Speakers

Sam Brasseale

Sam Brasseale is a Birmingham based web developer working at Cayenne Creative. He started building websites professionally in 2009. Since then he’s held positions at various agencies around Birmingham and at one time founded a local food startup, Freshfully, based in Avondale. He now manages a team of developers at Cayenne who build client sites primarily using WordPress. In his spare time he loves spending time with his daughter, wife and dog. He also brews beer of questionable quality and always enjoys a good burger.

Patrick Bates

Patrick Bates began his Internet career with becoming his hometown’s first ISP in 1995. From there he moved into web programming and data science roles while also providing strategic network consulting for government agencies. He first became involved with WordPress in 2011, which then led to him co-founding Project Nami (a port of WordPress to SQL Server) in 2013.

David Wood

David Wood is a web developer with over 7 years of development experience. He has spent much of his career working with WordPress, writing everything from custom plugins and themes to highly specialized code for unique situations. When he is not working he enjoys reading, gaming, and hiking. He also finds writing about himself in the third person to be a strange experience, one he tries to keep from repeating.

Corey Maass

Corey Maass is a full-stack web developer with a love for entrepreneurship and minimum viable everything. He built his first website in 1995, his first SaaS app in 2003, and his first WordPress plugin in 2009. In 2015, after 4 years of full-time WordPress development, he combined his passions and launched his first commercial plugin, Kanban for WordPress. He currently lives in Nashville, TN and is very involved with the local WordCamp, and WordPress community.

Micah Wood

Micah is a professional WordPress developer and architect who is committed to continuously improving his understanding of WordPress and sharing his insights with the greater WordPress community. He currently works at Narwhal Digital as the team lead for enterprise WordPress projects and helps organize a local WordPress meetup group.

Evan Mullins

Evan Mullins uses WordPress daily at the office as well as for his own projects. He is currently the Lead Web Developer at Brown Bag Marketing, an integrated marketing agency in Atlanta. He blogs at circlecube.com and has even been known to dream in WordPress. With a background in digital media art, he now embraces the dark side and has found a strong creative outlet programming websites. Evan loves the problem solving aspect of web development and shines at harnessing WordPress as a true CMS & making interactive designs interactive. He strives to make the web a prettier, more pleasant and all-around better place for you & your grandma. Outside of work, Evan is a dedicated husband, father of four and soccer coach who loves rock music, audiobooks, chocolate and good pizza.

Kyle Johnson

Ninja Forms Senior Developer and host of the Plugin Architect Podcast.

Adam Warner

Adam W. Warner discovered the world of WordPress in 2005 and has been working within the community ever since. To feed his entrepreneurial spirit, he founded several WordPress-focused businesses that provide education, plugins and consulting services for online business owners. He is a true product evangelist for WordPress in spirit and personality, and that also happens to be his job title at SiteLock. In addition to WordPress, Adam is passionate about his family, robots and of course, life, the universe and everything.

Kristi L. Oliver

Kristi L. Oliver is a serial entrepreneur, public speaker, and professionally known as The Brand Visibility Expert™. Like many of her fans and clients, she is passionate, results-oriented and operates her brand and businesses in a spirit of excellence.

As The Brand Visibility Expert™, Kristi combines her sharp business intellect and keen eye for detail to show other entrepreneurs how to strategically position their businesses for stellar growth. Business owners learn the powerful, far-reaching effects of how adding value to their products or services through their corporate identity will recalibrate the business’ momentum, escalating it to new levels.

Her razor focus commitment targets on creating a brand that succinctly represents the entrepreneur and their business objectives. Kristi’s experience and strong track record provides a proven approach with innovative ideas and marketing solutions, garnering success in all areas of business, branding and visibility. As a result, the brand is strengthened, visibility is enhanced and business continuity flows across all digital business landscapes that is both timeless and profitable.

As a public speaker, Kristi captures the hearts and minds of clients and is known for her charisma, clear communication style, positive energy, and witty disposition. She shares her insight on branding by serving on expert panels, as a keynote speaker, developing educational modules and branding workshops facilitated through her signature program “Beyond The Black Box™.”

Kristi has become a successful, sought-after expert in her industry and has helped to launch successful corporate identities and brands for clients throughout the United States and internationally.

