WCSD 2016 Event Photos

Thanks again to all of you who made this year’s WordCamp the best one yet! Enjoy these great photos from our volunteer photographer, Joe McDonald.

Additionally, Kari Leigh Marucchi & Marc Benzakein of Found Art Photography have event photos on Flickr here.

Speaker/Sponsor Dinner Photos

Thanks again to all of our awesome Speakers and Sponsors! It was great being able to give a small token of our appreciation via tacos and beer – San Diego style! Enjoy these great photos from our volunteer photographer, Joe McDonald (thanks Joe!).

Recap: WordCamp San Diego 2016

San Diego WordCamp Recap

With 600 tickets and nearly 95% attendance this year (WOW) it was out biggest and best camp yet! We are happy to report that while the event was “Making Waves”, behind the scenes, everything was smooth sailing, and the entire organizing team was giddy with excitement (and exhaustion) as the weekend wrapped up.

Speakers & Sponsors

During the 2016 camp planning we made it a priority to have something for every type of WordPress user – from total beginner to seasoned developer and everything in between. WCSD 2016 covered Development, Design, Plugins, Admin, Beginner and Business topics, all with their own dedicated tracks!

We had a great lineup of speakers this year to help us tackle all aspects of WordPress, and want to extend our gratitude for all the time they put into preparing for, and presenting at, our event. If you missed any of the talks, we are happy to announce that there are already a handful on WordPress.tv and more are showing up daily!

WCSD is not possible without our sponsors. Not only did they support us with funding and in-kind donations, but many of them came out to network and share their expertise over the weekend. The “community” room was alive with chatter and smiling faces – and the swag was plentiful! We hope you were able to take some time between tracks to meet some of our awesome sponsors and learn more about their services.

Venues & Vendors

NTC/Liberty Station

Finding space for an event of this size with the unique need of multiple, simultaneous tracks proved difficult this year. Coming across NTC at Liberty Station after losing our first venue at the 11th hour was nothing short of a miracle. Liberty Station is a beautiful area and truly captures the essence of our amazing city. All of their staff were a pleasure to work with and very helpful in our efforts to make this space work.

Wild Thyme Catering

Saturday’s lunch was provided by Wild Thyme Catering and they handcrafted a variety of fresh sandwiches and wraps for our attendees. We had options for everyone, and made sure to have tasty options for those with food sensitivities and/or allergies. People spread out along the grass and benches alongside a gorgeous water fountain while they networked and enjoyed a delicious meal.

Wild Thyme also made sure to keep the coffee, tea and water flowing during our event. We know how important it is to stay caffeinated during a WordCamp, so we made sure that coffee was readily available at all times.

98 Bottles

We had a great turnout at this year’s after party held at 98 Bottles in San Diego’s Little Italy neighborhood. 98 Bottles offers a good selection of local craft beers, and they also have wine and soju cocktails. We also had a selection of appetizers available to our after party guests – the flatbreads and brownie were AMAZING! There were two large areas for people to network and connect, and an open space at the front of the venue along the sidewalk. Overall, everyone enjoyed the food, drink and company!

Vario Productions

Vario worked alongside NTC/Liberty Station to make sure all of the audio/visual worked properly in all the rooms. Vario Productions was a wonderful partner to have for our event, and they worked tirelessly to ensure each track ran smoothly and was set up properly. Additionally, Vario set up our network for Wifi access in McMillin and our beginner’s bootcamp. While we did not ‘promote’ the use of WiFi for WCSD this time around, we did have an extremely fast, solid connection in McMillin for those that needed access.

WebPass

The WebPass team provided internet to our location via a radio “drop” at McMillin. They worked with our team at Vario to ensure that we had an internet lounge available in McMillin for those needing access.

Making Waves

We hope you’re still riding the wave from WordCamp San Diego and have been inspired to create or do more with WordPress. While you are waiting for WCSD 2017 there are a ton of ways to get involved with WordPress.

Post-Camp Survey

Send us your feedback so we can make next year’s WCSD even better!

https://central.wordcamp.org/wordcamp-attendee-survey/

Meetups

The Advanced WordPress Meetup is held monthly in/around downtown San Diego and is a developer-centric Meetup focused on sharing knowledge and ideas.

