Speakers

Anthony Hortin

Anthony runs a boutique design & development studio in the South-East suburbs of Melbourne. Maddison Designs works with a wide range of clients, from micro businesses through to large corporates, specialising in custom WordPress sites and WooCommerce stores.

Anthony has been developing for the web since the late 90’s. His love for WordPress was realised back in 2005 and he’s been happily using & coding for it ever since. He’s passionate about giving back to the WordPress community and has contributed to both the WordPress Theme and Plugin Directories and can be frequently found on the WordPress support forums.

Anthony is the author behind the highly popular Easy WP Guide an easy to read WordPress manual for end users and WordPress consultants.

Back in 2013, Anthony was a co-organiser for WordCamp Melbourne and each month he helps organise the WordPress Melbourne meetups.

You can follow Anthony on Twitter.

Ben Maden

Ben Maden founded Matter Solutions in April 2000 and remains the lead web consultant today. While Matter Solutions originated in London, UK, the company took on Australian clients when Ben emigrated to Brisbane in November 2006.

Ben does lots of different things… roughly in order of frequency the tasks he performs include…

  • Working with clients and prospective clients to plan projects.
  • Communicating plans with team members and project managing progress.
  • Coaching team members.
  • Coding – Headphones on and coding funky (mostly back-end) stuff.
  • SysAdmin – Keeping the infrastructure humming along.
  • Blogging – Writing about stuff that happens and how to do things.

 

Charlie Carter

Charlie is the Founder / Director at Webbism. A web accessibility consulting business that aims to make the web a more inclusive place. Charlie is the founder of the Brisbane Web Accessibility & Inclusive Design Meetup in Brisbane, Team Lead for Accessibility at the Emergency Wiki 2.0 and member of Universal Tux, a group that aims to enhance accessibility within Linus and FOSS (free and open source software). Charlie is a founding member at The Loft Project and lives on the Sunshine Coast.

You can follow Charlie Carter on Twitter.

Dan Petrovic

Dan Petrovic is Australia’s best-known name in the field of search engine optimisation and the director of DEJAN. His research and experiments have drawn attention of the worldwide community and major industry blogs. Dan is a frequent blogger and a speaker at all major Australian and select international search industry events. Conference delegates describe him as a passionate presenter with practical and actionable approach. Dan holds a multimedia degree from Griffith University in Brisbane, where he often presents as a guest lecturer and contributes to quality of teaching material as a member of the curriculum advisory board. Outside his day job Dan’s interests are in the field of science, education, research, technology, electronic music and futurism. The best way to connect with Dan is through Google+.

———-

More details and photos: http://dejanseo.com.au/dan-petrovic/

Dee Teal

Dee Teal a WordPress front-end developer, community organiser, trainer, blogger and all round WordPress enthusiast who is passionate about imparting that same enthusiasm to community members, clients and trainees. She graduated from USYD with a Masters Degree in Digital Communication and Culture and has been working with WordPress full time since 2009 (and with other technologies for some time before that).

She’s the girl behind WordChicks, Melbourne’s all-women WordPress meet-up is one half of the team who put together PressJam, a WordPress for good ‘rapid build’ event in 2013. Dee has also been the proud leader of amazing teams who made the awesome WordCamps Melbourne 2013 and Sydney 2012 and who run the WordPress Melbourne meetups. She has also been a WP Tuts author – and if that wasn’t enough WordPress for you, she’s training beginning (and advanced) WordPress users both privately and publicly as people need.

Dee has been running her own business since 2005 (going full time in 2009) and is bringing the lessons she has learned being a long term freelancer to WordCamp Brisbane in 2015.

Helena Denley

Are you a freelancer who is at capacity with clients but aren’t earning the income you would like to be? Are you a freelancer looking to expand your reach beyond the one on one client work? If you answered ‘Yes’ to either or both of those questions then this is a must see talk for you!

Helena will help you plan your first online course by helping you with following tasks:

  • Do you have a list? If not start building one now so you can survey your list to find out what they may want.
  • Can your current skills, the ones you use in your freelance business with one-on-one clients, translate into an online course?
  • Skills assessment.
  • Target market – who are you be able to teach your skills to?
  • Creating your course – delivered live or pre-recorded?
  • Minimum viable product and iterate as you go or at each release.
  • Fitting course creation amongst current work.
  • Cut back on one-on-one work to make time to deliver the course.
  • Specific launches or Evergreen course.

