Speakers will be announced Monday, March 6th.
Alisha McFarland
Alisha McFarland is a Mentor, Developer, and Writer. She has spent the last 25 years mastering the art and science of being an Independent Professional.
Alisha’s greatest satisfaction is helping people share their unique value and knowledge without the decades of struggle! She does this by helping them craft WordPress websites that are clearly written, cleverly designed, solidly built and consistently profitable.
You can read and listen to her at alishamcfarland.com, connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Pinterest at @alishawordpress or reach out directly via email at alisha at alishamcfarland dot com.
Andrea Garcia
Andrea serves as the Chief Mind Officer and client lead for Mind + Matter. Andrea supports client digital strategy, business operations, and managing Drew.
Andrea graduated from Northwest Missouri State University in 2007 with a B.S. in Industrial Psychology and in 2008 with a Master’s in Business Administration. Following a ten year tenure at Cerner in marketing, sales, and client management she moved to an account focused role in Associated Wholesale Grocers’ in-house agency. Andrea enjoys creating meaningful partnerships to help her clients express and achieve their goals.
When not at M+M Andrea can be found watching soccer, taking or teaching a yoga class, playing with her little beige puppy, or Instagramming her latest meal.
Andrea’s philosophy is to find your true north, she strives to help others find and follow their driving purpose.
Andrea Zoellner
Andrea is a freelance copywriter and digital content creator at Automattic. She trained as a broadcast journalist and worked in corporate communications before risking it all for a career in tech. Now she blogs, writes ad copy, and develops video tutorials for WordPress.com. She’s also a WordCamp Montreal organizer.
Andrea loves wordplay, coffee-shop-hopping, and blogging about how to pack the ultimate carry-on. When she’s not at home in Montreal, Canada, she’s sampling the digital nomad life and documenting her travels on her blog capsulesuitcase.com.
Ann Gaffigan
Ann Gaffigan is the Chief Technology Officer and partner at National Land Realty, a full-service real estate brokerage company specializing in farm, ranch, plantation, timber and recreational land across the country. Gaffigan was formerly the CTO of Land Pros Realty, which merged with National Land Realty in January 2016.
Gaffigan spent the first decade of her career growing her web and systems development business, Gazelle Incorporated, after graduating from the University of Nebraska with her bachelor’s in computer science in 2004. Gazelle Inc served dozens of clients all over the United States, ranging from small businesses that needed informational websites to larger non-profits and commercial businesses needing integrated membership and operations systems.
Bill Swearingen
Bill Swearingen has 15 years of experience in information security and the protection of critical infrastructure from advanced cyber threats. Bill’s technical expertise and understanding of the inherit risks corporations face today has given him a unique ability to build strong cyber defenses to detect, degrade, or disrupt cyber threats. Bill has a proven track record of creating, developing, and managing strong technical teams needed to provide Incident Response, Digital Forensics, Vulnerability Assessment, Penetration Testing, and Policy enforcement for large (Fortune 150) corporations such as CenturyLink and Sprint.
Brittany VanMaele
Brittany VanMaele is Community Manager & Content Strategist at Woodruff. With a creative writing training and a love for analytics, she’s deployed digital strategies for diverse local businesses, non-profits, and nationwide franchises, including Planet Sub, ARCpoint Labs, Petland, and the VFW. While she’s not geeking out about all things content, you’ll most likely find her karaoking.
Bruce L Chamoff
Bruce Chamoff has been a web developer for over 20 years and has worked on over 1,000 websites. He has worked on WordPress since 2006 building themes and plugins for Fortune 500 companies as well as mom and pop shops. His Udemy courses have taught WordPress development to web designers in over 150 countries as he loves to teach!
His most recent involvement was with the Radio City Rockettes website in New York City in 2016. In his spare time, he performs with this band and is a dedicated father.
Chris Brown
Chris is the founder of Venture Legal where he represents startups, freelancers, and small businesses. he also founded b.Legal Marketing, a website development and hosting platform for small law firms.
Danny Santoro
Hey everyone! I’m a Cincinnati born and raised movie fanatic with an obsession for tech, code, and anything with a current, switch, or explosion. In the daytime I love web design, video production, and general business online. I even make movies – fun stuff!
Dave Navarro Jr.
I am a paid WordPress Geek. I work for a large media broadcasting company as a WordPress developer where I write custom plugins and child themes for over 400 web sites operated by our company. I am a photographer and multimedia geek. I have the most amazing fiance in the world that I do not deserve. I am a father of three amazing young ladies and the grandfather of three even more amazing young girls.