Contributing to WordPress

The Codex has a very detailed page explaining the different ways you can Contribute to WordPress. There are opportunities for everyone to get involved, whether or not coding is “your thing”. Some of the ways you could contribute include: writing documentation, helping others in the support forum, assisting with translations to other languages, putting your coding chops to use and participating in development, bug reporting, and more.

Volunteering Next Year

Interested in volunteering to help with WCSD 2017? Drop us a line at wordcampsd@gmail.com and we will reach out when planning for next year begins.

Thank You

YOU are the reason we continue to volunteer our time to organize this event year after year, and it is our sincere hope that you walked away with a bit of inspiration and some new friendships. You are the reason the WordPress community is so amazing.

We look forward to seeing you next year!

– WCSD 2016 Organizing Team

Get ready, get set…

We are looking forward to seeing you at Liberty Station for #wcsd on Saturday and Sunday! Below is some helpful information to ensure you get the most out of your WordCamp weekend.

Registration

Registration opens at 7:45 am on Saturday in the McMillin building. You don’t need to bring a physical “ticket”, but you should confirm that the ticket you purchased (or obtained through a friend etc) is updated with your name. The token to edit your ticket is in your original confirmation email. Lines will be setup alphabetically by last name. Opening Remarks are at 8:45 am, so be sure to plan for parking and registration time!

Parking + Directions + Logistics + Special Needs

McMillin Event Center
2875 Dewey Rd
San Diego, CA 92106

McMillin building will serve as the main hub for the event, and we will have tracks in other locations nearby on the Liberty Station/NTC campus.

There is parking on-site, and the Event Map shows the various lots available. Handicapped parking is available within each lot and along the street near McMillin as well.

If you need help with seating, or anything else during the event, please find a volunteer (teal shirts) or an organizer (red shirts) and we will be happy to help!

Saturday After Party

The After Party will be held from 7-11 pm on Saturday at 98 Bottles in Little Italy. You MUST have your WordCamp name badge to attend – no badge, no entry, sorry! 98 Bottles is a 21+ venue, and you should be prepared to show proper ID.

Saturday and Sunday Schedules

Schedules will be handed out at registration, but it’s good to review things ahead of time, and clicking on schedule links will also lead you to further details about topics, so do some homework!

Saturdayhttps://2016.sandiego.wordcamp.org/saturday-schedule/

Sundayhttps://2016.sandiego.wordcamp.org/sunday-schedule/

Thank You WCSD16 Sponsors

Thank Your WCSD16 Sponsors!

Thank Your WCSD16 Sponsors!

While we are counting down the days until WordCamp San Diego 2016 we wanted to highlight this year’s sponsors whose generous donations make our WordCamp possible. Be sure to stop by and visit the sponsor’s area in the McMillin building while you’re at WordCamp.

Community Sponsors

Jetpack

Jetpack

Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin that simplifies managing your sites. This single plugin enables Photon (a global CDN for images), uptime monitoring, brute force protection, traffic-boosting tools, single sign on, multiple-site management, and automatic or bulk plugin updates. Additionally Jetpack includes several features that help you customize the look and feel of your site without installing other tools. More information can be found at jetpack.com.

Bluehost

Bluehost

Bluehost has been a WordPress partner since 2005 and powers over 1 million WordPress sites worldwide. Their objective is to help customers, whether novice or pro, create a thriving online presence at an affordable price. With a team of in-house tech experts available 24/7, Bluehost dedicates time and resources to providing the best support and services in the industry. Join millions of other site owners and see what Bluehost can do for you and your online presence.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the fastest growing eCommerce software/platform, powering over 30% of all eCommerce stores with over 1 million active installations. It is is built to integrate seamlessly with WordPress, making it the obvious eCommerce choice for existing WordPress users and connects you to the fast-growing WordPress ecosystem which now powers over 25% of all websites on the internet.

With WooCommerce you can start with all the basic tools that any small business would need to start selling online, including product setup, payments, shipping options, and sales reports and as your business grows choose from over 300 premium add-ons available including additional payment processors, shipping methods, inventory systems and marketing tools anyone to sell anything, anywhere from real products and digital downloads to subscriptions, content and even your time.

