Speakers

Anthony Cole

Anthony is a WordPress Hacker, WordCamp Organiser, and Melburnian who works as a senior developer at an advertising agency in Melbourne. He’s been working with WordPress since its early inception. When not writing or hacking code he can be found tinkering with some sort of web technology, enjoying a live gig, or studying frantically for an exam as he attempts to finish his science degree.

Anthony has helped organise several WordCamps throughout Australia and New Zealand and helps coordinate the local WordPress Melbourne meetup group. He also needs the local Sydneysiders to prove to him that Sydney has good coffee – soy lattes preferred.

You can find him on twitter at @anthonycole

Anthony Hortin

I run a small design & development studio in the South-East suburbs of Melbourne. I design & develop custom WordPress themes for my clients. I’ve also written a complete WordPress manual called Easy WP Guide that is currently available within the Apple iBookstore, Amazon and the B&N Nook Book Store. It’s also available online at http://easywpguide.com/. Recently I attended WordCamp NZ, which was held in Auckland NZ and also last years WordCamp Gold Coast, in Qld.

Brent Shepherd

Brent is a WordPress developer, WordCamp Organiser and occasional blogger. He has worked with clients like the Australian Government and Stanford University through leading Australian WordPress agencies like FindingSimple & Sennza.

When not writing code for clients, Brent can be found writing WordPress plugins, like Prospress and Social Connect, blogging about writing code at thereforei.am or organising WordCamps to talk about writing code – Brent was co-organiser of both WordCamp Melbourne 2011 and WordCamp Gold Coast 2011.

He is very excited to be able to attend WordCamp Sydney, the first camp in Australia in the last 3 years where he can sit back and relax while other brave-souls run the event!

Charly Leetham

Charly Leetham’s goal is to assist small business owners realise the power of the Internet as a channel to market their organisations in an appropriate and cost-effective manner. She helps solopreneurs and small businesses map their business processes and plan their web presence.
Charly has a passion for IT and helping people overcome their technology challenges and, with more than 24 years experience in the IT industry, she has hands-on technical to high-level business management experience. Charly has installed and configured computing equipment (yes, she actually has got her hands dirty) and has managed business contracts in excess of $26 million dollars.

Since 2007, Charly has taught herself php and WordPress to be able to design, develop and maintain websites for Small Businesses, internationally.

This experience in IT and running a successful business from home is what attracted the Women’s Ecommerce Association International Board of Advisors to invite Charly to be an adviser for Women in Ecommerce.

Charly has also won the MCEI Women in Business Marketing Award 2010, a Stevies Women In Business Award in 2011 and named as one of Women In ECommerce “Women To Watch” in 2012.

Chris Aprea

“Chris is a self confessed WordPress nerd and all-around good guy. He was developing websites back in the days where Microsoft FrontPage and table layouts where acceptable (ugh). When he’s not digging into the codex he’s usually trying to push WordPress to its limits and develop fresh and innovative web apps.

He loves creating cool plugins and themes with the help of custom post types, taxonomies and metadata. He’s also a sucker for bbPress and BuddyPress.

Dan Milward

Dan is a member of WordPress royalty. His company, Instinct Entertainment, has been building WordPress Plugins & providing custom WordPress development since, well, since the dawn of the ‘Press. Instinct’s flagship plugin, the hugely popular WP e-Commerce plugin has been followed up in Dan’s WordPress ‘portfolio’ by GameFroot a game building engine powered by WordPress that’s worth checking out!!

Jeff Waugh

Jeff Waugh is a technology generalist and Open Source specialist who enjoys translating technology opportunity into useful outcomes. He gets to do that all the time as pre-sales engineer at mission critical hosting provider, Bulletproof Networks.

Waugh has played an active role in the Open Source community and numerous projects, such as Director of the GNOME Foundation Board (2003-2004, 2006-2008), GNOME Release Manager (2001-2005), committee member (2000-2001) and president (2002-2003) of the Sydney Linux Users’ Group, and member of the linux.conf.au 2001 and 2007 organising teams. He co-authored the immensely popular Planet feed reader, and was one of the founding employees of Canonical, engaged in Ubuntu business and community development during its extraordinary early rise (2004-2006). Jeff then focused on the Australian industry and community with Waugh Partners, an boutique consultancy specialising in Open Source strategy, industry development and research (2006-2011).

