Category Archives: Featured Speaker

Featured Speaker: Al Davis

When not at his day job in the hosting industry, Al teaches WordPress at a Toronto, Ont college and also does corporate WordPress training. As a freelance web developer, he is always busy building sites on the WordPress platform. All this leaves him very little time to ride his Harley and watch NFL football.

Presentation: PSD to WordPress

In this double session, we’ll go over the different steps to take a PSD document from image to WordPress reality. We’ll build 3 different pages to give you an idea of some of the things to look for. While not a complete course,this session/workshop will you give a good starting point to continue building your knowledge and skills.

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Featured Speaker: Ruth Maude

Ruth Maude, of Dandelion Web Design Inc., has been designing and building websites since the late 1990’s. Now Ruth works primarily in WordPress. She loves WordPress because it’s open source, user-friendly and so good for SEO. Ruth teaches WordPress Workshops in Toronto for LearnWP.ca. You can find her on Twitter @dandelionweb.

Presentation: Getting Started with WordPress

WordPress is the most popular website content management system on the internet. If you are a beginner, wanting to try out WordPress for the first time, this is the session for you. WordPress terms will be explained in plain language. During this session we’ll take a live tour of WordPress and discuss themes, widgets and plugins. You’ll leave with a good idea of how WordPress works and how to get started.

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Featured Speaker: Shanta R. Nathwani

Shanta R. Nathwani is an IT and Social Media Consultant and an Instructor in Web Design at Sheridan College, which includes teaching WordPress. She teaches students and small businesses how to use social media to increase their online presence leading to increased revenues and improved customer service.

Presentation: Data Architecture in WordPress

Posts vs. Pages & Categories vs. Tags. There is so much confusion about what types of things should be put on a page and what should be in a post. Static vs. Dynamic content is the best way to tackle this. An “About Us” page would be just that… A PAGE. If you are talking about something that is more time sensitive, then you want to do a post. Connected to this would be Categories and Tags. What are they? When creating a website, you can edit a menu to include not only pages, but also category archives that can create a more complete experience for small businesses.

What do you want folks to learn from your presentation?

In this session, you will learn how to create a menu based on your content from categories, links and pages. Lead your visitors to your content in three clicks, which is the art of data architecture. Bring your post-it notes!

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Featured Speaker: Meagan Hanes

Meagan Hanes is a lifelong digital designer who uses WordPress to empower small business owners, artisans, and all other creatives to achieve their digital dreams. With over 15 years of design experience across all aspects of digital project management, her and her brand Love Digimedia provide a range of online solutions, with a focus on self-empowerment through education and coaching. After a gracious welcome attending WordCamp Ottawa 2013 and speaking at WordCamp Montreal 2013, she is now traveling across Canada and to WordCamps around the world to share inspiration, education, and passion!

Presentation: DIY or Have It Made? Here’s How To Decide!

I’m a big fan of maps. You know, those old fold-out-paper ones you get from the gas store? Or the one Jack Sparrow used to find ? I’ve always believed that with the right map and the right tool, you could go anywhere!

Well, it turns out this belief is pretty accurate in the web design and development world as well. With today’s tools like WordPress, Plugins, Themes, and People, a road map is worth its weight in gold – especially if you want to get to your goal before you run out of gas!

Just as with roads, there are many ways to get to the end of a successful WordPress project. The key questions becomes, “what route do I take?”

That’s where this presentation comes in.

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Featured Speaker: Pat Ness

Pat Ness is the founder of Social Media Blog Master (SMB Master). He’s a WordPress web developer, graphic designer, affiliate marketer, SEO guy, and blogger. Since 2001, he’s happily helped over 320 brands design and build their business adventures online. Over the last 3 years he’s built over 100 WordPress sites for small to large businesses which can be seen in his online portfolio. Pat has a passion for inspiring and teaching people on the web how to become a leader online and create a lifestyle they love.

