I’m a speaker and educator, passionate about translating stupid financial speak* into plain English so Freelancers and Agency Owners can understand it.

“I call it “accountantese” – an overly complex language that is most often spoken by financial planners and accountants.

I could, literally, talk all day. So here is the short version of “The Life of Nev”.

Michelle completed her MBA in Marketing, E-Commerce and Information Systems from the University of Rochester’s Simon School of Business. She has over twenty years of experience in higher education; ten years owning a web design and marketing company; and currently serves as the Head of Customer Success for Impress.org (developers of GiveWP.com and WPBusinessReviews.com).

Michelle is a veteran of public speaking. She’s been an instructor for a wide variety of topics including Using Quantitative Data Analysis Software, Meditative Drawing, Intro to WordPress, and Marketing for Massage Therapy. Michelle speaks at conferences all over North America. You can find many of them recorded on WordPress.tv including “Little Things That Make a Big Difference” and “Hidden Features of WordPress Revealed,” as well as panel discussions on ethics, marketing, page builders, and women in technology.

Served in 2006-2011 as an active U.S. Army Interrogator where I got a deep understanding of human behavior, psychology and ticks. Transitioned from military into Product Marketer for a government enterpirse platform (apan.org) – Managed a agile development team on the communities feature while promoting campaigns both internal and external. Decided to go freelance after I helped a friend generate 20k on 1k ad spend. From there I took what I learned and started offering my services and went to build a team, won awards, and grew a bunch of companies (as their digital marketer) and have been doing that for the past 5 years as a full-time freelancer.

WENDY GUESS

Dr. Wendy Guess has studied and taught transformation and behavior change for over 20 years. She has expertise in the promotion, communication, and marketing of health, wellness, across a variety of platforms and settings. Currently, Dr. Guess is an award-winning faculty member of the Dept. of Marketing and Logistics at FIU.

Rahul has been working in the web hosting industry since 2005 and started using WordPress in 2008. Since then he has helped scale web and cloud infrastructure for companies like General Mills, Saks, CSX, and PetSmart. Rahul is now the co-founder and CEO at ScaleDynamix, where he manages 15,000+ WordPress and WooCommerce sites.

Dan is a writer, speaker, online marketer and software developer who has over 20 years of online experience. He is the founder of SEO Turbo Booster, a WordPress based SEO visibility solution. Dan cofounded Pre-Dating Speed Dating, the largest dating event company in the US as well as StartupPOP, a Boca Raton based pitch event. Dan has written 5 books on Amazon about startups, online marketing and online dating. Dan lives in Boca Raton with his wife, 2 boys, 2 cats, 2 dogs, 20 finches, 100 guppies and 500 snails.

Ivan Suarez has more than 22 years of hands-on experience in information systems, technologies, and operations. Suarez holds a Master’s degree in Information Technology and a Bachelor’s degree in Information Security. He is a decorated US Army Veteran with extensive experience in information technology. His specialties include electronic warfare, exploitation, coding, networking, social engineering, cyber warfare, and signal exploitation.

He is passionate about providing or creating answers and helping others in the growing IT industry. Suarez also enjoys testing systems and looking for flaws or vulnerabilities. He loves to help end users by teaching and leveling the playing field for the safety of others and their children. Suarez has implemented and overseen several architectures, designs, and installed information systems for all types of operations and businesses.

He has created support systems that ensure that the organization maintains and hardens network infrastructures. In his spare time, Suarez volunteers at homeless shelters, teaches coding to children and warns others about the exposures and dangers pose by cyber criminals. He attends or hosts tactical events with others to teach and mentor how to respond to cyber attacks and rapid response measures and countermeasures.

E. Anita Newman, DTM is a speaker, certified trainer and MC known for her energetic and humorous speaking style. Anita discovered her passion for public speaking during her college years and later honed her speaking skills as a longstanding member with Toastmasters International, where she achieved the highest distinction of Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM) and served as Division Director, overseeing 26 Toastmasters clubs with over 800 members.

