Category: Speaker Spotlight

Tippi Thole is the happy owner of Bright Spot Studio where she does branding, web and print design for freelancers and small businesses across North America. Before starting her own studio, she worked for 15 years as an art director and designer for a variety of U.S. magazines and newspapers. When she’s not helping clients, you’ll find her knee-deep in a home improvement project, playing in her backyard or salsa dancing way past her bedtime.

Tippi will be giving a talk titled “How to Brand Your WordPress site“.

---

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

Automatic updates

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I’ve learned so much at previous WordCamps and wanted to give back.

What is your talk going to be about?

How to brand your WordPress site

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

Branding is more than just a logo, and consistency is everything!

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

Leisl Barrell, Brian Rotsztein, Michal Bluma, Chris Bavota, Belinda Darcy, Kathryn Presner … the list goes on!

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

Multilingual capabilities built into core

As a part of gen X, Lynne has been in and out of careers and has more diplomas than she really need. Her education in library studies, and experience in records has made her something of an information junkie. She has great search skills, and loves helping people find what they need. She had a role helping transition to a large multi-site install. At the time her knowledge was very limited, so she found herself spending a lot of time looking for answers, and being a bit scared to commit to doing something. After realizing that mistakes were OK, and asking questions was a good thing she was excited to jump in with both feet.

Lynne will be giving a talk titled “How I Learned to Stop Overthinking and hit Publish“.

---

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

Responsive previews. Love being able to easily preview changes across “devices”.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I’ve been doing a lot of talking about changing my career. I think this gets me out there and makes me jump. (In a very exciting, albeit, public way!)

What is your talk going to be about?

Basically good thinking versus overthinking. Finding good sources for information can give us a confidence boost when we are creating. Info literacy can help you do that, it’s pretty much a super power. When you’ve finished your epic creation, where do you share it? Using our info super powers we can find good folks and places in the larger WordPress community to share.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

I want folks to feel confident they can sort through search results to get at that good, good information.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

Kathryn Presner’s Techie Continuum posts and talks have been very inspiring. (I am thrilled she’s talking about it here at WordCamp!)

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

Not really a feature, but I think the admin menus could be a bit more user-friendly. The settings menu, in particular, could use some info management love, a lot of things people want to do are buried in that menu.

Shelly Peacock, AKA @Spinbird, has been in sales and graphic design since 2001, moving focus to include Social Media Management and Digital Marketing in 2007. She built her first WordPress site in 2009- as a way to make her designs “do stuff”, and as a portfolio for her art business. Shucked it all to run The SpinBird Group, a WordPress consulting and design agency. She likes short walks on the beach, cabanas, and shooting opossums off her back deck with her shotgun. Daily Mantra: Life is short- GET #FIERCE WITH IT.

Shelly will be giving a talk titled “Frameworks for Freelancers – Double Time IT!“.

---

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

The Link Connector

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I love to share my journey, and I love Montréal! #WinWin

What is your talk going to be about?

Frameworks, and the dissection of several of them. I go into pros and cons of each one that I use in my talk.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

If you want to speed up your business as a Freelancer- Learn a framework #deeply.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

So many- Brian Rotsztein, Carl Alexander, Carrie Dils, Sridhar Katakum, Roy Sivan- just to name a few!

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

Custom Post types built in. 🙂

Michal Bluma is a Montreal freelance developer who loves WordPress, code, cats and metaphors. He’s been chopping up mockups for quite a while and would love to share some tips, tricks and how to avoid certain gotchas when it comes to the website creation chain. Let’s aim to bridge to designer/developer gap together!

Michal will be giving a talk titled “Ça sent la découpe“.

---

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

The REST API moving forward.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I always love to try to give back to users in our community. Getting the opportunity to speak, share my knowledge and, perhaps, generate an Aha! moment or two is something I relish every time.

Montreal being my home base, this applies even more. I love how the folks you meet at WCMTL evolve into business and social relationships throughout the rest of the year.

What is your talk going to be about?

Chop-up!

There are many roles in the life cycle of a website. Many moving parts can mean a disconnect between certain disciplines. My talk concentrates on the designer/developer divide. I want to give both parties tools to communicate better and make their lives easier.

This talk won’t make you a chop-up master. But it might just make you want to go out for drinks with the other side more often. 😉

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

Preparation and communication are key. The less questions there are, the smoother the whole process will become.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

The community itself inspires me. We might have some drama from time to time, but that’s only because we are such a group of passionate people.
I’ve definitely been keeping up with Roy Sivan and Josh Pollock; and their desire to make JavaScript more present in our world through the REST API.
* Confession, I’m a huge JavaScript-lover.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a WordCamp without the “Carl Track”. If you want to level up your dev skills, you’ll probably find him at one of the tables in the main lobby throughout the weekend (look for a giant fort of Diet Pepsi cans).

