Category: Speakers

Here it is, the schedule for WordCamp NOLA 2016. With two tracks and twenty sessions, there’s definitely something for everyone, so get your ticket today!

Each session will last approximately 30 minutes, so we’ve built in time between sessions for chatting with the new friends you’ve made, visiting the Happiness Bar, and grabbing some swag.

WordCamp NOLA will be a safe and positive conference for everyone. Learn more in our code of conduct.

Rounding out the speakers for WordCamp NOLA are this fantastic lineup. Don’t forget to get your ticket, if you haven’t already! You won’t want to miss these talks!

Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey is a copyright and plagiarism consultant and owner of CopyByte who spends his time tracking content on the Web, dealing with plagiarism/infringement and helping clients devise productive strategies regarding their work. He is also the blogger at Plagiarism Today and blogs there about copyright and plagiarism matters. Jonathan is a non-lawyer copyright and plagiarism expert and approaches this from the perspective someone who works with various organizations that represent content creators. He approaches this as someone who has seen the aftermath of widespread content misuse and understands the need for greater protection of original work.

Topic: Protecting Your Content: Stopping Scrapers, Spammers and Plagiarists

Carolyn Sonnek

Carolyn has been an avid user of WordPress since 2005. She also makes a mean tater tot hotdish. These two things are not related, but both impressive. She currently lives in the Minneapolis, MN area and loves all sorts of outdoor activities. She works as a Happiness Rocketeer for Automattic, the company that makes WordPress.com and plugins such as Jetpack, Akismet, and VaultPress.

Topic: We Can’t Read Your Mind: How To Find Help For Your WordPress Problems

Douglas Thomas

Douglas Thomas is the Interactive Manager at The Marketing Center for Disability Law Practices, a niche legal marketing firm. Over the past five years, he’s designed and implemented code, strategy, creative, and post-project analysis of multi-threaded lead-generating search and social campaigns across niches. Managing a team of online marketers, Doug takes his team and clients to the next level with full stack strategy and real-world development experience.

Topic: WordPress Code Snippets to Jump-Start Your On-Site SEO

Eli Silverman

Eli Silverman is the founder of Caliper, a branding, web design, and development shop that opened in 2008 when Eli moved from New York to New Orleans. Caliper works with businesses to establish strong brands and fluid workflows – Eli builds websites, designs for both screen and print, creates web-based software and business tools, and offers creative direction for digital and physical design projects. Caliper often works with top restaurants in New Orleans but serves clients in other industries and cities, as well.

Topic: Beyond FTP: Moving to a Faster and Safer Deployment Workflow with Grunt and the WP-CLI tools

Frederick Meyer

With his partner David Hayes, Frederick is the co-executive editor of WPShout, which offers weekly WordPress technical tutorials. They recently released an online learning package, Up and Running (upandrunningwp.com), that aims to make learning WordPress development clear, logical, and quick.

They also operate a boutique agency, Press Up (pressupinc.com) that services all kinds of web development needs, and specializes in WordPress projects.

Topic: Creating In-Browser Mockups for Fun and Profit

Gregory Schultz

Member of NOLA WordPress meetup, writes for openbayou.com, podcasts at controldaily.com. 9 years of WordPress experience.

Topic: Podcasting and WordPress: how to use WordPress for your podcast

We’re thrilled to introduce another round of fantastic WordCamp NOLA speakers! Don’t forget to buy your ticket, if you haven’t already!

Burke Ingraffia

Burke has been working with WordPress since version 1.5, starting in 2005. He is the owner of Point Clear Media, LLC, a consultancy that specializes in WordPress, multimedia, user experience, and, eLearning. He has been a full-time professor at Loyola University New Orleans where he taught WordPress development to students in the Department of Music Industry Studies. He is currently a UX/UI software engineer for General Dynamics Information Technology as well as a semi-professional singer/songwriter.

Topic: Hardening WordPress Security

We’re excited to have a panel discussion about WordPress for Revenue.