Also a Certified Trainer with The John Maxwell Team, Anita helps organizations improve the communication skills of their employees.

Most weekends you will find her hosting the performances at a prominent 1,200 seat performing arts theater in South Florida, where she has been the MC for the past two years.

I build brands, processes, and programs that deliver results. I’m a firm believer in people, truly constructive feedback, and the value of tangible results. If something’s efficient, effective, and sensible, I like it. In the few years that I’ve directed the revenue-focused marketing and analytics at FIU Business, we’ve grown annual revenues over $11,000,000 (yes, that’s per year) during a time when education revenues are shrinking. I lead two teams — a marketing/analytics team (5 people) and an academic/training team (40+ people) and we work together to build our individual and collective brands. Connect with me on LinkedIn; follow me on Twitter (@SensibleFolk); and catch my weekly #MarketingMinute videos on YouTube (and be sure to subscribe while you’re there).

Donata is the President of Termageddon and the engineer behind the policy questions and text. She is a licensed attorney and a certified information privacy professional. She often volunteers at the Illinois State Bar Association holding courses on the General Data Protection Regulation where she teaches other attorneys on the importance of privacy and what Privacy Policies should contain. Donata is the newsletter editor for the American Bar Association’s ePrivacy Committee and the Chair of the International Association of Privacy Professionals Chicago Chapter.

DAVID YARDE

David Yarde is an award winning designer and software engineer that is now focused on leveraging his 17+ years of lessons learned in design, software programming and building brand experiences to help individuals and teams build lovable products and cultures.

David helps brands fill the gaps within their creative and technology initiatives and is focused on building better communities by building better brands.

During Davids career he has helped to facilitate a variety of customer experience solutions involving developing creative teams, strategies, visual designs and software platforms for brands of all sizes from Avis, Merriam-Webster, and Walmart/Sam’s Club all the way to the startup owner with a passion to make the world better.

Bianca hails from Kingston, Jamaica where she works in corporate innovation. She has been a WordPress advocate since 2005 when she set up her first personal website, eventually moving into freelance WordPress consulting. She decided to get more involved in the global WordPress community, including speaking at WordCamps since 2016 and starting a local meetup in 2017. When she’s all recovered, you’ll also find her playing steel pan or salsa dancing.

Tara Claeys began her career in advertising and marketing in the early 1990’s. After her first child was born, she supplemented her full-time job as Mom with illustration and stationery design for clients around the world. Her extensive marketing background and understanding of business quickly became her focus. Founded in 2010, Tara’s agency, Design TLC, specializes in websites and digital marketing for small schools, enrichment programs, camps and education-focused nonprofits.

She’s given presentations on essential tools for productivity (her passion) as well as sharing examples of websites she has built with WordPress and panel discussions on freelance work. Tara as a WordPress DC organizer and enjoys traveling to WordCamp conferences. Along with Liam Dempsey, Tara uncovers the stories of people in the WordPress community in their podcast Hallway Chats.

When Tara isn’t redesigning websites, she can be found volunteering for a nonprofit, running, challenging you to get out of your comfort zone, or vacationing with her family.

Kim White has been a web developer for over twenty years building websites and web-based applications. She has been using WordPress since 2008 and is the Co-organizer of the Lehigh Valley Meetup and Lehigh Valley WordCamp. She has been part of the organizing team of WCUS for the last 3 years.

Recently, Kim joined the support team at Paid Memberships Pro.

Carlos will setup and launch all the tech stuff you need to automatically attract more customers and convert them into cash. He’s been doing it since 2003 and has built campaigns for companies of different sizes to include Coca-Cola, Universal Studios, Disney, Carnival Cruise Lines and more.