In July 2015, WooCommerce was acquired by Automattic, the creators of WordPress.com which serves more than 15.8 billion pages a month and also the creators of other popular WordPress services including Akismet, Jetpack, and VaultPress. We look forward to growing WooCommerce to achieve even greater things together with Automattic.

Pantheon

Pantheon

The website management platform for Drupal & WordPress, Pantheon provides web teams with the hosting, cloud-based developer tools, and scalable infrastructure needed to run awesome websites. Serving billions of pageviews a month for over 100,000 websites, Pantheon’s container-based infrastructure allows you to launch websites faster, without worrying about traffic spikes, security or performance. It’s free in development. Create your free account now!

GoDaddy

GoDaddy

GoDaddy’s mission is to radically shift the global economy toward small businesses by empowering people to easily start, confidently grow and successfully run their own ventures. With more than 12 million customers worldwide and 57 million domain names under management, GoDaddy gives small business owners the tools to name their idea, build a beautiful online presence, attract customers and manage their business.

DreamHost

DreamHost

DreamHost is a global Web hosting and cloud services provider with over 350,000 customers and 1.2 million blogs, websites and apps hosted. The company offers a wide spectrum of Web hosting and cloud services including Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Server Hosting, Domain Name Registration, the cloud storage service, DreamObjects, and the cloud computing service DreamCompute. More information can be found at  http://dreamhost.com.

WPML

WPML

WPML turns WordPress websites multilingual. It works with caching, SEO and E-Commerce plugins, and allows the building of complete multilingual sites. WPML powers simple blogs as well as corporate and enterprise sites.

WPML allows users to translate everything in the site, including content, menus, widgets and even theme and plugin texts. WPML powers over 500,000 commercial websites from all over the world.

More information about going multilingual can be found at WPML.org

We are looking for talent. If you are a smart programmer you are welcome to contact us here: http://wpml.org/home/were-hiring/.


WPML te permite hacer tu sitio multilingüe.

Al instalarlo podrás traducir todo el contenido del sitio, desde entradas, entradas personalizadas y páginas así como menúes, widgets y textos del tema y otros plugins.

Es compatible con plugins de caching, SEO, E-Commerce y muchos más.

WPML es adecuado tanto para grandes sitios corporativos como para blogs personales, y ya ha ayudado a hacer multilingüe a mas de 500.000 sitios comerciales en todo el mundo.

Más información en: WPML.org

Contratamos talento. Si eres un programador creativo, te invitamos a contactarnos: http://wpml.org/home/were-hiring/

Plesk

Plesk

Plesk simplifies web management activities to align with the way infrastructure is used today for hosting websites and web applications. A widely used web management solution, Plesk provides everything a web professional needs to set up a website quickly and securely – including a WordPress Toolkit, an easy-to-navigate control panel, server level automation, supportability tools, and complete protection with our server-to-site security core.

Blacks Beach

SiteGround

SiteGround

SiteGround provides WordPress hosting that does not miss a thing! Their servers, available in 3 different data centers across the world, are optimized for ultimate WordPress speed and security and they provide many goodies for the WordPress fans – automatic updates for the core WordPress and its plugins, WordPress SuperCacher for ultimate speed acceleration, staging tool and GIT integration for the coders, and unique WordPress autoinstaller for the starting users – all crafted in-house by the SiteGround team. And still they do not forget the importance of the good old standard hosting features like domain name registration, email service, control panel and reasonable pricing. They also have a support team that is not only available 24/7 by phone, chat and ticketing, but consists of WordPress enthusiasts who will help you with specific WordPress issues.

SiteGround has been actively involved with the community speaking, supporting and attending various WordCamps around the world and by sponsoring WordCamp San Diego they want to further contribute to the amazing WordPress community.

MediaTemple

MediaTemple

Over 125,000 customers in 100 countries now rely on Media Temple’s tools for domain registration, web hosting, business applications, virtual servers, and other cloud services to power more than 1.5 million websites. With 200 dedicated, U.S.-based employees, Media Temple takes pride in our 24/7 customer support. Our customers range from everyday people to top bloggers, creative professionals, and small businesses, as well as large enterprises like Starbucks, Adidas, Samsung, and Toyota.

More information can be found anytime on the web at http://mediatemple.com or on Twitter@MediaTemple.