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

Not necessarily a “feature” but a push towards the CMS aspects rather than the blogging aspects of our ecosystem. Things like a single option to turn off the whole commenting system.

I’m also excited about the Fields (Metadata) API moving forward. I know how hard it’s going to be to replace ACF, but I think the efforts are really worth it to have a standardized API to deal with postmeta.

As an experienced Internet marketing entrepreneur, content creator, consultant, international conference speaker, and author, Brian has spent the last 20 years helping brands excel online. His latest book, Content Marketing Ideas, is a complete guide to content creation which has been highly praised by critics and is rated five stars on Amazon. He’s the head of well-established online marketing brands including Uniseo.com and RedstoneX.com, as well as the Editor-in-chief of Citynet Magazine (a Montreal lifestyle and food website), President of the Canadian Internet Marketing Association, Senior Editor at The WP Crowd, and a member of the Program Advisory Committee for the Digital Marketing Degree at Algonquin College. You may have caught his appearances on CTV News and various radio shows. An award-winning writer, he frequently contributes articles on content marketing, SEO, social media, business, entrepreneurship, and lifestyle. His work has been used by USA Today, ABC News, Social Media Today, Search Engine Journal, and other prominent sources. Brian holds two Master’s degrees and has taught university courses. His love affair with WordPress began in 2005 when he started with version 1.6! On Twitter and Instagram: @brianrotsztein

Brian will be giving a talk titled “How to Succeed as an Independent Blogger“.

---

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

Not so much an improvement but a continuing effort to make WordCamps happen is high on my list.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

My team specializes in WordPress, using it for design, development, and marketing projects. This is a way to give back to the community and keep it strong.

What is your talk going to be about?

I’ll be discussing the different ways to view success as a blogger and influencer. Yes, monetization will be a part of my talk but there’s more to it than just financial incentives. Come to my session to find out what they are!

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

An understanding of what it takes to be a successful influencer.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

TheWPCrowd.com – Get exclusive insight into design, development, running a WordPress website, being a freelancer, business issues and other great info.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

Making speech-to-text easy would be a nice touch.

Chris has been building websites since he was a kid and discovered GeoCities. Now he’s a WordPress engineer with blog contributions, plugin features and more under his belt. He spoke at WordCamp St. Louis, Asheville and WP Campus this year. He loves craft beer, plays in a rock band and his the Director of Digital Technology for Quasar Bio-Tech, Inc.

Chris will be giving a talk titled “Do You Have A Launch Plan?“.

---

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

4.5 was a great release. The editor has seen some real nice features added, also a fan of wp_add_inline_script()

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

#Carl2016

What is your talk going to be about?

Having a launch plan

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

Any tidbit that helps their launches go smoother means my talk served its purpose.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

Carl Alexander, Roy Sivan, Chris Wiegman and Josh Pollock are some of my favorites to follow.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

Complete REST API endpoints and all in core

Jonathan Perlman is an experienced web developer and teacher that works for Dawson College in Montreal, Quebec. He builds custom web solutions for the students, faculty and staff. Recently he’s been leveraging WordPress more and more to do the heavy lifting while focusing on the needs of the institution with custom themes and plugins. Some of his sites have been built for a select few whereas others are visited by 12,000+ applicants. Jonathan is also an instructor for Dawson’s Centre for Training and Development specializing in web technologies such as HTML & CSS, PHP and WordPress.

Jonathan will be giving a talk titled “The Dawson Way of Doing Things: A Study of Our Path Using WordPress“.

---

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

My favorite improvement would have to be customizer. I routinely try to give users the ability to add and remove widgets to change their site. While customizer is not perfect, it really beats having to go back and forth between front and backend to make changes.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I work in education and I teach, therefore I believe in spreading knowledge, experience and giving back to the community.

What is your talk going to be about?

Dawson College has had it’s fair share of success and failures using WordPress over 6 or so years. We’re going to see how Dawson chose it’s main publishing platform to be WordPress, what went right and wrong, and how we’ve built some of our high traffic and high profile sites.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

Use WordPress multi-site for the right reason!

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

Morten Rand-Hendriksen inspires me to never stop learning. I follow David Bisset @dimensionmedia cause he always tweeting about interesting things.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

Multi-language baked into core.