This is our last announcement of speakers. Here they are, the last 6 amazing speakers for our 2 day event! Head over to our speaker page to see everyone!

David Bisset

David is a full-time freelancer living in South Florida. While WordPress is 100% of his work, David also specializes in BuddyPress sites/applications. Organizer of WordPress meetups in Ft. Lauderdale and privileged to be an organizer of WordCamp Miami (one of the largest WordCamps in the US) for over 5 years. Father of three. Husband of one.

Robert Neu

Robert Neu has been using the web since someone picking up the other line was a problem and working with WordPress since 2010. Over the years, he’s started a number of WordPress businesses and projects including an SEO audit service and a popular WordPress podcast called WP Bacon. Robert recently joined WP Site Care as their Director of Digital Strategy and helped to create a brand new Premium WordPress theme shop called Flagship.

Blain Barton

Blain Barton has been with Microsoft for 20+ years and has held many diverse positions. He currently has Windows Azure and Windows Server focus.

Mark Jaquith

Mark Jaquith has been working with and contributing to WordPress since 2004. He is one of the lead developers of the WordPress core and offers freelance WordPress consulting services through Covered Web Services with a focus on scaling, security, and custom functionality. Mark likes patches that have more red than green, and his favorite WordPress features are the ones that you’re not even aware of. He eagerly looks forward to shooting down your feature suggestions with, “No, but it would make a great plugin!”

Chrissie Scelsi

Chrissie Scelsi is the principal of Scelsi Entertainment and New Media Law with offices in Orlando and Port Charlotte, Florida, where she focuses her practice on entertainment, intellectual property, internet, technology, and business law. Ms. Scelsi has served as in house counsel for an international game based-simulations company, where she was responsible for advising on software licensing matters, trademarks, copyright, and corporate issues. She served as an editor of the book Computer Games and Virtual Worlds: A New Frontier in Intellectual Property Law, which was published by the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law, and is a chapter contributor to The American Bar Association’s Legal Guide to Video Game Development. Ms. Scelsi has written and spoken extensively about matters at the intersection of law and new technology, and is the author of the PunkLawyer blog. Ms. Scelsi received her B.B.A. in marketing from Loyola University New Orleans, a J.D. from Saint Louis University School of Law, and a LL.M. in entertainment and media law from Southwestern School of Law.

Steven Sorenson

Steven Sorenson is an Account Manager working in the translation industry for Lingotek. He has over 10 years of experience working with customers in a variety of different fields. He is stoked about bringing an exciting new translation solution to the WordPress community. He graduated from Utah Valley University and studied Behavior Sciences. In his free time Steven loves to visit the outdoors with his family of 4 children and a beautiful wife.

Our fourth round of speakers! Only one more round left after this! See all the other speakers on our speaker page.

Sarrah Vesselov

Sarrah Vesselov is the Creative Director for NRS, also freelancing in the areas of web design, PPC Marketing, SEO, and media project management. She has taught classes in WordPress, HTML, CSS, and Internet Marketing at several local colleges over the past 5 years. Sarrah has also served as a Mentoring Lead for SIGGRAPH, Production Coordinator for Evolve CG, and is currently the Project Manager for Women Who Code Tampa.

Willie Jackson

Willie Jackson is an artist, engineer, marketer, and writer who serves as the Director of Web Optimization at W3 EDGE, a Boston based interactive web development and marketing agency. In this role, he supports users of products such as W3 Total Cache, a popular web performance framework for WordPress.

Prior to W3 EDGE, Willie served as the CTO of The Domino Project, a publishing company in New York City started by bestselling author and marketing guru Seth Godin, and powered by Amazon. In its year-long lifecycle, The Domino Project published twelve books, all of which became bestsellers, and redefined the way books are created, published, and shared.

David Laietta

David is a website developer, and founder of Orange Blossom Media, a company that builds custom themes and plugins for WordPress. He teaches frequently, and does numerous one on one lectures, small group presentations, and provides his training in a professional capacity for organizations looking to train their users.

He has donated his time to a variety of groups over the past few years and teaches basic programming courses at a local college. David is also the lead organizer of the WordPress Orlando Meetup, as well as WordCamp Orlando.

Lisa Melegari

I’ve been creating content before the Internet was “a thing”! After a misguided master’s degree in video game production (seriously), I found my true calling – Internet content marketing. I’ve been with We Do Web Content, Inc. for almost 5 years now and have had the pleasure of taking on such roles as content writer, topic and keyword curator, social media manager, local business listing optimizer, and in-office chef. I work remotely from home with my 4 cats and when I’m not making the Internet a better place, I’m cooking tasty things or playing video games.