Frankie Jarrett
Frankie Jarrett is a full-stack developer from St. Joseph, Missouri who has been building WordPress products since 2007. He is Senior WordPress Product Engineer at GoDaddy and loves the fact that he gets to work with WordPress every single day.
From launching his own theme shop in 2011, to building large-scale enterprise websites, authoring dozens of plugins, and now creating amazing product experiences on GoDaddy’s hosting platform – WordPress has always been at the center of Frankie’s career, and he plans to keep it that way!
Outside of work, Frankie loves being a dad to his two boys, Rivers and Bear, traveling with his wife, Gracie, smoking his own BBQ, and yelling at the TV during games.
J. Caleb Rogers
Born of a single mother and elementary education teacher, and raised with the help of his grandfather, a Southern Baptist minister, Caleb Rogers seemed destined to fill the role of both mentor and speaker. However, as most journeys go, it took him traversing a few detours before getting there.
Out of college, Caleb obtained his C.P.A. and began work in the financial services sector for PwC as an auditor. Dissatisfied with his role, he quickly transitioned from audit work to consulting. While a much better fit, it still didn’t quite hit the mark, and a few more moves had to be made.
After careful reflection, Caleb took a step into mental coaching and in a short time moved from working with amateur fighters to both UFC and Bellator professional athletes. The Mental Sensei was born!
Journey alongside him as he shares his wisdom in helping you develop meaning, purpose, and work towards your peak performance!
Jamie Schmid
Jamie Schmid is a freelance WordPress developer who specializes in planning and integration of content. She loves using WordPress to create user-friendly, functional and beautiful websites with intuitive administration interfaces.
Jason A Keeler
Principal/Owner at Search Solutions LLC and Senior Digital Strategist at Sandbox. 10 year veteran of the PPC industry and professional SEO. Digital Marketing consultant with equal experience in both B2B and B2C channels, including e-commerce applications.
Jennifer Rosenblatt
Jennifer Rosenblatt – whether in her native Florida, or her current home in the Midwest – has an uncanny ability to become a gravitational point for community, customers, investors, and partners. Her unique ability to make connections and find mutual gains is at the root of her business, MusicSpoke, a marketplace connecting composers and customers.
Now on her second business, Rosenblatt is taking lessons from her first exited company and leveraging those insights to propel MusicSpoke to become the world’s largest marketplace for artist owned sheet music. Jennifer is an NMotion Accelerator alumnus and a recent graduate of the Prosper Women Entrepreneurs Startup Accelerator. She is also a 2017 Pipeline Fellow. She has over 25 years experience in sales, marketing, and management. Jennifer graciously gives her time and lessons learned with other entrepreneurs, students, and learners of all ages.
Jeremy Fuksa
Jeremy has been designing for the web, print and video since 1995. In 2015, he founded Orange Flame Design, a full-service creative agency based in Kansas City.
Jeremy wishes he were an Okie from Muskogee. Because, as you know, it is the place where even squares can have a ball. Actually, Jeremy does originally hail from a very small Oklahoma town named after a poor Irish bastard who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Josh Broton
Josh Broton is the owner and lead developer of Broton Digital Consulting, a small team of designers and developers passionate about solving complex problems for clients using custom web and mobile apps. He spends his days writing JavaScript and his nights assembling Lego sets with his family. Very INFP.
Keanan Koppenhaver
Keanan Koppenhaver is the Lead Developer at How-To Geek, one of the top 200 sites in the US, where he help the editorial team share all their awesome, geeky knowledge with the world.
He is passionate about mentoring other developers as well as teaching people that WordPress can be more than just a blogging platform. Keanan writes about all these topics and more at http://levelupwp.net.
Konstantin Obenland
Konstantin is a WordPress aficionado, and Core Developer based in Southern California. You might remember him from projects like WordPress 4.3 or the new WordPress.org Plugin Directory. At Automattic he is part of a team that contributes to Core and WordPress.org full time. He enjoys home improvements, bourbon, and good food — sometimes so much that he blogs about it.
Marc Vasquez
Marc Vasquez, APR, is the Security Awareness Program Manager for UMB Financial Corporation where. He possesses nearly 20 years of both agency and corporate public relations and social media experience. Marc is also the technology chair for the Social Media Club of Kansas City and is a member of the Social Media Club global board. He holds the Accreditation in Public Relations credential which has been established as a way to recognize public relations practitioners who have mastered the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to develop and deliver strategic communications. By night is the gaming sidekick to his 9-year-old son @StuffJakobSays. You can generally find Marc via @vasquez007 or on LinkedIn.
