GoDaddy powers the world’s largest cloud platform dedicated to small, independent ventures. With 17.5M+ customers worldwide and 76M+ domain names under management, GoDaddy is the place people go to name their idea, build a professional website, attract customers and manage their work.
Global Sponsor Spotlight: DreamHost
When you put your dreams online — your words, your photos, your creations — you shouldn’t have to worry about your service provider mining that data for marketing purposes.DreamHost‘s open platform gives you the power to share your data and the freedom to control how it’s used.
A former school teacher turned podcast strategist, producer and host, Jeff has found his niche producing podcasts for other businesses. He and his team at Come Alive Creative embrace the technical and human aspects of producing quality podcasts to assist their clients in building, engaging, and nurturing their audiences through ongoing podcast series. Aside from client work, he also serves as the lead instructor at Come Alive Academy.
Beyond podcasting and education, he spends his time with his family, playing board games, and learning something new everyday.
As a high school student, Tim began building websites for local business in 1996 and has freelanced at it, off and on, ever since. From there he has applied his skills to web and application development throughout ministry, education, telecommunications, and manufacturing. Currently, he can be found working for Sprint as an Applications Developer for their primary ticketing application, developing on both the front and back end.
Tim is also a runner who is currently training for a marathon to raise money for clean water in Africa through Hope Water International.
Yankees fan and dedicated educator, Joe Casabona has a full time goal of helping people. To accomplish this, he uses his skills as a front end developer, instructor, and course creator to teach people how to use WordPress, coach them on their WordPress business, and improve their communication and customer support. Another tool in his arsenal is How I Built It, his weekly podcast that highlights the stories and processes of how various product developers and business owners have brought their ideas to life.
With over 18 years of web development experience, Aaron has worked with a wide range of clients, everything from small, local business to Google, Yahoo, Disney, and Harvard. As of now, he is funded by GoDaddy to work on the WordPress open source project full time and is currently the WordPress Security lead.
Away from the computer, his interests vary as much as the clients he’s worked for. Occasionally called both a coffee snob and beer snob, he wears the mantles proudly. You can also find him spending time with his wife and son, enjoying sci-fi/fantasy books, or riding his motorcycle.
To really make a login page truly secure, it should have 2 Factor Authentication on it. But many people find this to be a pain. Who wants one more step on top of having to remember your password?
Traiteware has solved both of those issues. Rather that using a username and password and then entering a code texted to your phone, you can simply scan a QR code with your phone and you’re done!
Excited to give it a try? Sign up for a chance to win a standard plan for a year at TraitWare.com/wordcamp (signups taken until noon on July 22, 2018) or head over to the WordPress marketplace to test drive theSecure Login plugin for free.
Global Sponsor Spotlight: WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an open-source, completely customizable eCommerce platform for entrepreneurs worldwide. Built by more than 350 contributors from around the globe, WooCommerce has developers at the heart. WooCommerce is a worldwide community, and here to help make your online store a reality.
Global Sponsor Spotlight: Jetpack
Jetpack is the ultimate toolkit for WordPress. It gives you everything you need to design, secure, and grow your site in one bundle.
With Jetpack, you can:
Fully customize your site with free themes, image tools, and rich content.
Increase your traffic through automatic social sharing, related content, and faster load times.
Get a safer, stronger site via secure logins and protection from brute force attacks.
All these core features are free. Advanced features like daily backups, spam protection, and SEO tools can be added with one of threesimple and affordable plans.
Best of all, Jetpack’s features are provided and hosted by WordPress.com — so there’s never any extra strain on your server when you activate or use a new tool.
Alonso is making his first appearance at WCGR, having traveled all the way from Albuquerque, NM. He is fully immersed in WordPress and as the CEO of 11 Online, a full service digital agency, he and his team build, fix, and maintain websites for their clients.
WordPress aside, he is a lover of cinema and has an active family life which includes his wife, daughter, twin toddler boys, and their neurotic dog, Rafa.
Benjamin, a full stack Web Developer since 2012, is tackling many firsts this year both as a new hire at Flywheel as a Happiness Engineer and making the long cross-country trip from Portland, Oregon to speak at WordCamp Grand Rapids. Aside from that, he can often be found working on both the front and back end of websites as well as handling content migration, DevOps, and the complexities of infrastructure.
A front end web developer, writer, and analyst with experience working for marketing agencies in the Metro Detroit area, RJ has 5 years experience with WordPress both as a user and developer. He’s thorough and smart and is currently applying these skills to his job at American Expedition Vehicles as well as helping out Girl Develop It Detroit, a nonprofit organization that exists to provide affordable and judgment-free opportunities for women interested in learning web and software development, as an instructor and teaching assistant.
A native of Princeton, New Jersey, Andrew is a tenured professor of archeology at Marshall College. He successfully protected the Ark of the Covenant, saved innocent lives, and found the Holy Grail! …Oh wait, that’s Indiana Jones. Andrew Norcross writes code, builds fancy things for the interweb, and drinks an absurd amount of coffee. He currently works at Liquid Web and lives in Florida with his two adorable rescue dogs.
Michelle used her education in Visual Communication, with minors in Psychology and Sociology, to build her business as an independent graphic designer and front-end developer based out of Minneapolis. Growing these skills, she has been able to move into front-end development and user experience design where she focuses on solving tangible problems and achieving real, people-driven goals through a strategy-based approach to design.
Fortunately for us, she is not all work and no play. Passionately active in the open source community, she can frequently be found speaking, volunteering, and organizing various events and workshops around the country.
Agathon began back in 1999 as a small team of people united by the conviction that the best job is the one you love doing. We wake up each morning ready to get started, and dream about solutions in our sleep. Too many other companies were clearly doing web development and hosting for a quick buck and it showed. They knew with hard work and a commitment to quality that they could do better, both as developers and as web hosts.
Today that belief has been proven. With nearly 20 years in business, hundreds of happy clients, and small, strong team, Agathon has proven that doing good can pay off.
Global Sponsor: BoldGrid
BoldGrid works as a suite of plugins for WordPress to add a simple drag and drop website builder experience to the already powerful application. BoldGrid circumvents the steep learning curve innate with WordPress by making it intuitive and easier to use with features like drag and drop design, free pre-built themes, and more.
Global Sponsor: Bluehost
Bluehost is a leading web hosting solutions company. Since their founding in 2003, Bluehost has continually innovated new ways to deliver on their mission: to empower people to fully harness the web. Based in Orem, Utah, they provide comprehensive tools to millions of users throughout the world so anyone, novice or pro, can get on the web and thrive with their web hosting packages.
We’re happy to announce that WordCamp Grand Rapids is officially on the calendar!
WordCamp Grand Rapids will be June 30, 2018 at the Pew Campus of Grand Valley State University.
Subscribe using the form in the sidebar to stay up to date on the most recent news. We’ll be keeping you posted on all the details over the coming months, including speaker submissions, ticket sales and more!
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, please see here:
Cookie Policy