Rochen

Rochen

Founded in 2003, Rochen’s mission is to build innovative hosting services that, while complex, are elegant and simple to use. We deliver these services on top of the most reliable server and network infrastructure available. We underpin these services with world-class support from pragmatic, technically capable, and customer service focused teams.

Find out more information by visiting Rochen here: https://www.rochen.com/

Sucuri

Sucuri

Sucuri gives website owners peace of mind with solutions that prevent hackers from abusing websites, and professional response services to those compromised. Sucuri is dedicated to researching the latest and emerging threats affecting websites like yours.

Website security should be attainable for all website owners; we focus on making that a reality. Get back to running awesome WordPress websites. Our services are built around three principles – People. Process. Technology.

WP Engine

WP Engine

WP Engine is the premium managed platform for websites and applications built with WordPress. WP Engine delivers the fastest, most reliable, and most secure web experience. Businesses large and small rely on WP Engine’s exceptional customer service team specializing in quickly solving technical problems, and creating a world-class customer experience.

Ecwid

Ecwid

Ecwid is a hosted cloud commerce platform used by over 900,000 merchants in 175 countries and offers the easiest way to add an online store to any WordPress site, social site or multiple sites simultaneously. With Ecwid, your clients get everything needed to start selling online in minutes. Easily embedded into any web presence and leading POS systems, clients can market, merchandise and sell products and services from multiple online stores with mobile management and point-of-sale integration anywhere at any time. Ecwid’s Jumpstart Partner Program offers the first and only private-label e-commerce solution for developers, agencies and freelancers globally.

Trestles

Give – Donation Plugin

Give – Donation Plugin

Give is proud to sponsor WordCamp San Diego 2016. We are based in Downtown San Diego and we believe it’s important to promote WordPress in our hometown. Give is the most flexible, robust, and easy to use WordPress plugin for accepting donations directly on your website. Upon activation, Give provides you with powerful features geared towards helping your Cause.

Simple and Pain Free Giving

Keep donors on your website. No bouncing to a third-party site or platform. The donation plugin works great, directly in WordPress.

Zero Commission Charges

Concentrate on your Cause, and not the cost. We earn our income by selling Add-ons and not from donor giving; period.

Easy to Customize and Enhance

Give is built by WordImpress. Our plugins are intuitive, actively supported, and well documented. Find out more about us.

WP Site Care

WP Site Care

WP Site Care is a WordPress Support and Site Management company. We love helping companies and individuals with their WordPress websites. We manage everything from WordPress Hosting, to themes, plugins, and even one-on-one support. We have monthly site management plans, as well as our a la carte service offerings. We love to help people love WordPress!

Pressidium

Pressidium

Pressidium® offers a managed WordPress hosting platform built with Enterprise Architecture design. Our platform is built specifically to host professional WordPress sites, by using webscale technologies and systems specifically optimized to deliver incredible speed, unparalleled availability and uptime. Pressidium® offers fast, robust, scalable, secure WordPress Hosting and an awesome DevOps support team full of WordPress experts. Our fully managed WordPress hosting service allows you to concentrate on your content without worrying about your website.

La Jolla Shores

iThemes

iThemes

Since 2008, iThemes has been creating WordPress tools to help you build and grow your freelance web design business with WordPress.

ServerPress

ServerPress

DesktopServer from ServerPress.com makes it simple to create local WordPress sites in just a matter of a few clicks. With DesktopServer you can design, develop and deploy WordPress solutions quickly and easily. It is the ONLY localhost server that integrates WordPress with Adobe® Dreamweaver®, Panic’s Coda and Diet Coda with WYSIWYG features for theme design and web developer professionals, offers multi-site, import and export (deployment) of archive files such as BackupBuddy, Duplicator, BackWPUp, BackUp WordPress, InfiniteWP & ManageWP, create custom blueprints and a lot more! Save tons of time and even more “brain damage” with DesktopServer!

Oceanside

Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder

Easily build responsive WordPress websites without touching a line of code. Use Beaver Builder’s page builder plugin to quickly build pages with any theme. Or, use it with our framework theme for the perfect balance of power and simplicity.

Visit https://www.wpbeaverbuilder.com/ for more information!