Helena’s presentation will leave you with the following key takeaways:

  • Do you have skills that would convert well into an online course?
  • There is never a good time to take a break from client work to create a course. Make a plan, set a date, make it happen!
  • Options for creating course content.

In between un-schooling her 6 year old son, Helena is the co-owner of http://www.diywebsitecoach.com & http://thenewsolopreneur.com­ (with her husband Warren).  They help new solo business owners get started with their first website and learn how to manage the daily tasks involved with running a business online and being a solo entrepreneur.

You can follow Helena on Twitter.

James Banks

Through this WordPress agency, Web3, James specialises in generating more revenue for businesses through online lead generation and websites built to convert leads to customers.

As a speaker at WordCamp Melbourne & Sydney, he is passionate about helping people in getting the most out of WordPress. He also loves working together with other online marketing and WordPress consultants to deliver excellent results.

Over the last half decade, he has consulted hundreds of local, national and international brands, from startups to Queensland Government in implementing online solutions with WordPress.

He enjoys marketing and doing UI/UX design for his own online software projects in his spare time.

You can follow James on Twitter.

Jamie Madden

Jamie has spent over 15 years as a systems administrator and developer. He is interested in all areas of technology both on and offline. Jamie has always aimed to automate his environments wherever possible. Starting in the early days with shell scripts and moving through to tools like Chef.

Jamie has been a WordPress user and developer since the early days of version 1.5. He has utilised WordPress for all levels of products including basic websites, blogs, e-commerce, auctions, helpdesk systems and more. He is the lead developer of WC Vendors a free Multi Vendor WooCommerce plugin.

Outside of the IT world Jamie enjoys a variety of music and photography and trys to combine the two whenever possible.

You can follow Jamie on Twitter.

Japh Thomson

Japh has been building websites since the late 1990s, and specialising in WordPress since ~2008. As a senior developer he’s helped a number of web agencies switch to WordPress as their CMS of choice. He worked as the WordPress Evangelist for WordPress at Envato from ~2011, and now works at Human Made, a WordPress.com VIP partner agency.

Japh is also interested in a variety of things, including fermentation and the intersection between beverages and botany. He also has a passion for seeing WordPress taken into the countries, languages, and cultures where it isn’t already dominant.

Jen Jeavens

Jen Jeavons is the director of Brisbane based digital design studio – Pixel Palace. For more than a decade, Pixel Palace has been specialising in handcrafted custom online solutions. Jen heads up a small but crazy clever team from their Kelvin Grove office servicing a broad range of clients worldwide. Clients include well known local businesses such as Shingle Inn and reach as far as America with clients including high end LA fashion labels and celebrity stylist and Harpers Bazaar spokesperson Anita Patrickson. Pixel Palace specialises in custom WordPress sites and WooCommerce setups.

You can follow Jen on Twitter.

Jo Grey

Jo Grey has over 20 years of experience in marketing and communications. She is the director of a new corporate communications agency in Brisbane: Cornerstone Communications. Jo and her team know that every brand has a story, and their job is to help you (or your clients) build a content strategy to tell that story.

Content can be words, great infographics, videos, a blog, a digital magazine or ebook, or a short social media post. Whatever fits with your (or your clients’ business) is what the team of hand-picked experts at Cornerstone Communications can do.

Previously, Jo has managed the marketing, communications and media for a range of companies, including state government and tertiary education. In her spare time, Jo studies for her PhD in communications using video-conferencing, walks the dog and eats copious amounts of chocolate.

Kate Duffy

Kate is a tourism social media geek, tinkers with photography, lives in Cairns and works as the Director of Destination Content for Tropical North Queensland.

You can follow Kate on Twitter and Instagram.

Kel Santiago

Kel is a Japan-based writer and evangelist of DigitalCube Co. Ltd. Advanced Consulting Partner of Amazon Web Services and Code Poet WordPress Consultant. They were the first in Japan and all of Asia.

You can follow Kel on Twitter.