In 2005, Waugh won the Google/O’Reilly Open Source award for Best Evangelist, which recognised his work on GNOME and Ubuntu. In 2007, Jeff and Pia were the first duo to receive a Pearcey Foundation award, recognising their pioneering achievement and contribution to the Australian ICT industry.

Joe Ortenzi

Joe is a Senior Experience Consultant at Stamford Interactive in Sydney, Australia. He is passionate about accessibility, universal design, interaction design and compliance. A champion of the user’s perspective, he enjoys listening to user’s stories in order to provide fewer frustrations and more satisfying moments.

A WordPress user since Charles Mingus (v1.2), a fan since Ella Fitzgerald (v2.1), and a zealot since John Coltrane (v2.7) Joe also like bringing people together for conversations by founding the London Web Standards group, and organising networking events like webBlastSYD. You can convince him of almost anything if you buy him a good enough seafood Laksa but will dominate any conversation about urban cycling and social policy.

Twitter: @wheelyweb

Jordan Gillman

Jordan is a freelance Front End Designer and Developer. After originally training and working as a graphic designer, a move to Christchurch NZ facilitated a move into the world of the Web. Six years on, and Jordan is enjoying the best of both worlds, running his own one-man studio pumping out websites that are both beautiful on the surface, and behind the scenes.

Jordan works in Wollongong on the NSW South Coast where he lives with his beautiful wife Channah, two cats (Bentley and Slinky) and dog (Pixel).

Kate Carruthers

Kate is a skilled communicator who brings together ideas, technology, and business in practical ways. Her work as a marketer and technologist gives her insight into the nexus between innovation and technology, and the changes that these bring to society and organisations.

She is Co-Founder of Social Innovation Sydney (www.socialinnovationsydney.org), a group that works to build human-to-human networks of people who care about creating ventures that do social good and create value for society above and beyond the bottom line.

Kate blogs at katecarruthers.com and can be found on Twitter @kcarruthers

Kimanzi T Constable

Last August Kimanzi self-published his first book and to date it has sold a little over 20,000 copies. March 2 of this year the second book was published and it has sold 5,150 copies so far. The second book got so much exposure he was offered several publishing contracts. He has since signed a 4 book deal with Sound Wisdom Books. Kimanzi has gone from being self-published to having the book in print with no agent or book proposal.

The only way Kimanzi sold books was through a WordPress website and social media. He has studied and learnt what makes people share your work; and he didn’t spend any money on any advertising.  He will share his insights on getting people reading AND sharing your work.

Lachlan MacPherson

Lachlan is one of the co-founders of Sennza, a WordPress only digital agency based in Brisbane. At Sennza we work with many business both small and large, including a number of ASX listed companies.

Lachlan is passionate about keeping the WordPress community alive and growing in Australia. He was a co-organiser for WordCamp Gold Coast and also helped to start the WordPress Sydney and Brisbane meetups.

Lisa Davis

Lisa Davis – Web Developer and SEO & Social Media Strategist

Lisa has worked as a Web Developer for over 20 years and in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) since 2005 working as an Account Manager for Websalad & developing websites incorporating her SEO knowledge into WordPress builds.

Lisa presently juggles many website developments with her company & includes SEO strategies & Social Media into website developments. Focusing on small to medium local businesses. Lisa has also juggled her role for 6 years as a Speaker Manager for No Drama Media who run Search Marketing Expo (SMX) & Online Marketer (OMX) in Sydney, Melbourne & Brisbane. Lisa has travelled with SMX & Bootcamp to New Zealand & Singapore.

Lisa also assisted the 1st WordCamp in Sydney with Anthony Cole, Sam Bauers with the special guest Matt Mullenweg.

Lisa loves SEO and watching the kaleidoscope of SEO continually change as we try and keep up with Google’s Algorithm. Lisa is passionate about SEO & Social Media & keeps her finger on the pulse and takes part with in the search community in Australia and ASIA.

