Speakers

Amy Kvistad

Amy Kvistad is a freelance web designer with a background in graphic design; and co-organizer for the Boston WordPress meetup. She delves into typography, layout, and clean design across a wide range of industries. Her design process is customer-focused, research driven, and adaptable. She loves warm weather and racing on sailboats.

Andy McIlwain

Cara Nelson

Instead of focusing on the large obstacles blocking a trail to success, Cara looks forward to find web and design strategies that exceed organizational goals and expectations. Cara is passionate about promoting human-centered design, usability, and accessibility for the web. She leverages the Internet as a tool with optimal online pathways that position businesses with positively designed experiences for their various customers’.

As the founder and Creative Trailblazer of Swift Trek Media in Huntington, Vermont she shares her LOVE of WordPress with engaging websites for small-medium size business and non-profits. Between her client work and free time, she teaches WordPress, web design/development, digital marketing, and website planning and strategy courses in the Boston area. Cara’s Visual Communications degree motivated her to join the online world in 2001 with an MS in Internet Strategy Management, and in 2013 with an MS in Information Technologies focusing on Open Source Web Development from Marlboro College Graduate School. During her offline time, she enjoys getting outside for a good long hike, paddle or ski experience.

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. While he currently lives in New York, he grew up in Maine and he’s excited to check out the local WordPress community.

DeAnne Curran

DeAnne is a designer and developer at Visible Logic in Portland Maine. Visible Logic helps complicated B2B brands clarify and communicate their message with a cohesive brand strategy including their logo, web site and content marketing. She is a graduate of the Maine College of Art where she earned her BFA in Graphic Design.

Trained first as a designer, DeAnne then learned to to develop for the web and has been creating custom WordPress themes for clients since 2010. Being a designer and a developer is beneficial because both skills are needed when creating designs and deciding how they will be built. Finding the marriage between a great design and the usability of a site is a problem she always loves to solve.

DeAnne works with clients from the start of the design, builds a custom branded theme, then teaches clients how to use WordPress to maintain and manage their web presence. DeAnne works on both print and web-based design, and assists in all types of projects in the studio.

Emily Straubel

Emily is a copywriter and tech startup strategist working with Big Room Studios. She has worked for over a decade alongside brilliant entrepreneurs to help them build, grow and scale new companies. She’s also consulted with large enterprise corporations to bring an agile, entrepreneurial approach to internal projects.

Emily is passionate about helping people clearly communicate with their audience and gain momentum to help grow their business steadily towards a goal.

While early in her career she never considered herself a writer, every project she took on focused around creating content. This helped her develop practical skills and hone a uniquely simple writing style. Now, she uses that style to write for magazines, blogs and is working on her first novel.

Gary Thayer

Gary is a WordPress Developer at Hall Internet Marketing who specializes in eCommerce websites and analytics tracking. He is an active member of the WordPress community, acting as an organizer for the Southern Maine WordPress Meetup and as Lead Organizer for WordCamp Portland, ME.

Greg Schoppe

Greg Schoppe is the Senior Developer at Burlington Bytes and the brain behind WP-Blockade. Prior to Greg’s work at Burlington Bytes, he was the CTO of two startups in the promotion and couponing space. Greg is driven by a passion for systemic improvement, not only in his own skills as a developer, but also in his team and the industry as a whole.

Fun fact: Greg was briefly categorized as a weapon of mass destruction for work he did for with the Marine Corps while at Carnegie Mellon. Greg currently lives in Burlington, VT with his part-time dog (Burlington Bytes mascot), Savannah.

Jennifer Ecker

Jen is a principal and the creative director of shines & jecker labs, a web development firm in Portland, Maine. She has over 14 years of experience in digital design, doing everything from creating original graphic design to writing CSS. Her strength is her ability to master the latest technologies quickly to provide clients with modern, current designs. Jen spends her free time reading, running, and serving on the board for her local library.

Jesse Friedman

Jesse Friedman has been building websites for 18 years, and exclusively with WordPress since 2006. Since then he has written several books, taught hundreds of students as a professor, and organized dozens of local meetups (and even a few WordCamps along the way). He has spoken at tech conferences worldwide and has utilized his expertise as a consultant for small agencies and billion dollar international companies. Today he’s a proud team member of Jetpack at Automattic.

John Brandt

John is the Training and Operations Coordinator for Maine CITE, Maine’s Assistive Technology program. Since 1999, he has also been the proprietor of jebswebs.com a web design and consulting firm. John has been “assembling” websites using WordPress since 2012.

A native of Brooklyn, New York, John has a Master’s in Education in School Psychology from Pace University and has worked in a number of educational and nonprofit settings over the past 30+ years. In nearly all of these positions he has managed to merge his three passions: education, psychology and technology into meaningful opportunities to improve the lives of people with disabilities.

Jonathan Perlman

Jonathan Perlman is an experienced web developer and teacher that works for Dawson College in Montreal, Quebec. He builds custom web solutions for the students, faculty and staff. Recently he’s been leveraging WordPress more and more to do the heavy lifting while focusing on the needs of the institution with custom themes and plugins. Some of his sites have been built for a select few whereas others are visited by 12,000+ applicants. Jonathan is also an instructor for Dawson’s Centre for Training and Development specializing in web technologies such as HTML & CSS, PHP and WordPress.