Chris Jenkins

Chris Jenkins has spent more than 15 years in the technology industry, both as a programmer/analyst, and as a project manager for both public and private sector development. He spent five years in private practice as a WordPress application developer before accepting the role of Chief Architect at BenefitNext.com. In his current role, he leads development in both .Net and WordPress based applications which provide business intelligence functions to companies impacted by the ACA. When he feels like it, he blogs about WordPress, social media, and other internet ramblings.

Please welcome our next 5 speakers! See their photos and everyone else on our speakers page!

Chris Christoff

Former lead developer of Jigoshop (forked to make WooCommerce). Chris helps make Easy Digital Downloads and many of its extensions. Plugin developer at AwesomeMotive, which runs WPBeginner & List25, and makes several well-known WordPress plugins like Soliloquy Slider, Envira Gallery, and OptinMonster. Full time student at the University of Florida. His code runs over a million online stores.

Josh Eaton

Josh is senior developer and partner at Reaktiv Studios, with a focus on modern front-end development, custom themes and plugins. A former management consultant, he taught himself web development and continually enjoys laughing at code he wrote 6 months ago. When not wrangling code, Josh travels the world, plays guitar and loves craft coffee and fine whiskey.

Jacqueline Jimenez

Jackie Jimenez is The Innovative Consultant, focusing on the big picture with integrated marketing. She specializes in branding websites online with social media, SEO and email marketing. Her career has helped many companies including Hilton, Marriott Vacation Club, high fashion store Magenta, and world-renowned hairstylist Peter Coppola.

Jackie often speaks and trains clients in WordPress Webinars, with her new brand InnovateWP. Connect with Jackie on Twitter @jackiej04 and @InnovateWP.

Jesse Petersen

Jesse embraced his true geek nature in 2008 and left an office job as a desktop publisher and editor to be a full-time WordPress community member and formed Petersen Media Group in early 2009. He meets the needs and exceeds the expectations of his growing network of friends who desire websites that they can maintain and has amassed a returning client base of over 100 clients from Australia to Hawaii and many places in between.

With consistent referrals from StudioPress and Copyblogger Media, Jesse is highly sought-after by speakers, authors, and small businesses who want a clean, robust, and elegantly planned online presence. He isn’t flashy, but “does the ordinary extraordinarily well – every day.”

Jesse and his wife live in Tampa, FL. No pets. Fifteen foster children since 2012, adopting one. They love road trips. You can follow him on Twitter @jpetersen.

David Parsons

David Parsons, a recent Computer Science graduate over at The University of Central Florida, has been working with WordPress for over six years now and is currently working at BrandCo as a WordPress Developer. His passion for the web originally started by making a simple website with WordPress back in high school and over the years he has been branched out his skill set. More recently David has been spending his spare time speaking about WordPress at various WordCamps at Meetups.

Another 5 of our speakers are being announced! Head over to our speakers page to see everyone announced so far.

Drew Barton

Drew is the founder and president of Southern Web Group. After launching his career at CNN.com, Drew founded Southern Web Group in 2004. The Atlanta Business Chronicle named him one of the top 40 rising stars under 40 years old. He is often quoted in Inc.com, SmartBiz Magazine and Microsoft’s Live.com.

Syed Balkhi

Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner and List25 an extremely popular entertainment site with over 1.2 million subscribers and 190 Million video views. Syed’s work has been featured in NYTimes, HuffingtonPost, Yahoo Small Business, Wired, Mashable, and countless other well-reputed online magazines.

Nathan Hangen

Co-Founder and managing partner of Virtuous Giant, the creators of IgnitionDeck and Monument Brewing Co. As the first of its kind, IgnitionDeck pioneered the self-hosted crowdfunding industry and is now one of the largest and most widely used self-hosted crowdfunding platforms in the world. When he’s not working company projects, you’ll find Nathan playing soccer, brewing beer, and hitting the beaches with his family.

Lenny Gale

Lenny Gale is the creator of Life is NOYOKE. He is a health crusader, daily blogger, and entrepreneur.

Before starting learning WordPress, Lenny, a Certified Public Accountant, worked for five years as a traveling financial consultant building financial models for Fortune 500 companies. In 2012, he left his well-paying job and unhealthy lifestyle to start Life is NOYOKE, a grass-roots initiative to make our world healthy again.

Lenny’s favorite foods are grapefruits, egg whites and scotch. He also loves dogs.

Diane Kinney

Diane Kinney is the Creative Director and co-founder of The Versatility Group, a full service firm providing websites and other online solutions for 15 years. She is an award winning designer focused on WordPress design and development, graphic design, and marketing services. In her previous corporate life, she led large scale application development projects, managed multi-disciplinary teams, and oversaw Operations including marketing, customer service, and business development. She gets excited about applying the lessons from her diverse background to web and marketing projects.