Shercole King, moderator

Shercole King serves as the Homeless Management Information Systems Administrator for VIA LINK. As Administrator, Shercole works with homeless programs on data quality and human services software user experiences for the Greater New Orleans region. Today in addition to her work with the homeless community, she has devoted her time to bringing technological resources to the youth in underserved communities in the area. She serves as founder of The Creative Impulse, which plans to focus on bridging the gap between technology and the arts. She is also Co-Founder of Teens for Tech, which is a program solely focused on bringing technology to youth. The program most notable is Teen Tech Day, a one-day conference, in its sixth year, which has gone from serving 15 to over 60 students each year.

Read more

Wendy Dolan, panelist

Wendy Dolan is the founder of Get Online NOLA, a community minded company that provides affordable websites, e-commerce, branding and marketing to small businesses and nonprofits.

Before starting Get Online NOLA, Wendy worked with top brands such as Nike, Dannon, and Dr Pepper, but she feels most at home helping small to medium sized businesses develop their brands and establish a strong online presence.

Wendy has been building WordPress websites since 2008, and teaches regular workshops to help business owners make the most of the internet. She is on the board of New Orleans Women in Technology (WIT), an active member of the American Business Women’s Association (ABWA), and was named one of Silicon Bayou’s 100 Top People in Tech and Entrepreneurship in 2014 and 2015.

Alex Geriner, panelist

Born out of a love for design and New Orleans’ soulful architecture, Doorman Designs was founded by Alex Geriner in 2011. The mission was clear – design and craft unique furnishings that evoke a sense of place and tell a story, while giving centuries old materials a new life. Alex and his small team of trained craftsmen have developed a line of furnishings that are designed, built and sourced from materials throughout the Gulf South. Alex handpicks cypress, poplar, fir, ash, pine, and wrought iron from contractors and demolition crews who no longer have a use for them.

Mallory Whitfield, panelist

Mallory Whitfield has been blogging since 2006 at MissMalaprop.com and using WordPress since 2004. Throughout her journey as a creative entrepreneur, Mallory has worn many hats, including blogger, visual artist, upcycled clothing creator, performance artist, jewelry designer, craft show vendor, creative strategist, speaker, teacher and consultant to other small business owners. By day, she specializes in SEO and content marketing as Content Analyst at FSC Interactive, a leading digital marketing agency in New Orleans.

Mallory will also be presenting the topic Content Hacking, FTW! [Grow Your Online Traffic with Epic Content]

Michele Butcher

Michele hails from the beautiful Southern Illinois and is the SLA Lead ensuring a five star support experience at Valet.io. Michele is also the Support Guru for Give, the donation platform exculisivly for WordPress. During the evenings she is a WordPress instructor for John A Logan College. In Her free time she is the Lead Organizer for the Southern Illinois WordPress Meetup, loves traveling with her family, enjoys reading, and a lover of fine food and drink.

Topic: Jetpack All The Things

Stay tuned for more speakers and topics!

We’re so excited to announce another batch of amazing speakers that will be at WordCamp NOLA on August 13! Tickets can be purchased here.

Jeremy Dolan

Jeremy Dolan was born and raised in Sussex, England. He discovered his love of engineering at a young age, and often took things apart just to put them back together again. Later, he delved deeper into the subject as he pursued Design Technology in A-levels. He graduated from Birmingham University with a degree in Geology. Soon after leaving school, he was selected for the cast of STOMP, and spent almost a decade drumming for the show in London, Paris, and Boston.

Jeremy began teaching himself programming during his years as a performer. When he left the stage in 2007, he began a successful second career as a freelance web developer, and continued his education with programming classes at UCLA.

Prior to joining Faudo/Get Online NOLA full time in Fall 2014, Jeremy worked as a programmer for Peter Mayer Advertising, where he specialized in email marketing and WordPress development.
In his spare time, Jeremy enjoys playing rugby for Crescent City Blues, cycling, gardening, and going camping with his family.

Topic: E-commerce for WordPress (Why we wuv Woo)

Sonja Leix

Sonja is a location-independent WordPress designer and Digital Strategist. She’s an active member of the WordPress community, contributes to the Polyglots team, and helps out with community events such as WordCamp New York and Europe. She loves working with passionate people and sharing her experiences with the community.