K. Adam White

K. Adam White is a Senior Engineer at Bocoup, the open source technology consultancy in Boston, Massachusetts, where he trains teams, writes web applications, contributes to open-source projects, and evangelizes the web as an open platform for technology and collaboration. An artist and enthusiast photographer, K. Adam is also a WordPress core contributor and the Design Lead for the WordPress REST API.

Ken Gagne

Ken Gagne is the host of the Polygamer and IndieSider audio podcasts, where he intervews marginalized voices in the gaming industry. He is host of the YouTube channel Gamebits, a freelance writer for Computerworld, and an adjunct faculty member in the publishing department of Emerson College.

Lauren Jeffcoat

Ludmila MacLean

A hotheaded Ukrainian, Luda develops and implements SEO strategies mostly for fun. As the SEO manager at Hall Internet Marketing, she gets to combine her love of online retail and her eagerness to catch up on never ending search engine algorithm changes. Loves to run, cook and mostly complain about the parking situation in Portland.

Mel Choyce

Mel is a Boston-based Product Designer and a WordPress core contributor. She loves big type, cold brew coffee, and printmaking.

Michelle Ames

Overextended, overcommitted, entrepreneur, volunteer, and social butterfly. Avid Scrabble player. Tea snob. Mother. School board member. WordPress fanatic. 11th hour expert. Michelle runs the Rochester, NY WordPress meetup and is the lead organizer for WordCamp Rochester. She is the owner and marketing diva at Marketed by Michelle.

Michelle Zimmerman LCSW

Michelle is a writer, photographer and clinical social worker who has worked in the fields of mental health, addictions and research.  She has a passion for writing and encouraging the practice with others as a means to achieving a fulfilling quality of life.

Michelle creates the content for her mindfulness and intentional living blog, clunkyshoe, where she posts photographs coupled with articles and musings.  Michelle lives in the Greater Portland area and offers writing and wellness workshops.

Owen Stowe

Owen is the director of UX Development at Alley Interactive, a web agency for large-scale digital publishers. Owen works closely with both Alley’s back-end developer and design teams to help deliver in-browser designs and facilitate a seamless design-to-development process. He has led the front-end team on some of Alley’s largest projects, including the Brookings Institution and the Denver Post. Owen has experience in design, prototyping, style guides, and building custom front-ends for large-scale sites and site networks.

Pattie Reaves

Pattie Reaves is a senior user experience developer at Alley Interactive, a web agency for large-scale digital publishers. At Alley, Pattie has worked on teams to build websites for Digital First Media, America’s Test Kitchen’s Cook’s Science, and The Points Guy. Prior to Alley, Pattie worked in editorial and new media at the Bangor Daily News and Sun Media Group.

Peter Jewett

Pete Jewett is a serial entrepreneur, and the founder and CTO of Burlington Bytes, a 15 person web development and digital marketing agency that he started in 2010 from his home, and expanded later in his business partner’s garage. Prior to founding Bytes, Pete founded an eBay store called GoTradingPost which he operated for 5 years. He was a founding member of the BYOBiz program at Champlain College where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in e-Business management in 2006.

Pete finds the most satisfying element of his role to be helping others use technology to build their business and has been a strong advocate of municipal and open source technology efforts both locally and regionally. Pete currently lives in Huntington, VT on a treacherously steep hillside with his wife and 2 kids.

RC Lations

RC is the lead developer at the Institute for Nonprofit News, where he works to help others democratize publishing using WordPress.

Reiko Beach

Using WordPress for clients and self since 2008. Work with beginners and intermediate users helping then thru workshops and individually. We have been involved with the Boston WordPress community since 2011. You can find her on twitter @reikob

Sarah C. Hines

shines (Sarah C. Hines), Co-Founder & Chief Web Mechanic at shines & jecker laboratories.

For the past eight years, Sarah has been building shines & jecker laboratories. They work on building efficient, beautiful, and highly usable web sites and apps for clients large (like Dunkin’ Donuts and Ahold Delhaize) and medium (like building custom menu management software for a bakery in Louisiana).
Sarah has been coding professionally for the past 18 years, and she’s responsible for writing or overseeing the development process, building functionality to edit sites and hooks it up to the design in a polished, user-friendly way.

Sarah speaks regularly at conferences and WordCamps across the US and internationally, and is followed most places by her dog, Pepper.

Tim Sisson

Tim loves WordPress and enjoy leveraging it to meet businesses needs. I lead the Customer Community Team at BoldGrid. I’m passionate about nonprofit usage and e-commerce.

When I’m not tinkering with WordPress I spend my time on adventures with my awesome wife Lisa, three daughters Autumn, Stella, & Petra.

Tom Shapiro

Tom Shapiro is CEO of Stratabeat, a branding, web design, and marketing agency. Shapiro has developed marketing strategies for market leaders such as AT&T, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Kraft Foods, and P&G. Shapiro has a deep passion for neuroscience and human psychology, and his insights have appeared in CMO.com, CNN, Forbes, MarketingProfs, and MediaPost. His book “Rethink Your Marketing” will be published in 2017.

WordCamp Portland, Maine USA is over. Check out the next edition!