustainable business planning.
Melani is the CEO/Fouder of TapHunter.com. Taphunter.com is a San Diego- based interactive and digital media solutions company that connects craft beer fans with their favorite brews and the establishments that pour them. Widely considered as an Internet marketing expert, Melani’s knowledge has been showcased in Realty Success Magazine, Broker Agent News, Your Realty Insider, and she has been a featured speaker on World Talk Radio, the National Association of Women Business Owners, and Ingram Micro Venture Tech Network, large business conferences and has held several live workshops. Melani has also been a professor at the Fashion Institute, where she taught an e-commerce course.
John has been developing sites on the web for 15+ years. Currently living just outside of Las Vegas, NV where he runs 9seeds.com, which focuses primarily on WordPress plugin and site development for clients. John is also a bit of a WordCamp groupie. He organized WordCamp Las Vegas in January 2009 before ever having attended a WordCamp. Since then he’s spoke at or attended more than 20 WordCamp events across the US (including Phoenix and New York on the SAME WEEKEND!)
Jodi started Jackson Taylor Design after a long corporate career with many web development firms throughout Orange County and San Diego. She specializes in branding and creating custom web design and is a self-proclaimed “code-challenged”. She’ll be the first one to admit her strengths are definitely in the front end of the user experience and client relationships but she has a great team behind her that supports all the necessary programming and components that make up amazing sites and marketing strategies for her clients.
With a diverse background in both business and engineering, Kelley fills the role of Production Manager at Zeek Interactive. Kelley has over a decade of experience in system creation and analysis, with well versed skills in testing and optimization. At Zeek, she combines her sales and marketing background with her engineering skills to better serve clients, insuring that every product created is delivered with the highest level of testing and quality control.
Cody Landefeld is the owner and CEO at codyL where he oversees web strategy for businesses. Our company plans, builds, and oversees amazing things for the web. Beginning out of college in 2000, he began working for entertainment entities building interactive design projects and creating websites. In 2005 he launched codyL as a website and design agency focused on helping people build their projects and have success on the web.
Chris Lema started working on web sites in 1994 and has been leveraging the magic of WordPress since 2005. A native of Orange County, he’s just moved back to San Diego after twenty years in the Bay Area where he started & sold two startups, turned two more around, and coached a series of entrepreneurs. In almost every case he used WordPress as his secret weapon, until he mistakenly spilled the beans on how easy it was to use.
Pete has been weaving magic on the web for the last ten years. He is a veteran open source programmer and a regular core contributor to WordPress and bbPress. He has experience in building fast, scalable, dynamic solutions in different business environments. Pete is skilled at turning around troubled development projects, and improving the productivity and dependability of the team. Pete founded Joint Forces, a web development company which specializes in WordPress development and web applications.
Matt McInvale is the founder, owner, and lead developer of BinaryM, a boutique web firm that specializes in crafting WordPress solutions for any size business. With 12+ years of professional experience, Matt also writes custom plugins and is an active member of the WordPress community.
As the Chief BBQ Taste Tester of Automattic, Matt travels the world sampling cuisine and comparing it to the gold standard of Texas BBQ. Although he originally aspired to be a jazz saxophonist, Matt somehow wound up studying economics which took him to Washington D.C. where he began taking pictures and blogging. The rest, as they say, is mystery. He lives in San Francisco and has a crush on Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Luke is a software architect and entrepreneur with just over a decade in the San Diego tech scene. He’s the founding and managing partner of the development firm Mobiah, a group dedicated to extending WordPress to meet the demands of media management, mobile engagement and integrating with location based servcies. With Mobiah’s platform in adoption on a few thousand websites, Luke has helped one person operations to public companies understand WordPress and leverage it for their organizations.
Matt’s breadth of experience there has broadened significantly to include WordPress, CSS, PHP, and many things in between. Matt is Mobiah’s utility player. No job is too big or too small, requires too much design or too much code, and no one enjoys working into the wee hours as much as he does (we assume that’s true, since no one does it more). His passion for technology in his work extends into his free time as well, and he is fascinated by the art, science and technology of communication. He thinks of his travel accomplishments in terms of continents yet to explore (Antarctica, Australia, South America, Asia), and when he isn’t able to do long-distance travel, long-distance running is a reasonable substitute.