Marianne Worthington
Described as brilliant, awesomesauce, hilarious, and so engaging you will forget to eat your snacks, Marianne delivers a client experience sure to exceed your expectations. She is the founder of Work Warrior LLC, a company that helps small business owners build wildly successful teams. Marianne teaches business owners how empower their employees to do more, so they can focus on what they love to do…build their businesses.
For over a decade she’s been fortunate enough to build teams that have exceeded benchmarks, saved client relationships, increased sales…doing things most thought were impossible. By focusing on the tangible aspect of team building Marianne has helped teams make the seemingly impossible…possible. In 2010 she received her Master’s in Organizational Development from Avila University. She loves super hero shirts, sequins, selfies, and exclamation points!
When she is not busy being a pseudo super hero team builder you can find Marianne running around in the Lincoln startup world working on her new project Revo, a one stop shop for social entrepreneurs with a vision to change the their communities using smart business models.
Mark Kelly
Mary White
The owner of MWforDesigns studio creating Graphic Design and WordPress Websites for small business partners.Plus, Supporting WordPress Websites.
Mary has been a continuing education instructor at Johnson County Community College for 3 years. She teaches WordPress and Adobe creative cloud products.
Hobbies are being a crazy artist and a volunteering at Wayside waifs walking and fostering Dogs and Puppies.
Melissa Roberts
Melissa Roberts is the Marketing Director at the Enterprise Center of Johnson County and the President of Free State Strategy Group LLC. She has worked at the nexus of politics, marketing and community organizing for a decade.
After running political campaigns in Boston, Melissa joined DCI Group, where she advised Fortune 100 clients on public affairs, advocacy and CSR strategies. Melissa also served as Executive Director of the Partnership for Technology Innovation, where she worked to connect the startup community with policymakers in Kansas City and across the Silicon Prairie.
Melissa currently serves as a 1 Million Cups Kansas City Community Organizer. Melissa is an alumna of Boston College and a Johnson County native. Though her career has taken her around the country, she has remained a loyal, if sometimes tortured, Kansas City Royals fan.
Michael Black
Michael began his SEO career in 1997, while working with clients of his first company which provided networking services to small businesses. A couple of his clients posed the question “What is the internet and how do I get my business on it?” To which Mike responded, “I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out.” Soon after the same clients began asking how to get customers to their new sites. Mike again responded, “I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out.” Since his initial foray into website development and optimization, Mike has optimized thousands of websites for hundreds of clients.
Michael L Rattenne IV
Michael has been working for UMB financial institution for the past 19 years at a management level for various areas of the bank. In his current role as Information Security Risk Manager in the Corporate Information Security and Privacy group, he is responsible for; enterprise information security incident fraud mitigation response and root cause risk analysis, regulatory reporting, policy exception process, enterprise Security Awareness strategy, and developing program operations.
Michael chairs the UMB Fraud Taskforce sharing information and analyzing fraud with cross functional groups bank wide. He is also a member of FS-ISAC Payment Risk Council, Fraud Exchange Peer Group, ISACA and other fraud and security awareness groups. Michael is an accomplished speaker, credentialed minister, musician, husband and father of three sons.
Mike Demopoulos
Mike “Demo” Demopoulos is a longtime lover of Open Source Software.
He currently works at BoldGrid (a WordPress Page Builder) as an Evangelist. He has spoken at numerous open source events around the world. He has been interviewed by multiple publications and podcasts and as contributed to many as well. Mike also volunteers with the Joomla Project as the treasurer of Open Source Matters (the not for profit organization for Joomla!) as well as serving on the Joomla World Conference and Capital teams. He also co-organizes JoomlaDay Minnesota. He lives in the Twin Cities with his wife Kayla and dog B’Elanna.
Paul Gilzow
Programmer Analyst. Web application security and accessibility evangelist. Software instructor. Conference lecturer and presenter. Runs on passion and coffee.
Pippin Williamson
Pippin Williamson is a WordPress plugin developer from Hutchinson, KS. He runs PippinsPlugins.com and is the founder and lead developer of Restrict Content Pro, Easy Digital Downloads, AffiliateWP and many more WordPress plugins. Beyond WordPress, Pippin has a love for sour beer, home brewing, and is an avid cyclist.
Rebecca Haden
Rebecca has been writing for the web since the 20th century. She has a Masters degree in Linguistics from San Diego State University and owns Haden Interactive, a content-focused web firm based in Fayetteville, AR. The company serves clients on four continents.