Crowd Favorite

Crowd Favorite

Crowd Favorite is a premier, boutique professional services firm focused on enterprise-level clients such as National Geographic, Lexus, and DirecTV, and several major movie studios. A leader in the WordPress community and the first WordPress professional services firm, Crowd Favorite has established offices throughout the US and Europe to deliver large-scale client projects. Crowd Favorite also provides consulting and web development services specializing in web applications and user experience.

Del Mar

Zeek Interactive

Zeek Interactive

Zeek Interactive is a small and highly focused group of talented people. We’ve been solving problems for clients since 1995, and we’ve been focused on the web from day one. As the web has grown and changed, our skills have expanded to match. Zeek’s experience on hundreds and hundreds of Internet projects is now focused on two major platforms, WordPress and iOS. We are not just technologists. We are also driven by both a desire to help our clients achieve their business results, and an equally strong desire to give back to the development community we love.

GitHub Updater

GitHub Updater

GitHub Updater is an Open Source project by Andy Fragen. It’s a simple plugin to enable automatic updates to your GitHub, Bitbucket, or GitLab hosted WordPress plugins and themes. It also allows for the remote installation of plugins or themes.

GitHub Updater is and has been a project that has taught me much and more importantly helped others with their work. Try it out and see if it doesn’t save you time and energy with your own development projects.

Find GitHub Updater at https://github.com/afragen/github-updater
Find Andy Fragen and say “Hi”.

LearnDash

LearnDash
Transform your WordPress site into a powerful learning management system using LearnDash. In minutes, create (and even sell) your online courses, track user progress, deliver certificates, and much more!

easyname

easyname

easyname is one of the oldest web hosting companies in Europe. We have decades of experience and offer a wide variety of top level domains (over 447). We tailor our solutions towards professionals and programmers. Check out our international site as well:easyname international

Oasis Workflow

Oasis Workflow

Oasis Workflow WordPress Plugin allows you to build editorial review workflows with its easy to use drag and drop visual editor. The plugin also adds workflow support to revise your published content.

One of the biggest problems with multi-author blogs is knowing exactly who is responsible for working on what at any given time. Oasis Workflow gives you the flexibility to create from a basic to highly sophisticated workflows quickly and easily. With features like workflow inbox, due dates, email reminders, editorial comments, teams and more, it streamlines your editorial review process and enhances productivity for busy blogs.

Visit https://www.oasisworkflow.com/ for more information!

In-Kind

StickerGiant

StickerGiant

StickerGiant prints high-quality stickers and labels. They have the best customer service, quick turnaround times and free custom shapes using state of the art laser cutting. Every sticker has a story. Want to share your story today? They’re waiting to hear from you.
stickergiant.com

Beginner’s Bootcamp Signup

Signup Instructions

Since the Beginner’s Bootcamp will have limited seating, we are offering a signup so you can secure your seat. Signup will be on a first-come-first-served basis. If you would like to be added to this list, please email us at wordcampsd@gmail.com with the subject “Beginner’s Bootcamp Signup”. Include your name and contact info in the body.

If you are not present in the room when the track begins, your seat will be given up to anyone who is waiting for space.

Bootcamp Structure & Requirements

  1. You should definitely have your laptop for this track. 
  2. Be prepared to stay in this track for the entire day on Sunday – this is meant to be a progression of topics, it’s not meant that you would bounce around between this and any of the other tracks that are going on
  3. Please read over the topics that will be covered to ensure that this is a track you are interested in:
    1. Setting Up Your Local Environment (Local Server)
    2. Plugins & Plugin Troubleshooting
    3. Customizing without Hacking
    4. How to Teach Yourself CSS
    5. How to be Strategic About Getting Content in Your Site

Announcing the WCSD 2016 Beginner’s Bootcamp Speakers

WordCamp San Diego 2016 Begiiner's Bootcamp Speakers

WordCamp San Diego 2016 Beginner’s Bootcamp Speakers

DesktopServer Team

We believe in empowering our customers by developing and supporting great web development tools and services. Our tools reflect our philosophy of balancing form and function and applying “kaizen” (meaning “continuous gradual improvement”) to each evolution in our project cycles. This results in mature and refined processes that help our customers not only save time and money, but also to create unique, attractive, powerful, and timely solutions. We create tools that specifically cater to both creative designers and professional developers. We know that our philosophy can help bring together beautiful design and powerful engineering to help our customers reach new heights in their professional goals. Our favorite interactions are when customers tell us how much time they have saved and how easy their magnificent projects have come to life. It means we hit our goal.