Matt has served nonprofit organizations since early 2000’s as a web developer, educator, fundraising consultant, marketing consultant, board member and more. Currently, he is Partner and Head of Support and Outreach at Impress.org who’s mission is “”Code for Good””. Impress.org’s flagship product is the number one fundraising tool for WordPress websites: GiveWP.

Matt serves on the board of San Diego Refugee Tutoring, a volunteer driven organization dedicated to serving the rising refugee population of children in San Diego. He also serves on the board of Mid-City Church of the Nazarene who hosts bi-weekly food distributions, and houses dozens of other local NGOs in their facility in City Heights, San Diego.

Matt is a husband, father to four, and lover of all things musical and/or homebrewed. He also loves to talk about the most taboo of topics: Politics and Religion.

Luis Atencio (@luijar) is a Principal Cloud Engineer for Citrix Systems in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. He has a B.S. and an M.S. in Computer Science and now works full-time developing and architecting cloud web applications using JavaScript and Java. Luis is also very involved in the community and has presented on several occasions at conferences and local meet-ups. When he is not coding, Luis writes a developer blog at http://luisatencio.net focused on software engineering as well as several magazine articles for PHPArch and DZone. Luis is also the author of Functional Programming in JavaScript (Manning 2016), co-author for RxJS in Action (Manning 2017), and currently working on his third book The Joy Of JavaScript (Manning 2019).

ADAM SOUCIE

Adam Soucie is a front-end focused WordPress developer based in Kissimmee, FL. He is a member of the WordPress Orlando & WordCamp Orlando organizing teams and has a passion for building websites that are accessible to all users.

Melanie G Adcock is an Agency Owner who brings her artistic skill and web development background together to help Small Businesses and Nonprofits. She began her digital consulting career in 2010 and is now co-owner of Adcock Creative. She is especially known for creating beautiful church websites, providing excellent support to her clients , and being a creative problem solver.

Melanie G Adcock regularly speaks on various web design business topics at local WordPress Meetups and WordCamps . Besides speaking on business processes, software training, and design, Melanie volunteer at her church and runs the local WordPress Meetup Chapter.

When she is not creating stunning websites, she is reading, binging on BBC murder mysteries, cooking, or fishing.

Charles is a self-proclaimed and well earned “digital ninja” on a mission to help entrepreneurs and nonprofit organizations change their communities. After spending the last few decades in the corporate IT industry he started a web design and digital marketing agency called HeartWired Digital Solutions, where they focus on putting compassion back into technology. His passion is helping nonprofits and small business owners share their stories on the web.

Sebastiaan van der Lans is an open-source fanatic who loves to explain complex technology in plain English. In 2006, he founded the Amsterdam based agency ‘Van Ons’. In 2013, he started to experiment with WordPress and blockchain, resulting in start-up WordProof.io, bringing benefits of blockchain to the WordPress ecosystem. At WCEU 2019, Sebastiaan presented ‘From WordPress to Blockchain: The Future is 100% Open-Source’. His motto: “Celebrate progress, tomorrow is just a dream away” – W. Disney

Victor Ramirez began his foray into the interwebs building websites and email newsletters for various high school art projects. He is currently a lead software engineer at Dow Jones building WordPress projects for the Wall Street Journal. On the side, he runs An Abstract Agency – a WordPress-focused marketing agency. In his free time, he teaches high school students to code & coaches professionals in New York City.

After starting a career in programming, Korene Stuart felt there was more she could do to improve the lives of the community in which she lives. Learning the statistics for people of color in STEM fields was a wake-up call and she now serves as the director of MAScode( Minorities Advancing through STEM), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization she established that exposes both children and adults to the amazing careers of S.T.E.M.(Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). She encourages experienced professionals in those fields to give back to communities in need. Her ability to effectively engage offers her the opportunities to serve in different leadership roles such as the Technical Lead for Black Girls Code Miami, serving on the Broward County Schools S.T.E.M Task Force and a facilitator for the Jamaican Diaspora Education Task Force.

