Billie Hillier
Billie is a blogging addict {second to being a domain junkie}. With over 15 years in traditional and internet marketing in her back pocket, she loves helping others master marketing techniques to benefit their businesses.
Individuals and businesses seek her knowledge to build their marketing strategies, plan paths of execution and leverage the results to take them to the next tier to meet their business goals.
When she is not consulting on a personal level she can often be found speaking to groups at blogging and internet marketing events.
Feeling that there was a need to help women entrepreneurs grow their online presence with a thorough understanding of what it takes to be successful, she recently founded Mommy Blogger U.
Located in sunny Las Vegas, her goal is to build a local community with a common bond of bloggers, social media junkies and techies.
Bret Simmons
Bret L. Simmons, Ph.D., (@drbret) is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Nevada, Reno. He earned his doctorate in Business Administration at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. Bret teaches courses in organizational behavior, social business, and personal branding to both undergraduate and MBA students. He helped enable a team of talented organizers, speakers and participants to produce TEDxUniversityofNevada on January 25, 2013. The event was recognized as the 2013 Best New Entrepreneurial Activity of the Year by The Nevada Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (NCET) and the Reno Gazette-Journal (RGJ). Bret blogs about leadership and social business on his website Positive Organizational Behavior.
Brian Bourn
Brian (@brianbourn) is the co-owner of Bourn Creative, a design agency founded in 2005 that specializes in branding and WordPress design for small businesses and entrepreneurs.
Day-to-day, Brian acts as project manager and lead developer, overseeing the technical strategy and implementation behind all of Bourn Creative’s WordPress projects. He works closely with his wife Jennifer, the other half of Bourn Creative and the company’s lead designer, to bring their clients’ visions to life.
When not working, Brian is an avid racquetball player, Twitter content junkie, and spends more than he’ll ever admit on growing his collection of Star Wars Legos.
Chris Lema
Chris (@chrislema) started his first enterprise in 4th grade – with his own version of arbitrage. He bought packs of Now&Laters for $.25 and sold each candy piece for $.25 the next day. For 15 days he was rich! Then, he got in trouble and the “man” shut him down.
You could say the entrepreneurial bug bit Chris early. Since then, he has helped start three software companies, sold two of them, and joined two others to help accelerate their product development. He has worn the engineer, analyst, designer, product manager, architect and product marketer hats in different companies.
Since 2006, Chris has been working for Emphasys Software as their Vice President of Software Engineering, focused on new product development and organic growth. He is also a blogger (chrislema.com), ebook author and runs the WordPress Meetup in North County San Diego.
Colin Loretz
Colin (@colinloretz) has been working with WordPress for over seven years. From an end-user, developer, designer and consultant, Colin has worked on every side of WordPress for clients and his own projects.
He is the CEO and founder of Cloudsnap, a platform for developers to easily integrate with Salesforce.com, Freshbooks, Evernote and more. He is also the founder of Reno Collective, a community and collaborative workspace for developers, designers, freelancers, independents, entrepreneurs and startups.
Colin was awarded Technology Advocate of the Year by Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (NCET).
Dylan Kuhn
Dylan is a freelance hacker in Reno, NV who has used WordPress to empower dozens of small organizations to do big things.
He is also :
- Author of Geo Mashup and other open source plugins
- A Reno WordCamp organizer
- An occasional WordPress core contributor
- A core community supporter of the Reno Collective
- Blogged over 4,000 miles of backpacking (and counting…)
Eric Pretorious
Eric Pretorious is the owner and co-founder of Rocket-Powered.com, a web hosting company based in Reno, NV. Rocket-Powered.com is a locally-owned, locally-operated web hosting company that provides a more personalized, hands-on web hosting service for small businesses and organizations that need help building an on-line presence.
Eric is a computer geek with a passion for technology and for helping others use the Internet more effectively for personal, social, and business goals. Since leaving Silicon Valley in 2010, Eric has worked as a host at a local ski resort and launched Rocket-Powered.com. He lives in Truckee, CA with his wife, his two Labrador Retrievers, and his large collection of computers.
Gene Hammett
Gene Hammett is fiercely committed to teaching web designers and developers how to expand the size, scope and billings of their projects (in weeks, not months). As the managing director of Core Elevation, Inc., Gene helps them transform from broke, busted and disgusted to thriving, growing, and loving every project they touch.
Gene’s journey to find his own niche took him from engineering school and Big 6 consulting firms to 7-figure success as an entrepreneur. Which is why you can trust him to achieve big results with your company.
What lights Gene up is showing talented, creative and broke tech experts how to increase their income by doing what others in their industry don’t do:
- Laser-focus on a single powerful niche
- Say yes to projects that make a difference (and no to the one that don’t)
- Raise their rates
- Serve the clients that thrill them
Working with Gene, web designers and developers end the stagnant and tiring cycle of overworking and under-earning and implement strategies to up-level their profits and visibility more quickly and easily than they ever could on their own.