We’re pleased to officially announce our first 5 speakers! Head on over to the speakers page for more details.

Chris Lema

Chris Lema is the CTO and Chief Strategist at Crowd Favorite. He’s also a daily blogger, a public speaker, and product strategist. He helps companies leverage WordPress, and helps WordPress companies find leverage.

Dave Clements

I’m a proud Brit that landed on these American shores 8 years ago in the name of love – I’m happily married to Martina, with a 15-month-old daughter, Ellie, and another on the way. I love efficiency, veganism, hummus (in unhealthy quantities), Portland, good grammar and relaxing.

During the day, I’m a civil engineer, and I tinker with WordPress at nights and weekends. I started working with WordPress in about 2008 when I launched my first blog with it. My initial intrigue of wanting to modify my site led me to building sites for friends and family and ultimately, clients. I now offer a variety of WordPress services, including custom development through my company The UK Edge and WordPress maintenance services via The WP Butler

John Hawkins

John was an early adopter of WordPress. He moved his blog to the brand new platform a few short months after it was released. After doing countless updates to his own site and those of a few dozen friends, John co-founded 9seeds.com to focus full time on WordPress development. In his spare time, John is the lead organizer of the Las Vegas WordPress meetup and a co-organizer for WordCamp Las Vegas.

Kelly Housholder

Kelly designs and manages web development projects from a beach house in Destin, Florida. She creates for both web and print and spends a lot of time keeping up with design and typography on the web. She likes to nerd out about fonts and things like kerning, leading and readability. You can see her work at fromscratchdesign.com. Kelly is married to a crazy talented ER doc and is mama to a wild toddler. She starts each morning with a chai and would not get anything done without her office manager, The Binks (her cat).

Micah Wood

An enterprise-level PHP, JavaScript and WordPress developer, Micah has worked on WordPress projects for companies like Coca-Cola, Orkin and DMCA. He was the sole developer for two successful SaaS products during the initial product development and launch phases. An avid WordPress plugin developer, Micah has experience supporting products with thousands of users and is a frequent speaker at various WordCamps across the southeast. Micah is a Georgia State graduate with a dual major in business management and marketing and has consulted for companies around the world on SEO and inbound marketing strategies. He also occasionally blogs about WordPress and other web development topics.

Many of our potential speakers are not sure what to talk about. Are you looking to hear something specific at WordCamp Tampa? Please share what that is, and we will post it in our topic idea section for our potential speakers to review.

Talks that we are looking for

WordCamp Tampa is looking for local speakers offering their knowledge on varying levels of WordPress usage.

We are asking you to share your knowledge, or perhaps a difficult situation you faced and how WordPress helped solve the problem.

You don’t need to be a total expert or a developer to share your knowledge. There will be many users that are strictly publishers just like you that are eager to learn.

General Format

Each session will be about 45 minutes long with some time for questions. Please leave at least 10 minutes for questions.

Have something to share that you can’t really go on and on about? That’s okay, we have 15 minute lightning talks readily available for you to jump in. Please leave a few minutes for questions but stress that you can answer lengthy questions at the networking party after the event.

Important notes about the content of your talk

• Share > pitch. WordCamps are educational events, not marketing opportunities, so proposing a product pitch will not get you very far with the speaker selection team.
• No pay for play. WordCamps never, ever provide a speaking opportunity in exchange for sponsorship or anything else. Please don’t ask.
• Unique. WordCamp sessions are all recorded and posted to WordPress.tv for everyone to watch, so it’s redundant to have speakers give the same talk at multiple events. WordCamps pride themselves on having unique content.
• Tell a story. Most people can Google what they are trying to accomplish with WordPress unless it’s a very complex process. Tutorial talks are often not remembered a few days later, but stories that will inspire our attendees to do more with WordPress are encouraged.
• Embrace the WordPress license. Speakers, sponsors, volunteers, and organizers must be GPL friendly.
• Respect the WordPress trademark. Ensure any references to WordPress are with a capital ‘W’ and a capital ‘P’.

Topic Ideas (as they relate to WordPress)

• Developing themes and plugins
• Caching and speed
• Inbound Marketing
• Using WordPress as an eCommerce platform
• Content writing, scheduling, and strategy
• Setting up and using child themes properly
• Blogging as a career
• Using WordPress as an intranet
• Taxonomies, post types, and custom fields
• WordPress and photography
• Blogging vs Journalism
• BuddyPress and community building
• Using WordPress as a CRM
• Presenting WordPress to clients as a solution
• Using WordPress as an application framework

How to Submit a Talk

Please complete the form on this page. If you have more than one talk you are submitting, please fill out the form again with a new talk title and description. We will pick which talk makes most sense for this event.