Kristen Symonds

Kristen Symonds, (aka Kristarella) is co-organiser of the WPSydney meetup group, co-organiser WordCamp Sydney 2014 and a WordPress fanatic. She also loves photography, craft (especially knitting and crochet), Sci-Fi and Fantasy, and board games.

Kristen is married to Dave and has two pet rabbits named Kaylee and Monty; they all live together in suburban Sydney.

You can follow Kristen on Twitter.

Lucy Bloomfield

Lucy is a UI/UX designer that got sick of doing the usual 9-5 in agencies and decided to go out on her own. Over the last year and a half, she’s set up a one (wo)man agency that handles a variety of different projects – anything from writing programming courses for London-based QA to leading the re-brand and re-structure of Boston-based startup, Security Innovation. Oh… and she’s only 22!

Currently Lucy is the lead designer on a team within Security Innovation for an application security product called TEAM Mentor. This product allows her the freedom and privilege of getting to try her hand at basically everything she could ever want – from iconography, digital strategy and programming to design, information architecture, user testing and product management.

She has a lot of experience designing in browser specifically, with a focus on mobile first. Much of her process revolves around coding and because of that, she’s had a lot to do with the way her designs are created, which is something many designers aren’t able to do.

You can follow Lucy on Twitter.

Meryl McCay

Meryl has been using WordPress since 2011, but still considers herself to be a novice. Having seen the list of august speakers coming to the WordCamp, people with serious dev skills, entrepreneurs and the like, she has some trepidation about volunteering to present; however, we all had to start somewhere and if she can inspire another newbie to think “Hey, I can do that too”, then the anxiety will have been worth it!

As a non-coder she finds the WordPress platform perfectly suited to the skills she can bring to the table. With over 20 years’ experience as an Information Professional (aka a Librarian), helping small businesses and not-for-profit organisations to create well-structured websites, with quality content, that they are able to manage themselves (to a large degree) is something she finds very satisfying.

Being programmatically challenged, Meryl uses quality commercial themes to do the heavy lifting and has begun to delve into the mysteries of CSS in order to tweak the design to suit the client. Still unsure about whether this fascination with WordPress can actually generate an income, she has nonetheless taken the plunge and finally got a business card. ☺

You can follow Meryl on Twitter.

Nicki Mckay

Nicki Mckay is a wander lusting, garden loving Brisbane based creative. A freelance web designer, front-end developer, blogger, digital strategist and co-founder of ROOOAR magazine – a digital magazine for female entrepreneurs.

With over a decade of experience in the industry, Nicki has helped hundreds of clients bring their online vision to life. She has a passion for helping people not only build their online brand, but also help them to maintain sustainable businesses.

You can follow Nicki on Twitter.

Nik Cree

Nik Cree is the lead developer and WordPress consultant for PostiveBusinessOnline.com His primary focus is helping bricks and mortar businesses double their leads, enquiries and sales on by implementing systematised, replicable systems online to generate leads enquiries and sales.

You can follow Nik on Twitter.

Peter Wilson

Peter Wilson has been a front end developer for almost two decades. After spending his early career working with tables and spacer gifs, Peter developed a love for CSS.

Peter has provided coding and web management services for a for some of the country’s largest and smallest businesses.

He currently spends his days working on enterprise grade contract management software.

You can follow him on Twitter.

Ricky Blacker

Ricky is a self taught web professional who found and fell in love with WordPress, and the community behind it while looking for a CMS platform to build websites for clients. He soon fell down a rabbit hole full of plugins, themes and passionate WordPress devotees, which forever changed his life and has taken him on an extraordinary journey, filled with late night talks with equally enamoured Wordies and fueled by craft beers.

Ricky runs Data Guru, a small web design business based on Brisbane’s Northside, which develops sites for small to medium sized businesses, as well as doing Pro Bono work for not for profit groups.

He is a Co-Organizer for the Sunshine Coast WordPress Meetup Group, and also regularly attends the Brisbane WordPress Meetup and Brisbane Web Design Meetup groups.

In his spare time (not that he has much of that), he is a temporary Australian (motorcycle rider), plays keyboards and sings in a local Brissy band and tries to stay on top of the ever changing Web Development world. He is passionate about sharing his knowledge of WordPress with anyone who will listen, and loves helping newbies find their legs with the WordPress back end, and show them what can be achieved with this powerful platform.