Matt Cromwell

Matt Cromwell is Head of Support and Community Wrangler at WordImpress. He is the Lead Organizer of the Advanced WordPress San Diego Meetup and AWP Facebook group (which boasts over 17K members). He’s a popular blogger at his personal site (mattcromwell.com), wordimpress.com, givewp.com, and mediatemple.net. Matt has a background in education and as a web developer for nonprofit organizations.

Lucy Beer

Manchester-raised, now based in Los Angeles, I’ve been using WordPress since 2004. I started using it for my own personal projects and in 2009 started to teach others how to use it. Since then I’ve been training people in the ways of WordPress. For the past year I have been working as a Customer Happiness Rocketeer with WP Rocket – the premium caching plugin.

Christina Hills

Christina Hills, the creator of the Website Creation Workshop, has been passionately teaching non-techie small business owners, authors, experts, coaches and consultants, how to easily create their websites in WordPress so that they can get their message out to the world. She has been running this WordPress training program to an international audience for the past 9 years. She loves to teach WordPress as a creative way to get clarity on your business, your marketing, and your message. Christina is also an 11-year online marketing veteran, often seen at events as an expert speaker teaching on a variety of topics such as email marketing, membership sites, and ecommerce marketing, all with a focus on WordPress. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Christina Hills worked as a digital artist for the network promotions division of NBC-TV, and then as a senior technical director in the Feature Film Division at George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic with film credits for Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and ET the re-release. While her skills and background are unquestionably “technical”, her style is completely “user friendly” and marketing-oriented. She puts the fun into teaching technology and empowers business owners to be in full control of their marketing and online presence. Come find her and ask her anything about WordPress, or about Spirituality and God (her other passion!) She lives near the beach in San Diego, California with her husband and daughter.

Start Planning Your Weekend: Track Recap

Can you believe #WCSD is only a couple of weeks away?! Here is a recap on what’s happening so you can start to plan your days.

Saturday:

Saturday has three tracks running: Design, Development and Plugin. Also, there is a “Help Desk” where you can get WordPress assistance at any level (beginner user to developer etc.), so check that out!

Time Designer Track Development Track Happiness Bar (Help Desk) Plugin Track
7:45 am
8:45 am
Opening Remarks
9:00 am
9:50 am
10:40 am
11:30 am
12:10 pm
Lunch Break
2:00 pm
2:50 pm
3:40 pm
4:30 pm

Sunday:

Sunday has three tracks running: Admin, Beginner and Business (Business track runs at slightly different times, so see that specific schedule at the bottom of this page). Sunday will also feature and “Open Discussion” where anyone can participate in discussing all things WordPress. The “Help Desk” will return Sunday as well, get WordPress assistance at any level (beginner user to developer etc.)

Time Admin Track Beginner's Bootcamp Business Track Happiness Bar (Help Desk) Open Discussion
5:10 pm
Closing Remarks
7:00 pm
12:00 pm
Keynote: Chris Lema – Your next five years with WordPress Chris Lema
12:40 pm
1:20 pm
2:00 pm
2:40 pm
3:20 pm
4:00 pm
Closing Remarks
Time Business Track Details
12:40 pm
1:10 pm
1:40 pm
2:10 pm
2:40 pm
3:10 pm
3:40 pm

We hope you’re able to mark out some sessions that interest you! Can’t wait to see you at Camp!

Announcing the WCSD 2016 Open Discussion

WordPress Open Discussion

This is an open discussion about WordPress. No speakers, no panel judges. Everyone in attendance is welcome to join in and participate in the conversation. We’ll be discussing themes and plugins, like you’ve never discussed them before.

Asking questions is part of the fun, at WordCamp. Now, you have the chance to answer someone else’s question.

This is not a session to plug your business or mention that you just opened shop. This is a session where you can become part of the WordPress community and give back to others.