Rebecca Music
Rebecca Music is a one-stop-shop marketing expert who specializes in driving traffic to websites using social media and search. Outside of her working hours, she donates her time to local organizations looking to improve their on-line presence, or, who need help with graphic design, photography, or event planning. Still a recent transplant to Kansas City, she welcomes every opportunity to connect with others.
Rob Walch
Rob Walch was inducted into the Podcasting Hall of Fame in 2016. Rob is the Vice President of Podcaster Relations for Libsyn (LSYN) having joined Libsyn in 2007, Prior to joining Libsyn he founded podCast411, Inc in 2004. Rob is Co-Author of the book “Tricks of the Podcasting Masters” – Que 2006, an editors pick as a Top 10 Reference book for 2006 by Amazon.com. Rob was listed as the 5th most influential person in podcasting according to the book “Podcasting for Dummies” – Wiley Press 2005. He has consulted on podcasting for Jack Welch, Senator Edwards, Governor Bill Richardson, Noah Shanok (Stitcher), Tim Ferriss, Dr. Mark Hyman and the Sacramento Kings/Monarchs to name just a few. He is also a monthly columnist for Podertainment The Podcast Magazine. Rob is a member of the IAB Podcasting Working groups.
Rob started podcasting in 2004, and is the host of the award winning podCast411 podcast, where he has interviewed such prominent podcasters as Quincy Jones, Walt Mossberg, Colin Ferguson (Eureka), Ronald Moore (Executive Producer of Battlestar Galactica), Phil Gordon (World Series of Poker), Larry Kudlow (CNBC’s Kudlow and Company) and Leo Laporte (TechTV, G4 TV). Additionally Rob is host of Today in iOS (iPhone) Podcast – The first and largest podcast about the iPhone – www.todayinios.com and also the KC Startup 411 podcast which covers the Kansas City Start up scene – www.kcstartup411.com
Since 2004 Rob has presented at well over 100 events on the subject of podcasting and New Media including NAB, the Newspaper Association of America Marketing Conference, the US Latino Film Festival, the Corporate Podcasting Summit, The Association for Women in Communications 2006 Annual Professional Conference, Social Media 2007, Ad-Tech, Podcast Movement, New Media Expo, and Blogworld Expo. He is also a regular guest Lecturer at the University of Kansas School of Journalism. Rob was the Track Leader for the Podcasting sessions at the 2009 Blog World Expo – where he recruited 25 top experts to speak on podcasting.
In 2004 Rob received his MBA from the University of Connecticut. He also has an Engineering degree from the University of Dayton.
Ronald Huereca
Ronald has been doing WordPress since 2006 and professionally since 2009. He has written numerous WordPress plugins and loves front-end and back-end WordPress development.
Ryan Rhoten
I am an Author, Speaker, Podcaster, and Digital Branding strategist. He helps business professionals, career coaches, and recruiters boost their CareerKred using a 4-step process called D.I.C.E.
Through DICE, I teach my clients how to build their personal and business brands in a way that amplifies their CareerKred, grows their influence, and increases opportunities in their area of expertise.
Sam Werner
Currently run an online marketing company in Kansas City. Spent 10 years travelling internationally working with NPOs building their websites and helping with their technology.
I’ve been working with WordPress for 9 years and have built child themes and plugins.
With my current business 90% of our sites use WordPress
Sean R. Nicholson
Sean founded his web development and content consultancy under the name of XHorizon Consulting in 1995, when the web was still in its infancy. He is currently the Co-Founder of Ignition90, a digital solutions provider that excels at helping their clients envision and implement change 90 days at a time.
Sean has more than 20 years advising his clients on the best ways to leverage technology, digital channels, e-commerce, and social media to advance their business needs. As the process of building web sites evolved, Sean has written and contributed to more than 10 different books, on topics ranging from the use of Microsoft Office, to website design and development.
Sean has worked for companies and with clients ranging from Fortune 100 to small non-profits and is passionate about helping businesses understand their customers and connect with them using content and communication.
In addition to working with digital technology, Sean has been employed as both a Bungee Master and the Mayor of a city…no lie.
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.
Will Hanke
Will Hanke has a passion for helping businesses tell their story, get more customers and make more money. His veteran-owned company, Red Canoe Media, has helped mom & pops, startups, and multi-million dollar companies with their online marketing strategies.
Will teaches monthly classes and holds coaching webinars for small business owners on a wide variety of topics from analytics to ecommerce. He is an avid business & marketing blogger and has published several ebooks including an Amazon Bestseller in Marketing.