Presentation: Choosing a WordPress Theme for Your Business

I want people to learn how to choose a theme that suits the needs of their business. Themes these days come with a lot of new options and features and I’d like people to know about whats new and whats out there.

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Featured Speaker: Rick Radko

Rick Radko began building web sites and applications in 1996, and has been developing WordPress websites since 2008. Over that time he has amassed significant experience with WordPress, coding plugins and designing custom themes. In 2011, Rick became involved in the WordPress community by starting the Ottawa WordPress Meetup Group and speaking at WordCamp Toronto. Since then he has been a repeat presenter at WordCamp Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. Rick is also one of the organizers of WordCamp Ottawa.

Rick is the founder of R-Cubed Design Forge, where he develops and designs web sites and applications using open source software. Rick specializes in custom development and multilingual websites.

Presentation: A Peek into the World of WordPress Plugin Development

My talk will introduce the concepts of creating WordPress plugins while walk through the code for a simple widget plugin.

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Featured Speaker: Brian Rotsztein

Brian is an inbound marketer with 16 years of experience. He’s been using WordPress since version 1.6 (2005). His companies (RedstoneX.com and Uniseo.com) provide WordPress services (web and mobile design, marketing, programming, plugin development, etc.) and he likes to give back to the community. He has spoken at WordCamp Montreal (4 times!) and WordCamp Ottawa.

Presentation: Content Marketing with Guest Posts

My presentation is Content Marketing with Guest Posts. It will cover the basics of how to guest post on blogs and contribute to online magazines. This can be helpful for SEO, social media marketing, and personal branding. WordPress is a great platform to use for that purpose.

What do you want folks to learn from your presentation?

I’d like attendees to understand how WordPress can be used for promoting written content and amplifying reach in the “modern era” of online marketing. It’s a powerful tool to get more people to consume useful content. Bloggers and the business community can benefit from this presentation.

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Featured Speaker: Sean Nilsson

Sean is an online consultant with a focus on building WordPress websites. He also make online videos and records music under the name Sheltered in Sound. You can follow Sean on Twitter and visit Sean’s site, N Creative, at ncreative.ca

Presentation: Dr. WordPress or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Template

This presentation will discuss the development of a magazine site with over 4,000 posts actively updated daily by a large team of writers and editors.  We will discuss migrating a multisite install of a very old version of WordPress into a modern day single install.  Discuss providing a solution where the client can redesign page layouts in-house with no coding knowledge through the use of a premium theme and a multitude of plugins.

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Featured Speaker: Ben Fox

Ben has been building with WordPress for just over two years and in that time has merged his passion for education with a love of technology. In 2012 he co-founded of FlowPress, a WordPress focused development agency as well as WPUniversity.com, a site dedicated to enhancing WordPress learning and providing hints and tips for WordPress users. His current project is a WordPress plugin for the Sidekick platform that provides real-time, guided help and learning from right inside the WordPress dashboard.

Presentation: So You Want To Teach WordPress?

How and what to teach when training a non-technical person or beginner in WordPress.

Non-technical WordPress beginners aren’t like you and me. They didn’t look at the WordPress the first time and say “Wow COOL!” they said probably said something like “I don’t understand this” or “I’m not good at computers”.

During the presentation we’re going to talk about helping people get past that fear, how to engage in a meaningful and memorable way and how to prepare for class.

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Featured Speaker: Geoff Campbell

Geoff runs his web design and hosting business almost entirely on WordPress based websites and has been climbing up the WordPress ladder. He helped organize WordCamp Hamilton 2013 and after attending, he thought. “Geez, I should have done a presentation. ”

Since he thought he could come up with some helpful information. Geoff has done quite a bit of speaking, teaching and presenting before and he’s very comfortable in front of large groups.

Presentation: Plugin Safari

We’ll be hacking our way through the jungle of WordPress Plugins, looking for the gems.  I’ll be covering a variety of plugins and best practices as well as presenting a specially prepared rant for the folks at WP HQ.

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