Brian Krogsgard

Brian is a web developer, writer, and consultant based in Birmingham, Alabama. He’s the editor of Post Status, a news and information website for WordPress professionals. It’s a community-centric project with more than 700 members doing incredible things with WordPress.

Elizabeth Pampalone

In 2007, Elizabeth started her first company, Jax Computer Chic. She started out making house calls for sick computers and branched out into teaching classes at the local High School. As her computer company grew, she decided to go back to her first love and opened a web design firm called The Web Design Chic. In order to get more business clients, she began networking like crazy. She saw a need and thus NetworkInJax.com was born. In 2014, she was named “Queen of Jacksonville Networking” by the Jacksonville Business Journal. This led to ventures such as DoINeedABusinessPlan.com and becoming host of 5 meetup groups and mentoring 7 meetup group leaders. During all this, she was an active teaching member of SCORE for 5 years, an instructor with OLLI UNF for 3, a continuing education instructor with UNF for 2 and a small business instructor with the SBDC for 1. Her latest venture has been ConnectGrowSell.com, here she combines her love of teaching and her knowledge of networking with blogging. Her and her husband, Joseph, contribute to ConnectGrowSell and they enjoy working on it together. When they are not behind the computer, they are out ballroom dancing or embarking on an adventure with their pug, Obi.

Nathan Ingram

A freelance web developer since 1995, Nathan specializes in building easy-to-use web sites that help small businesses, professional firms, and nonprofit organizations look great on the web.

He is a regular instructor at iThemes Training where he teaches WordPress and freelance business development topics via live webinar.

He also works with web developers individually and in groups to help them become more successful in their freelance businesses.

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

Kathryn Lang

#Hope builder. #Dream inspirer. Master of “it’s all about #relationships.” Aficionado of inappropriate laughter, Kathryn Lang has been helping others find the time to make their dreams come true. As an award winning author, master multi-tasker, and encourager extraordinaire, Kathryn shares with people that are trying to walk the tightrope of family, work, and faith – and keep them all in the right balance. Whether you need help producing 1,000,000 words in a year or just producing a post for your blog, Kathryn has been building with words and wants to share her secrets with you.

Sara Cannon

Sara Cannon is an entrepreneur, creative director, and artist. She is the Managing Partner and Creative Director at Range. She is also the Founder of Spruce Media, LLC.

At Range,an agency specializing in high-quality design and WordPress development, Sara loves leading her remote team in creating strategic designs. She has done work for clients such as Disney Publishing, Re/Code, and Flickr. She also speaks internationally on web design, user experience, creativity, typography, and more. Contact us if you need a digital partner!

At Spruce Media, Sara is the driving force behind the up and coming app Spruce Planner, a powerful planning and goal setting app designed for on the go women.

Find Sara Cannon Around the Web:

Range – Managing Partner & Creative Director: http://ran.ge
Spruce Planner – Founder: http://spruceplanner.com
Twitter: @saracannon
Original Artworks: http://saracannonart.com

Shelly Peacock

Shelly Peacock, @Spinbird, has been in sales and graphic design since 2001, adding focus to include Social Media Management in 2007. She built her first website in 2009- as a way to make my designs “do stuff”, and as a portfolio for her art business. Moved to WordPress in 2010, and shucked it all to run The SpinBird Group, a WordPress consulting and design boutique agency. She likes short walks on the beach, cabanas, and shooting opossums off her back deck with her shotgun. Mantra: Life is short- GET #FIERCE WITH IT.

George Childs

George has taught WordPress training seminars on three different continents. His passion is to make things easy to use so that nobody feels stupid, because most people aren’t.

Gerroald Barron

Gerroald is passionate about WordPress development and WordPress security. When he’s not providing support for fellow developers, he’s planning on going to the beach, dreaming about being on the beach or just might be on a beach. In between support and beach dreams, he’s watching terrible B-rated horror and sci-fi movies.

Kate Newbill

Kate Newbill has been building websites since she taught herself HTML and CSS to dress up her eBay listings in 1999. She flirted with a few primitive content management systems before finding WordPress in 2004 (version 1.2) and has never looked back since then. Today she runs 2FishWeb LLC, a general WordPress consultancy offering design, development, security, and maintenance services, and teaches classes on WordPress. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her husband, two dogs, and a cat, and is currently planning zero trips in hot-air balloons.