Topic: Lost in Translation: What I learned by Contributing to the Polyglots Team

Blake Bertuccelli

Blake Bertuccelli is an independent web designer, developer, and strategist who has created websites and media outreach campaigns for a var arrayOfClients = {‘organizations’ : [‘NOTMC’, ‘GoNOLA’, ‘Tulane’, ‘Ragusa Consulting’, ‘NolaVie’], ‘individuals’ : [’La. State Senator J.P. Morrell’, ‘Ruby Bridges’, ‘Terry Gilliam’], ‘events’ : [‘New Orleans Navy Week’, ‘New Orleans Book Fest’], ‘government_groups’ : [Third Coast Leadership PAC, Keep Louisiana Beautiful]}.

A graduate of Tulane University, Blake is also an avid filmmaker (“A Journey West”, “El Sud”), playwright (“Waiting for the Sun”), a co-founder of Cinema Reset, founder of Open Screen New Orleans, a board member of Shotgun Cinema, and Managing Director of Lowling Company, LLC.

Topic: Design Thinking: Keeping Themes DRY in the JavaScript Age

Adam W. 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.

Topic: Creating a Digital Download Business – What to sell, how to sell it and shortcuts to success

Christopher Harris

Born a geek, Christopher Harris coded his first website in 1997. In 2005 he launched Faith Growth, a Dallas-based consulting company that builds custom Genesis WordPress sites for domestic and international faith-based clients. Faith Growth also provides white label development service to agencies. Christopher particularly enjoys helping churches develop a digital-first mindset, to effectively engage and grow their communities online. Christopher is an active contributor to the local WordPress community.

Topic: One Dashboard to Rule Them All

We’re thrilled to announce our first group of speakers that will be presenting at WordCamp NOLA on August 13. If you haven’t purchased your ticket yet, you can get it here.

Anthony D. Paul

Anthony helps build great digital experiences and software through usability research, IA concepts, and prototypes. Outside the office, you’ll find him spread across regional meetups and conferences—evangelizing IA/UX, accessibility, and a variety of open source dev projects. When he’s not doing responsible adult things, he grows the world’s hottest chili peppers and bottles his own hot sauce. He’d divulge something funny from him past, but these days the Internet does a better job of surfacing our embarrassing moments; find him anywhere by Googling “anthonydpaul”.

Topic: Bringing Order to a Content Hoarder (an Information Architecture primer)

Myndee Corkern

Myndee is a 36 year old writer and Social Media Manager. She has been married for 11 years and is a mother to three young children. She started blogging in 2008 as a way to connect with others and chronicle her journey into motherhood. In 2013, she joined the New Orleans Moms Blog as a contributor and quickly began working as their Social Media Strategist. She has worked with local and national brands on social media and blog campaigns, with both on and offline components.

Topic: Using Social Media to Grow your Blog

Jess Planck

Jess has been creatively building websites for over 20 years using open source and whatever works. His background is graphic design and fine arts with a large dose of trial by fire training experiences.

Topic: 10 years of using WordPress at Nicholls State University

Nathan Allotey

Nathan is a web designer and digital marketing consultant based in Houston, TX. He first started working with WordPress in 2009 after taking a position at one of the leading web hosting companies in Houston. Since that time he founded inPhocus Media, a web design studio that uses WordPress as a part of their digital marketing strategy.

He is the author of Freelance Jumpstart, an online resource to help freelancers and creative entrepreneurs reach success in their business and avoid common pitfalls.

You can find Nathan teaching on business and digital marketing on his weekly podcast at nathanallotey.com.

Topic: The Price is…Wrong

Luca Sartoni

Luca is a Growth Engineer at Automattic / WordPress.com. He is active in the international WordPress Community, co-organizer of WordCamp Europe 2016, co-editor on http://it.wordpress.org/.

Topic: How Photoblogging Daily for a Year Made Me a Better Photographer

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements in the coming days!