Speakers

Adam Dunford

Adam Dunford helps clients reach more customers and serve users better through engaging website designs and easy-to-use application interfaces. His business, Steeple Ashton, focuses on interface design and information architecture, working with developers to make their apps easier to use and with business managers to better organize and prioritize their content on the web. His clientele range from the State of California and large non-profits to a metal artist and a dozen dentists, and he loves the variety of the work he does. He’s been a WordPress user since Mingus, and while much of his design work is applied to large and complex Enterprise CMS, Adam believes every website can be implemented in WordPress. He also thinks that beedogs.com is the best site on the internet.

Session: WordPress CMS ASAP: A How-to Guide

Chris Reynolds

In 2007, Chris Reynolds left a nice, cushy job with benefits and a 401k to co-found Arcane Palette Creative Design with his wife, Erin. Their mission: to “blow away bad design.” Last year, they took their artisan approach to design and development and applied it to commercial, GPL-compliant WordPress themes by founding Museum Themes, where Chris is the lead developer. When he isn’t developing WordPress sites for clients or Museum Themes, Chris is also the lead customer support guru for Event Espresso. In the rare occasions when Chris is not consumed by work, he’s also a dad, a musician, a geek, and probably signing up for some new-fangled social network or beta invite right now.

Session: WordPress Theme Development 101: Theme-ing for Everyone

Dave Martin

Dave has lots of passions, most of them related to the web. He loves clean, usable, bloat-less interfaces. He’s a fan of iterative design, polishing everything until it’s right, and testing changes to see what kind of impact they’ve made.

Session: A/B Testing For The Win!

Garth C. Koyle

Garth C. Koyle, recent MBA, MHA graduate from the University of Utah, is the co-owner of Event Espresso, an event registration and management plugin for WordPress. Although Garth has dabbled in programming and design, his true talent lies in business management. He has been involved with internet marketing for almost a decade, from SEO consulting to his current entrepreneurial adventure of the WordPress plugin, Event Espresso. He and Event Espresso’s founder, Seth Shoultes, competed in the 2011 Utah Entrepreneur Challenge and took home the grand prize of $40,000 for their business plan and presentation that used innovative business forecasting techniques. Through Event Espresso, Garth has sponsored and attended many WordCamps across the country, including Utah, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Kansas City, Orange County, Vancouver, Phoenix, Chicago and Indonesia. He also spoke at WordCamp Chicago.

Session: Can you go commercial?

Joseph Scott

Joseph is a California native, living in Utah with his wife, two daughters and one son. He got hooked on email when it meant dialing into a BBS with a 2400 baud modem and ended up memorizing way too much of the AT command set. Access to the Internet changed all that and going to work for an ISP cemented that shift. It also exposed to him to the world of open source, starting with FreeBSD in 1996. From there he spent a number of years in IT doing a little bit of everything.

Session: Site Performance, From Pinto to Ferrari

Justin Carmony

CTO of Dating DNA, CIO of CEVO, PHP Developer, & CSS Guru. He has been making websites for 12 years, first as a hobbyist, and professionally for the last 6 years. He has been a big fan of WordPress, and uses it for many different projects.

Session: Demystifying CSS & WordPress

Matt Jones

Matt Jones is an entrepreneur who works full-time on WordPress powered projects and has used the platform to power several ecommerce applications since 2007. He is the founder of Storefront Themes, which develops Premium WordPress themes and plugins for the WP-e-Commerce plugin.

Session: WordPress for eCommerce? The sky’s the limit!

Mike Payne

Mike Payne is a Salt Lake Native, Black Belt, Eagle Scout, and Website Marketing Developer. As a freelance designer, he has worked with search engine and onsite optimization for several years, and currently
develops WordPress based marketing products at OrangeSoda.com. Mike was recently honored as a Nominee for Young Developer of the Year (2011, .Net Awards), and as top 10 Website Designers in the U.S. (2010, SkillsUSA).

Session: WordPress SEO: A Comprehensive Pre-Launch Checklist

Pete Davies

After nearly 30 years of fabulous British weather, Pete moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he was surprised to find it still rained. Unperturbed, he fell in love with the California outdoors and, among other things, learned to sail. In-between sailing trips and bike rides, he managed to get a fancy business degree from Stanford University. As a Business Engineer he builds partnerships between Automattic products and other awesome companies.

Session: WordPress and You: Results of the 2011 WordPress Survey

Rachael Herrscher

Rachael Herrscher is the CEO and founder of TodaysMama.com, an online media and publishing company founded in 2004. TodaysMama produces regional reference guides for mothers and families and has a presence in 27 markets across the U.S. Rachael oversees general business operations, new market development, partnerships, and marketing initiatives.

Rachael was a finalist for the 2007 Stevie Awards “Best Young Entrepreneur” award, was named one of Utah Business Magazine’s 30 Women to Watch in 2009 and one of the “Top 5 CEO’s you Should Watch on Twitter” by Business Week Magazine. She was also recently featured in the book “UpStarts!: How Gen Y Entrepreneurs are Rocking the World of Business.” Rachael is also the co-founder of evo, a social media conference for women hosted in Park City.

Session: The Evolution of Publishing

Sheri Bigelow

Sheri started out by learning HTML at the Marriott Library computer lab once upon a time when Gopher was popular and Netscape was just getting started. She then worked for eight years as the Webmaster for Myriad Genetics in Research Park at the University of Utah. Now she works at Automattic as a Happiness Engineer, lives in Saratoga Springs, NY and visits Salt Lake City whenever she gets a chance.

Session: Getting Started With WordPress

Thom Allen

Thom Allen has been developing software for over 20 years. Loves to code using PHP, Python, C#, and Javascript. Thom has been using and developing WordPress sites since version 1.5. Thom loves to Read/Write/Code, talk about Software Craftsmanship, Cloud Computing, Open Source Software and Mobile Development, and has been a conference speaker on many occasions. Thom is also a United States Marine.

Session: 10 Widgets To Rock Your WordPress