James is an accomplished, forward-thinking marketing professional with 25+ years of multi-disciplinary experience in marketing and marketing communications companies serving high-profile, global brands and B2C clients in consumer packaged goods, durables, transportation, telecommunications and financial services. He has been involved in digital for more than ten years, first as President of a direct marketing agency in San Francisco, where he led the evolution of the agency from traditional direct marketing to digital. Clients included Apple and Wells Fargo online bank. And then as the head of a mid sized agency’s interactive group, with Toyota as the main client. He joined Red8 Interactive (http://red8interactive.com), a long term vendor, as an owner and managing director, four years ago.

Tell us about yourself

I was born in Ottawa, Ontario, and grew up in Manotick. After a 30 year career in marketing and advertising that’s taken me to South American, Europe, Chicago and now San Francisco, I bought a vendor, Red8 Interactive, 4 years ago and find myself a small business owner.

Red8 Interactive, is a development studio designed from the ground up to support advertising and digital agencies, and web design firms with high quality digital production. We specialize in building custom WordPress themes and native mobile apps.

Speaking session

WordPress for Designers in the Designer track

What are you presenting?

WordPress for Designers provides an overview of what sits under a WordPress site, so that designs won’t be in conflict with WordPress’ inherent capabilities, and can efficiently design effective WordPress themes that are equally efficient to build. It draws on our experience working with designers, and highlights the mistakes they’ve made so you don’t have to repeat them.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

The presentation is broken into four sections: how web sites are built, how WordPress functions, implications for designers and tips, tricks and pitfalls.

Why did you decide to speak?

WordPress is key to our success, so speaking is how we can give back to the community.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

It’s open source, has a strong and growing community, and it’s easy for marketing folks, the usual end user for the custom themes we build, to use the CMS.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

We build custom themes and love all our children equally. We use Advanced Custom Fields extensively. Gravity Forms for, well, forms, and WooCommerce for shopping carts and other things, like catalogue sites.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Sharing what I know and learning from all the other smart people who are part of and contribute to the WordPress eco system.