As one of his successful clients said after working with Gene for just a short time, “I have so much more swagger!”
Gene is offering his ebook “5 Costliest Mistakes Broke Web Designers Make and How You can STOP Making Them” completely for FREE on April 27th and 28th, 2013. Download at Amazon for free. Send Gene the receipt and get the WORKBOOK for free too that walks you through these.
Hillary Schieve
Hillary Schieve (@HillaryForReno) is an entrepreneur and small business owner of two recycled clothing stores in Reno, NV. She was elected to the Reno City Council in 2012 and believes government needs to help technology flourish.
She is excited that WordCamp is held in Reno and wants to encourage more events like this. She believes it is important to be accessible to people that use technology platforms such as WordPress so that government has direction and understands the needs of our growing technology community.
Jake Goldman
Jake (@jakemgold) is the President of 10up, a full service web agency that imagines, builds, and grows first class websites. 10up focuses on outstanding publisher experiences and high scale implementation, with full time designers, engineers, strategists, and infrastructure experts. Clients range from major publishers like TechCrunch, Time Inc and Consumer Reports, to media companies like NBC Universal Sports, to retail giants like Juicy Couture, to universities like Bates College and Brown. Jake built 10up from a 1 man agency with a couple of clients to over 20 employees and dozens of brand name customers in its first 2 years. Today, 10up is widely recognized as one of the top WordPress agencies in the world.
Between leading the charge at 10up, Jake has been a writer and expert reviewer for Smashing Magazine and taught WordPress development at Boston University. Jake has spoken at WordCamps around the country, including Chicago, New York, Orlando, Phoenix, and Miami. He helped organize the first WordCamp Boston in 2010 and founded Providence and Sacramento Meetups.
Jake is a core contributor to WordPress and maintains some of the highest rated plug-ins on the official repository. Cumulatively, they have been downloaded over 350,000 times.
Joe Boydston
Vice President of McNaughton Newspaper Group, operator of eight northern California newspapers. Our “printed” newspapers are powered by WordPress, not just our websites. Joe is A Knight News Challenge winner, was named Innovator of the Year by Suburban Newspapers of America and serves on the board of directors of the Local Media Foundation.
His latest endeavor is the founding of NewspaperFoundation.org. Its goal is to promote the use of open source software by newspapers.
Joe is an advocate for open source, an evangelist of Journalism and a dreamer of exciting futures for both.
Joseph Karr O’Connor
Joseph Karr O’Connor (@AccessibleJoe) lives in Santa Monica, CA. Since 1999 when Section 508 came into effect he led teams doing accessible web production on pasadena.edu and on csun.edu. Joe has been using WordPress in support of non-profits, research and university news since 2005. In 2012 he organized the Los Angeles Accessibility and Inclusive Design Group.
Now leading Cities, a world-wide effort to build free accessible WordPress themes, Joe also contributes to Make WordPress Accessible and asks you to get involved. Joe presented “Cities: Making Accessible WordPress Themes” on February 28, 2013 at the 28th Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference, in San Diego, CA.
Kathy Alice Brown
With a background in web operations and engineering, Kathy Alice Brown is a veteran of the technology industry. For the last three years she has been a SEO consultant and has developed several WordPress sites. With this combination she has developed an expertise in WordPress SEO.
She blogs about WordPress, WordPress SEO and Online Marketing http://webenso.com and tweets at twitter.com/kathyalice.
Mark Tilly
Mark Tilly is the CEO of Target Info, the developer of the MyCurator WordPress plugin. Mark has over 30 years of software development experience. He founded iMany (now Revitas) with a partner in 1988 to build client server software for Pharmaceutical firms and grew it to over $30 million in sales and an IPO. He has been working with WordPress for 3 years now and finds he is having the most fun in his career – “Where else can you work with a community of millions worldwide who are actively involved with writing, media, building businesses and giving shape to the massive information revolution of the web!”
Megan Gray
Megan Gray loves 3 things: her family, great design and WordPress. She’s been designing for as long as she can remember, or since she got her first copy of Photoshop in the 90s. During that time, she has had the privilege of executing design strategies for clients including Johns Hopkins University, Hilton Hotels, Arlington Department of Public Health and the public television series Roadtrip Nation.
Designing for WordPress is by far her favorite thing—ever. If there is one thing that gets her fired up, it’s hearing someone say, “I don’t want to use WordPress because I don’t want my site to look like a blog.” Challenge: accepted!
Megan Gray is a Senior Web Strategist at 10up, where serious WordPress magic happens. When she’s not designing or building WordPress sites, you can almost always find her at the beach. Or over-sharing on Twitter, @houseofgrays.
