Stéphane works for Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com as a VIP Engineer helping sites stay secure and optimized. He was formerly senior advisor for the Federal Liberal party for 4 years leading the party’s growth in online data acquisitions and donations.

View Stéphane’s speaker profile.

Presentation: Everything you know about AB testing is wrong

“This talk is more advanced than most testing talks in that it goes in depth on why you need to be careful about statistical significance and not getting caught up in early results.”

“In 2011 I began offering managed WordPress hosting, creating a protected place for website owners. In 2013, I expanded my services to include prevention and recovery for those who had been hacked.

I do what I do because I care. I love taking care of the business you love so you can stay focused on the work that delights you.”

View Kate’s speaker profile.

Presentation: Disaster-Proof Your WordPress Site

How much money and credibility would you lose if your website went down for a week? A day? An hour? Let’s take a look at some of the most common things that can go wrong with a WordPress site and discuss plans and processes to prevent disaster.

“I am a theme wrangler at Automattic based in the UK. I am lucky enough to spend my days arm deep in themes. I am a themer at heart and passionate about everything theme. I am an admin for the WordPress theme review team and love working with new and old reviewers.”

View Tammie’s speaker profile.

Presentation: Level up: review themes on WordPress.org

“I will go through how to become a review and the tools you need. I’ll look at the world of theme reviewing. I’ll give some tips on how to refine your skills as a theme reviewer so you can be the best reviewer you can be.”

“I’m a print designer at heart, but quickly came to the conclusion that I needed to also be able to design for the web. I’ve been a designer for 25 years and now own and operate my own design studio Trailer Trash Design.”

View Joe’s speaker profile.

Presentation: Congratulations! You’re having a WordPress site!

“This session compares having/launching and new WP site to having a baby. There are so many unknowns that you need to find out about both. It’s a fun, light-hearted session about not getting frustrated. No one really knows how to change a diaper, but they learn quickly. The same holds true with many things associated with a new WP site. Hopefully by the end of the session, I give new users hope that the frustration is only temporary.”

“I am a developer, I am a car fanatic, and I like long walks on the beach at sunset because I live in Southern California. JavaScript is my passion, and WordPress is where it all began. Nowadays I work with WordPress trying to build things that no one would think to, helping bridge the gap between the developers and designers who use it.”

View Roy’s speaker profile.

Presentation: WordPress and Client Side Web Applications

“My presentation will focus on the merits of client side applications, why they are “better” in some regards, and why it is helpful to use them in certain use cases. I will go into more detail about how to build one using WordPress utilizing AngularJS code and the JSON REST API (WP-API).”

Matthew Smith completed his Ph.D. in 2012 while working as a researcher in the Data Mining Lab since September 2004. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from BYU in December 2004 and defended his M.S. Thesis on “Implicit Affinity Networks” in December 2006. He is currently working on his Ph.D. Dissertation on “Social Capital in Online Communities.”

View Matt’s speaker profile.

Presentation: Multilingual WordPress – How to make your WordPress site multilingual

This session will cover how to…

• Compare plugin options to install that enable multilingual functionality
• Ensure your themes, plugins, and content are multilingual ready
• Translate a theme or plugin into a new language
• Send content to a translation services provider when needed
• Use typical workflow for translating posts, pages, menus, and other types of content
• Understand typical translation and editorial workflows
• Leverage machine, professional, and community translation

As an experienced Internet marketing entrepreneur, consultant, speaker, and author, Brian has spent much of the last 17 years helping companies excel online. He’s the head of well-established brands such as UniSEO (a boutique Internet marketing agency) and RedstoneX.com (a web design and online marketing company), where he brings a hype-free, seasoned approach to working with clients.

View Brian’s speaker profile.

Presentation: Grow Your Audience with Savvy Content Marketing Tactics

“Content marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in the online world and for good reason. Properly implement, content marketing plans can increase search engine visibility, social media networking, brand awareness, personal branding and sales, while decreasing costs. WordPress is a great platform that businesses and bloggers can harness to achieve these objectives. Topics such as social influence, guest posts, and social signals for SEO will be discussed. Key plugins and relevant online tools will also be highlighted.”

James Archer is the Chief Creative Officer at Crowd Favorite. He’s a future-focused optimist who loves identifying problems and designing solutions for companies that make a difference.

James Archer is founder of Forty, a creative firm that’s been designing rich, emotional, and effective experiences for over a decade (using primarily WordPress). I’m future-focused optimist who loves identifying problems and designing solutions for companies that make a difference.

Over the years he’s worked for clients like Microsoft, Motorola, Walmart, and Yahoo, and has spoken at many conferences and workshops.

View James’ speaker profile.

Presentation: The Human Side of UX Design

“I’ll explain why empathy and emotion are crap-tons more important to overall user experience design than parallax, front-end frameworks, and even the hamburger icon. I’ll also explain why design is too important to leave to the designers, and why developers, and others should be directly involved in the process.”

“I’ve been building and hosting WordPress websites for over 5 years. During the 15 years I’ve worked in technology I’ve designed high performance networks and specialized in network security. Currently I’m a co-founder of easyPress.ca, a fast, secure and reliable WordPress hosting service operating in Canada.”

View Victor’s speaker profile.

Presentation: Performance Hacking

“This session will present clear instructions on how to make a website load faster. There are 3 main areas that affect a website’s performance: server side stack, application code and frontend components. The same is true for WordPress. I’ll begin by providing an overview of why speed is so important for every website. Next, the tools required for analysis are introduced and their use is demonstrated. Then, I’ll spend the bulk of the talk focusing on specific frontend best practices that every designer and developer can apply to help speed up the websites they build.”

“Hi, I’m Dara, an independent web designer and front-end developer from Toronto. I’ve worked at a number of places from large organizations to small agencies, and now I run my own small (as in, one person) business. I’ve been creating websites professionally for many years, and well over 3/4 of them are in WordPress! When I’m not designing and coding client sites you can sometimes find me leading Ladies Learning Code workshops, mentoring at HackerYou, or showing up at various meetups around the city.”

View Dara’s speaker profile.

Presentation: Levelling up your development workflow

“About a year ago I realized that my WordPress development workflow wasn’t nearly as efficient as it could have been, so I took steps to make it far better, and I think that sharing what I learned would be really useful for other developers.”