Nathan is the Host at iThemes Training where he teaches WordPress and freelance business development topics via live webinar.

As the founder of >ADVANCE Coaching, Nathan works with WordPress solopreneurs and business owners individually and in groups to help them become more successful in their businesses.

Nathan has been working with clients to build websites since 1995. He is based in Birmingham, Alabama where he has been an organizer for WordCamp Birmingham (WP Y’all) for several years.

NILE FLORES

Nile Flores is a long time WordPress designer and Developer. While she grew up a military brat, she’s settled in the St. Louis metro east region. Nile blogs at Blondish.net, where she covers topics on WordPress, Blogging, SEO, Social Media, and Web Design. Nile also works as an Infection Cleanup Specialist at WP Fix It.

She also loves helping people and contributing to WordPress, and that includes speaking at WordCamps across the United States. When Nile isn’t knee deep in coding and design, she’s spending time with her son, who is also a WordPress user. Lastly, here’s a fun fact: Nile has been blogging over 18 years!

Scott is the Founder and Creative Director of Highforge, an Orlando-based service agency focused on helping medium and enterprise businesses lead and succeed online. He’s an Emmy- winning commercial writer that’s sold millions in projects and generated hundreds of millions in new revenues for clients since 2001. He’s been managing commercial WordPress projects since 2009. He loves to solve problems, make clients happy and help creatives achieve their destinies. He digs racquetball, travel backpacking, scuba, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, music festivals, fine tequila and a non-profit called Be the Match that helps save lives.

Tara King is a self-taught developer. She works at Pantheon, where she helps WordPress and Drupal developers build skills and optimize their WebOps processes. She has also worked as a Senior Developer at Universal Music Group, at small digital agencies, and freelanced for countless arts organizations. She loves using the command line and thinks you will, too.

She lives in Albuquerque, NM, where she plays boardgames, writes poems, and tends her garden.

William Jackson, M.Ed. graduate of South Carolina State University earning
a Bachelor’s in Education, furthering his education earning a Masters of Arts
in Teaching from Webster University with a focus on Educational Technology,
Social Media and STEM.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Jihana Barrett has pushed her career in intelligence and cybersecurity to the limits.

Beginning her career in the United States Air Force, Jihana was quickly promoted to Staff Sergeant. During this time, she pursued a career in tech. After obtaining her Associates degree, she later completed her Bachelors and Masters degrees in Cybersecurity and acquired both her Security+ and Certified Ethical Hacker certifications (CEH) at the University of Maryland University College.
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Following her separation from the military, Jihana received her Masters degree in Cyber and Information Security from Capitol Technology University.

Currently, Jihana is a Senior Threat Vulnerability analyst at one of the country’s largest tele-communications corporations. After many years of education and research, Jihana has developed a passion for excellence within her field—and encouraging up and coming women in tech to pursue their dreams in the industry through her organization, Tech Sorority.

Keanan Koppenhaver is CTO at Alpha Particle, a digital consultancy that helps plan and execute digital projects, mostly using WordPress.

He enjoys helping clients build out their developer teams, modernize legacy tech stacks, and better position themselves as technology continues to move forward. He believes that more technology isn’t always the answer, but when it is, it’s important to get it right.

Anelle Valdes is a freelance editor and content creator, specializing in website audits, blog posts, articles, and resumes. As a professional with a master’s degree in marketing and undergraduate degrees in biology and psychology, Anelle breaks down marketing concepts and gives them a psych twist. Her desire is to help people feel more connected, productive and happy. She feels, fulfillment in what we do, while having meaningful relationships is key. Anelle has experience in the marketing, healthcare, and recruiting industries.

ANDREW NORCROSS

When i was 17, i threw a party at my parent’s house while they were out of town. it ~maybe~ got a little out of hand, given the numerous games of human cannonball through the screened in porch. I woke up the next morning to realize I had about 7 hours to learn how to re-screen all the panels we jumped through. i finished with 15 minutes to spare. i almost got away with it, until my father found all the bottle caps in the pool filter.

