Speakers

WordCamp Gold Coast 2011 Speakers

WordCamp Gold Coast 2011 will offer 2 tracks of talks featuring some of Australia’s WordPress finest users and developers.

The tracks are:

  • Low Tech Track – This track will focus on the uses of WordPress for generating content, blogging, content creation, content management and content strategy.
  • High Tech Track – This track will be more development focused. The speakers will be talking about the more technical aspects of developing with WordPress, including plugin development, theme development, using frameworks for developer and scaling WordPress.

There are several formats of talks for the event which include:

  • Regular talk with slides and Q & A (approx. 30 mins plus 15 mins questions)
  • Lightning Talk (5 mins, 20 slides, 15 seconds a slide)
  • Practical (Hands on workshop/Live Demo)

Andrew Davis

Andrews has worked as an IT consultant since 2000. He specialises in “cloud” services, such as Salesforce.com, Google Apps and WordPress.com. At WordCamp Gold Coast, he is presenting the must-attend introductory presentation for new-comers to WordPress.

Andy Henderson

Andy Henderson has been involved with the web since the mid 1990s (yes, they even had search engines way back then), has run his own Web Consulting agency for the last 10 years, (specialising in Search Engine Optimisation for 8 years) and has been using WordPress for the last 6 years – so is very well qualified to present Sunday’s SEO for WordPress Workshop.

Anthony Cole

Anthony Cole is no stranger when it comes to WordPress development. Anthony will be talking on: WordPress Plugin Development 101 – An introductory talk to how to develop WordPress plugins for absolute beginners! Covering fundamental basics of plugin development, how to NOT write plugins, unit testing, and good practises.

Brett Morgan

Brett is a Developer Relations Engineer for Google’s Blogger and has previously worked for Fairfax Media, so he knows a thing or two about blogging. At WordCamp, Brett will show you how to make your blog more awesome with the graphical magic of HTML5.

Bronson Quick

Bronson is a WordPress obsessed designer/developer from Brisbane. After working in the IT industry for many years and wrangling code in both proprietary content management systems (CMS) and other open source CMS, Bronson decided it was time to focus on the best CMS out there…WordPress!

Day to day Bronson works at a leading WordPress only design and development agency in Brisbane, Queensland. At night he’s often found commenting and blogging on anything that’s WordPress related because he’s completely obsessed with WordPress!

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, even has a download count double the population of the Gold Coast!

Dan Petrovic

Dan Petrovic is a well-known Australian SEO and a managing director of Dejan SEO. He has published numerous research articles in the field of search engine optimisation and online marketing. Dan’s work is highly regarded by the world-wide SEO community and featured on some of the most reputable websites in the industry.

Dee Teal

Dee is the body and brains behind the Web Princess development studio. She’s been building websites for almost as many years as WordPress has been able to power them and loves to give clients the WordPress experience.

Dion Hulse

Dion is currently one of a select few with the privilege of WordPress core commit access. Having made close to 300 Trac tickets, uploaded well over 500 Trac patches (as well as too many commits to count) and had over 180,000 downloads for his Plugins this will be a talk not to be missed!

Japh Thomson

Japh is a freelance developer specialising in PHP, MySQL, Javascript, jQuery, WordPress and more! With over 12 years experience working with many clients from various industries and being a proven speaker at WordCamp Melbourne earlier this year, Japhs’ presentation on code quality standards and best practices is a must see for both new and old WordPress themers and developers!

Jodie Miners

Jodie will be talking on: Building a web presence for your Community Group using WordPress.com and other free tools.

Every community group, sporting team or even small business, not for profit group or individual, needs their own web presence. This talk focuses on free or very low cost tools that your group can use to to get online and get organised.

John Ford

John Ford presently works for Automattic, focusing his attention on VaultPress, a security scanning and realtime backup service for WordPress.org users. Passion for coding is what motivates John, but some people are beginning to question his attachment to his iPad. Mix equal parts beautiful code writer, lover of healthy living, world traveler, living room DJ, and community giver and you’ll have the geek known as John Ford.

John O’Nolan

John is an interactive design who works with companies all over the world, from Microsoft to Virgin Atlantic Airways.

John is a WordPress Core UI group contributor, was heavily involved in the WordPress 3.0 and 3.1 release cycles, and is coming over to speak at WordCamp Gold Coast all the way from sunny (*cough*) shores of the UK.

Kate Swaffer

Kate was diagnosed with a rare younger onset dementia when she was 49. At WordCamp Gold Coast, Kate will share her personal story of living with dementia and how she uses it as motivation to live a fuller life. Kate will demonstrate how WordPress helps her to capture memories, and how it is becoming her personal history file, by way of words and stories embodying feelings and emotions. At WordCamp Gold Coast, the power of her story will inspire you.

Stephen Cronin

Having provided custom WordPress solutions since 2007 and holding web management roles within Queensland Government for most of that time, Stephen Cronin provides insight into the challenges facing the adoption of WordPress by government within Australia.

Stew Heckenberg

Stew has wrangled the wild business of freelancing to the point where in the last month, he brought in just over half of the entire previous financial year’s income.

Timothy Ferguson

Timothy has been an IT trainer with various library systems for fifteen years. He is a maintainer for the Gold Coast Library Service’s online book club, which is powered by WordPress. In this session he’ll share experiences about building communities of readers online.

Troy Dean

Troy is an experienced WordPress developer. However his real strength is translating real world business objectives into online user experiences and creating sites that serve the customer as well as the brand. He has an infectious passion for communicating in the digital realm.

Vikki Maver

Since 2008, Vikki has been training other professionals on how to improve their writing at work through her business Refresh Marketing. Vikki finds helping people improve their writing skills extremely rewarding and loves meeting interesting people along the way. Be sure to catch her talk at WordCamp on writing for the web.

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 McNelis

Will has plenty of experience in selecting the essential plugins when setting up client sites through his company McNelis Media. At WordCamp Gold Coast, he’s going to share this experience and reveal the 10 Essential Plugins for your WordPress Site.