Discussion will be lead by: Russell Aaron

College was the place that I first found WordPress. I moved to Eugene Oregon and attended The University of Oregon. This is where I learned how to write a blog. I learned how to manipulate the template ‚”theme” of my site. I had all these blog posts and I still did not get hired. After graduation, I moved to Las Vegas and I was selling memberships to adult websites. I was asked to build the website for the affiliate program. I turned to WordPress once again. In 2011, I attended WordCamp Vegas. I met some really cool people and my love for WordPress was recreated. Since that WordCamp I’ve focused all of my time and attention on WordPress.

Announcing the WCSD 2016 Admin Track Speakers

wcsd admin track speakers

WordCamp San Diego 2016 Admin Track Speakers

Greg Taylor

grtaylorMarketing Press blends business and development to create WordPress sites that succeed. We approach websites as marketers, not developers, and use a data-driven process to guide everything we do. By seeing where you are now and setting a strategy to achieve your goals, our team can help you build an effective, easy-to-manage site that improves your conversions, community, and content. Greg Taylor, Founder After working in marketing and business development for over ten years, Greg decided to pursue his passion for WordPress development and content marketing by starting his own company. Tired of seeing sites that look great but don‚Äôt achieve results, he founded Marketing Press to help business owners find the best of both worlds. In addition to leading the company, Greg has become well-known in the WordPress community as a speaker and teacher. He has presented at several conferences (including TechPHX, WordCamp LA, WordCamp Phoenix, WordCamp Sacramento and WordCamp Vegas), been featured on industry podcasts (such as BusyMarketer and Hit the Mic with Stacy Harris), and regularly appears on popular shows (like WPwatercooler and his very own Marketing Press TV). When he’s not working on code or content, Greg spends his free time enjoying life in Pacific Beach, San Diego, mentoring startups, taking in live music, or hanging out in his home state of New Jersey.

Erick Hitter

erickIt took Erick a while to figure out what he wanted to be when he grew up, which led him through a few different careers. After experiments in audio engineering and accounting, he now works on Automattic’s VIP team, serving enterprise WordPress users. Erick lives near Los Angeles, loves craft beer, and longs for enough free time to go hiking in the mountains that surround LA. He blogs at ethitter.com and i.ethitter.com.

Evan Scheingross

evanEvan is a proud native San Diegan who loves the surf, sand, and a good fish taco even more than he loves WordPress! His first experience with WordPress dates back to 2006, and he was immediately fascinated with its power and flexibility.

For the past 9 years, Evan has run his own web design, development, and consulting business drawing on a primarily local client base. He helps individuals and businesses alike establish a successful online presence through the creation of user-focused, goal-oriented websites that are engineered to produce results. Almost all of Evan’s websites are developed using WordPress, and most of them are built as completely custom themes. Over the years he’s run into more WordPress snafus and gotchas than he would probably care to admit, and he’s happy to share them with you in hopes of sparing you a few expletives or that feeling where you want to throw your laptop off a cliff.

You can check out Evan’s work and thoughts on all things web-related at evanwebdesign.com or follow him @evanwebdesign. Outside of the web world, Evan is a father to the cutest 15-month old boy in the world (though he admits he has some bias there), and a husband to a wonderful and supportive wife. He has too many interests and hobbies to list here, and too little time to pursue them.

Jarrett Gucci

jarrettJarrett Gucci comes from a retail background that started at Home Depot in Buffalo NY as cashier and 18 months later was asked to be a project manager based out of Carson California with a goal of opening 12 stores in 14 months. This goal was accomplished. He has also been an area manager at Big Lots and Bed Bath and beyond. He left his very last retail career as a district manager at Linens & Things in 2007 to pursue a hobby of website development as hope he could make some money doing it. After 4 years of building and managing WordPress sites, he founded a company called WP Fix It and since 2011 his company has serviced over 30,000 WordPress support tickets. Something you may not know about Jarrett besides all this, is that when he was 15 his neighbor gave him a 1962 dodge dart and he completely took it apart and rebuilt it.

Dustin Meza

dustinDustin Meza is the Director of Customer Experience Operations at WP Engine. He has been in the hosting industry for 7 years and has been with WP Engine for 2 years. At WP Engine, Dustin oversees many aspects of the WordPress platform including WordPress upgrades for over 100,000 WordPress installs.

Outside of WordPress, Dustin loves being outdoors in Austin with his wife Megan, and black lab, Maddy. He enjoys all kinds of sports, both watching and playing, and has been known to play some video games when time allows.