You can follow Ricky on Twitter.

Ryan McCue

Ryan McCue was 14 when he started contributing to WordPress. Today, at 21, he’s a WordPress core contributor, and the lead developer of the SimplePie RSS/Atom parsing library included with core, plus the Requests HTTP library. He’s also the lead developer of the JSON REST API project that will bring a full REST API natively into WordPress. In all of his spare time, he’s a developer at Human Made.

Selina Power

Selina Power is a social media specialist and founder and owner of Super Power Digital – a WordPress website design development and social media agency.

Selina’s native genius moniker, ‘Social Media Powerhouse’, is pretty apt, as she has been in the social media and digital marketing industry for over eight years and has worked with non-profit organisations and large commercial companies. She was also the founder of Social Media Online Academy which is now being run by Bluewire Media. Selina has been featured on Nova (Brisbane), ABC Radio and has spoken with Facebook at their Small Business Bootcamp. Selina is a renowned international keynote speaker and is the co-creator of the Social Media Planning Template and the 5 Minute Social Media Marketing Plans which have been downloaded 1,000+ times worldwide. Selina is always on the look out for the next social media trend and gadgets.

Follow Selina on Twitter.

Steven Cooper

Steven Cooper is responsible for working with the strong developer community within Asia-Pacific, to develop and nurture the healthy start-up culture that continues to flourish across the region.

Over the last 20 years, Steven has worked as a senior developer for a host of start-ups and as a developer analyst for more than 10 years with Sensis. Before joining PayPal, he configured and spec’d mass production technology hardware for the likes of Virgin, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Visa, St. George and Westpac.

In his current role, Steven hopes to align businesses with the most appropriate PayPal solutions – products that deliver efficiency, flexibility and enable scalability.

You can follow Steven on Twitter.

Tracey Porst

Tracey’s professional background is in digital media design and production.This includes many years designing and developing online and digital media, including using content management systems and other cross platform interactive experiences. Today, this includes content and digital media strategy development and user-centered design for engagement.

The healthcare technology space is of particular interest to Tracey and she is very active in this community in Brisbane, especially as a co-organiser of a successful and rapidly expanding meet up group called Healthtech Innovation QLD (http://www.meetup.com/Healthtech-Queensland-Meetup/events/220964056/) which has grown exponentially since it began in October last year.  

Tracey has managed and delivered content for international brands as well as small, local clients and her talk will cover some case studies in:

  • Corporate communications – online, brand establishment and management, copywriting, visual communications.
  • Instructional videos – motion graphics, combined with voice-over and video content.
  • Information graphics – visual communication of complex data and concepts.
  • Website advancement – design, build, content strategies and maintenance.
  • User experience design – engagement, task focused outcomes, GUI design.
  • Creative direction and brand management – guidance on target audience perception, branding guidance, social media etc.

You can follow Tracey on Twitter.

Troy Dean

Troy Dean is co-founder of Video User Manuals and WP Elevation.

His past clients include QuickBooks, IBM, F1 Grand Prix, The Ashes, Westpac and Jessica Watson.
He is also host of the WP Elevation podcast which consistently ranks in the top 3 in iTunes for his category.
In his spare time he is a rock god in several bands.

Warren Denley

Working as a Business Analyst on technical projects for over 15 years, Warren has developed a knack for moulding available technologies into business solutions. As a WordPress Consultant, Warren has spoken at WordCamp Melbourne (Australia) and regularly speaks at WordPress Meetups in Melbourne (for which he is a co-organiser).

When not creating websites or helping people with WordPress technical issues, Warren likes to test his physical endurance, having already completed the Oxfam 100km walk 3 times and Tough Mudder in 2014.

You can follow Warren on Twitter.

Wil Brown

Wil is a professional web developer with a passion for leading edge technologies, security and server architecture. He spoke at WordCamp Sydney 2012, co-organizes the WordPress Sydney meetup, was lead organiser for WordCamp Sydney 2014 and contributes to the WordPress Core development. He likes pizza, sausages, chilies, beer, red wine and hyperdimensional physics.

You can follow Wil on Twitter.