Mike Fitzpatrick
As the COO of DealerTrend Inc. and CarDealerPress, Mike has been using WordPress in the automotive industry since 2007. The two organizations have built several hundred WordPress websites for car dealerships and have a full featured inventory hosting tool and open source WordPress plugin. As a self certified WordPress junky, Mike has personally reviewed and tested hundreds themes and plugins (if not thousands) and loves to share and discuss WordPress with anyone that will listen. He is also one of the WordPress Reno meetup co-organizers.
Natalie MacLees
Natalie MacLees from Los Angeles, California is a front-end web developer and UI designer and is founder + principal of the interactive agency, Purple Pen Productions. In 2012 she published jQuery for Designers with Packt Publishing. She founded and runs the jQuery LA Users’ Group and together with Noel Saw she heads up the Southern California WordPress User’s Group, organizing WordPress meetups, help sessions and workshops. In 2010, she worked as a technical reviewer on WordPress 3 Complete by April Hodge Silver. She makes her online home at nataliemac.com.
Nicole Rose Dion
Nicole Rose Dion (@nicolerosedion) is the digital communications director at The Abbi Agency and freelances in social media / graphic design. She’s been working with WordPress for 5 years now and enjoys everything the platform has to offer from usability to SEO benefits. She believes in authenticity above all.
Patricia Barnes
Patricia G. Barnes of Reno, NV, is an attorney, tribal court judge and author who writes a legal blog on WordPress. The blog, When the Abuser Goes to Work focuses on workplace discrimination, bullying and abuse. The blog sells Pat’s eBook, Surviving Bullies, Queen Bees & Psychopaths in the Workplace (May 2012). The blog gives Pat a platform in the national debate about protecting workers from workplace bullying. (The United States lags behind Europe and most other industrialized countries that already have adopted laws or regulations addressing workplace bullying.) Pat was recently quoted in Bloomberg Businessweek on workplace bullying. Finally, bullied workers and human resources professionals from around the country contact Pat through the blog to consult about workplace bullying problems.
Pat believes her experience demonstrates the tremendous potential of WordPress to influence social change…and sell books. Pat wrote two earlier books that are held in libraries around the world for CQ (Congressional Quarterly) Press on the American criminal justice and court systems.
Russell Aaron
Russell Aaron is a WordPress Enthusiast/User first and foremost. He is the founder of GeekStreetWP.com. Geek Street WP is a support site for beginners and advanced WordPress website owners. He is a speaker, event host and event planner for the Las Vegas WordPress Meetup Group. Russell lived in Reno, NV until the age of 25. Russell Aaron does not just support WordPress. He is a teacher and donates most of his free time to the WP Support Forums.
Russell Aaron started out building Band Profiles on Myspace. He used WP to blog about his success and failures. After reading thousands of tutorial and self help websites, he decided to turn his passion for designing the inter-webs into a full time career. After working for numerous amounts of start up companies in Las Vegas, he decided to create his own. He designed the companies entire website on paper, before writing any content or code. “Every website should be planned and thought out before hand. It makes the building process a thousand times easier when you have a plan of attack.”
Russell Aaron lives by a few simple rules. “Anyone can have an idea, it’s how you execute the idea that determines the future” & “The good ones sweat it. Sweating it makes you one of the good ones.”
Sé Reed
Sé Reed (@sereedmedia) specializes in developing and implementing comprehensive web strategies for small businesses. She has been building websites since the early 90s and has been working with WordPress since 2007, primarily focusing on developing custom WordPress themes and functionality.
In addition to her web consulting company, Sé Reed Media (sereedmedia.com), Sé serves as a business advisor for the Small Business Development Center (Los Angeles Regional Network), where she helps small business owners develop a comprehensive marketing strategy both on and offline, and to create and use WordPress websites. She teaches workshops for small business owners on topics including WordPress, SEO, content development, and social media, and speaks at seminars and conferences about all aspects of the Internet and small business. Sé is also a regular contributor to the weekly webcast WPWatercooler.
Sterling Hamilton
Born and raised in Las Vegas, Sterling has been developing web sites for more than 15+ years and has spent the majority of his time focusing on web application development. Freelancing up until 2005, Sterling has worked for various firms throughout the Nevada area and is currently lead developer at Noble Studios in Reno.
Sterling likes to spend his time hanging with friends, skydiving, contributing to open source projects like WordPress and building custom applications.
Sterling was awarded the 2013 Rising Star Developer of the year by Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (NCET) for his work at Noble Studios.
Susan Breidenbach
Suzette Franck
Suzette Franck (@mt_Suzette) is the WordPress Evangelist Lead for Media Temple, a web hosting company in Culver City, California. She has been doing web development for 17+ years, but discovered WordPress four years ago and has used it to create over 200 WordPress sites, ranging from multisite, BuddyPress, membership to portfolio sites, with a variety of different designs and requirements. Suzette is passionate about open source software, loves to blog and teach others on the wonders of WordPress, and is an Automattic fan girl. Suzette’s dream is to bring easy web publishing to everyone with something to say on the Internet.