Phil Peet

Phillip is a freelance web designer and part time teacher at the Design Centre Enmore.  His love affair with WordPress began about 4 years ago when he was searching for a content management system [CMS] solution for his clients. Since then he hasn’t looked back. He has sound experience in both the graphic and web design industries and many of his projects involve branding/identities, print collateral, custom mobile and website user interfaces, theme development and post installation training. Phillip has recently written a commercial course, which runs at Enmore TAFE to help other web designers build their own custom themes.

Sofia Woods

Sofia Woods, is a WordPress web designer, front end developer, avid blogger and social media manager. She is also the creative director of Shortie Designs, her own web design business working with small to medium business, artists and non-profits helping them get online.

In her previous life before she discovered her inner geek, she was a circus performer.  Although life on the stage was swell, the digital world beckoned, so Sofia swapped her trapeze for a Mac and instead of learning routines, she learned code.

We all know code is poetry and so she continues to harness her creative energy for web design and development projects while assisting people learn how to better utilise online technologies.

Connect with her on twitter @ShortieDesigns  or Facebook www.facebook.com/shorTiedesigns

Stephen Cronin

Stephen started developing websites in 1997 and is passionate about all things web. For the last 5 years, he has managed websites for a Queensland Government department, giving him an in-depth understanding of SEO, Content Strategy, Information Architecture and User Experience for large scale sites.

He started blogging in 2007, but quickly found he spent more time writing WordPress plugins than he did writing posts. He has been developing for WordPress ever since. Stephen (occasionally) blogs about WordPress and can be found on Twitter @StephenCronin.

Tony Cosentino

Tony Cosentino WordPress developer, author and trainer

Tony has been using WordPress for 5 years, Building commercial websites only with WordPress for the last 3 years.

Tony runs regular face to face WordPress training workshops and is now embarking on a statewide campaign to educate all of NSW about WordPress with face to face training for all city and regional areas.

Tony is also the author of a soon to be released hard copy book called the Plugin Cookbook, sharing great recipes for plugin combinations for specific types of websites and requirements.

Tony can be found on twitter at @wphow

Tracey Kemp

Tracey is a designer who taught herself CSS, some basic PHP and MySQL to build a friend’s band a new website. After that, thanks to word of mouth, soon she was doing other band sites in her ‘spare’ time. Fast forward a few years and she had more work than she could handle while working a full time job so, she went freelance and moved back to Sydney to focus on her own clients.

After experimenting with other content management systems, Tracey discovered WordPress and it quickly became her exclusive choice for building new sites – she hasn’t looked back!

Tracey will be doing her first ever presentation at WordCamp Sydney which is equal parts daunting and exciting, she writes… “Nothing like getting out of your comfort zone though so bring it on, I say!”

You can hear Tracey talking about those mysterious things they call Custom Post Types and Taxonomies…

You can find Tracey on Twitter: @dogshindleg

Troy Dean

Troy Dean is passionate about simplifying the Internet to deliver real business outcomes.

He has worked with hundreds of clients and helped them get measurable results for their business. He managed the online strategy for Jessica Watson, the 16 year-old Australian girl who sailed around the world, and helped FebFast raise over $1 million in 2011 and 2012 for the drug and alcohol sector.

He built his web design and digital marketing business, Tonto Digital, to support his lifestyle and regularly turns down clients who he doesn’t align with. And he stopped negotiating on price long ago.

Troy lectures in E-Business at JMC Academy and is a regular contributor to Flying Solo – Australia’s largest small business community.

He is also a professional voice over artist and musician.

Vlad Lasky

Vlad is a computer systems engineer with a humorous and educational story to tell about WordPress security. His presentation will give every site administrator tips on how to harden their WordPress installation against would-be attackers and avoid inadvertently doing things that could compromise site security.

Will Brown

Wil has been involved in web development since 1992 and his company Gravitational FX has been delivering business web solutions since 2008 for clients in the UK, Ireland and Australia.

Having used “the others”, he now develops websites exclusively using WordPress and is at his happiest creating new plugins for bizarre client requests.  He founded the WordPress networking group in Dublin in 2011 and regularly contributes to online forums, blogs and articles to share the joy.