Behind the bowtie, Tracy Apps (@tapps) is a big-picture doer, a veteran UX designer, front-end developer, strategist, teacher, and artist, Tracy has amassed quite a wide range of experience since she started teaching herself code in the late 1990’s. Including teaching at several Universities, presenting at numerous WordCamps, and over 20 years of creating for either her own company, tracy apps design, her co-founded startup, inntro, or as a contractor for Fortune 500 & 1000 companies like Kohl’s, Johnson Controls, and GE Healthcare.

She also could probably deadlift you.

I am a Builder on the Web! In my tool belt: PHP, WordPress, JavaScript, NodeJS, ReactJS | Co-founder of Rate My Barber

Maria is a Learning and Development Specialist at White Shark Media. She is a marketing professional with a bachelor’s degree in Information and Document Management and Advertising and over 6 years experience in digital marketing.

During her free time, she enjoys baking and spending time with her family.

Chris is co-owner of Data Driven Labs, a WordPress Maintenance and Marketing agency. He is a 19-year Internet marketing veteran with experience in web design & development, search engine optimization, online marketing, social media marketing and mobile development. He is very active in the WordPress Orlando community and loves to help others learn new ways to grow their business. Chris has held development and Internet marketing positions in some of Orlando’s top technology companies.

A 27-year educator in South Florida, Annejeanette Washington Collins combines Computer Science and STEM into everything she teaches both K-12 and collegiate levels. Annejeanette Washington Collins is a proud alumnae of the University of Miami and Nova Southeastern University. She teaches 5th grade at Manatee Bay Elementary and is a professor at The University of Fort Lauderdale. When she is not teaching, she serves as a volunteer with Black Girls Code (Miami Chapter), The Faith Center Ministries ( Sunrise, Florida), The Broward County Mayors Chess Challenge, Broward STEM Department, Dare to Care Outreach, DadsBeonDuty.com and volunteers at Sawgrass Springs Middle School. Her greatest moments in life are spent with her husband Major, her daughter Jayda Washington-Boothe ( 3 time Word Camp Miami Speaker), her family, and the beautiful South Florida beaches.

Antoine is a recognized expert and strategist in digital marketing.

He’s an award-winning marketing agency owner and a speaker at national & international conferences. He combines 18 years in marketing and 15 years in the hospitality industry.

His first job out of college was working for Gordon Ramsey in London at Le Gavroche. Antoine travels the world sharing his strategy and methodology to marketers and business owners. His goal is to improve lead generation and business growth via his proven marketing strategies.

As a result, he is an in-demand consultant on discovering the strategies that work.

KIMBERLY LIPARI

Kimberly is the CEO of Valet, a WordPress Management and Development Agency. She’s spent the last few years growing a business that focuses on service as a key selling point. Kimberly will share her firsthand and hard won knowledge of how support can make or break your business.

A self-taught web developer, Victor left a career as a Professor of Biochemistry to build websites with open source tools like WordPress. Having made and sold plugins for many years, Victor currently focuses on SaaS services for content management systems. When he’s not working in open source he spends his time travelling or coaching the girls rugby team at the High School near his home.

Without boxing myself in too much, I describe myself as always curious, overly energetic, and a holistically inclined person. By night, I’m a licensed clinical psychologist with a small private practice and every other waking hour I’m a Product Designer of digital products. In 2017 I chose to evolve my career to include design and development with a focus on Front-end development. My everyday motivation is to bridge gaps between needs and resources. I feel inspired by tech and design’s ability to have a positive impact on a grander scale.

Mike Herchel works as a senior front-end developer for Lullabot, and has been developing for the web for over 18 years. He’s passionate web performance, usability, and accessibility. You can often find him speaking on these subjects at web development conferences around the world.