There are quite literally hundreds of people to thank for the fun and success of WordCamp LAX this past weekend. It takes so much work to pull a WordCamp together, and we were only able to do so because of all the help we had pulling it off, both on stage and behind the scenes.
First, thank you to every single person who attended WordCamp LAX. If you hadn’t bought tickets, supported us, and shown up, our event never would have happened. Thank you for being a part of it, thank you for making new friends and connections, thank you for getting inspired to start new projects, thank you for sharing your experiences with family and friends.
Thank you to Cami Kaos and Andrea Middleton for their patience, support, help, and advice. These two do an amazing job of coordinating the efforts of local WordCamp teams the world over.
Thank you to each and every one of our sponsors, who not only provided the budget to make WordCamp possible, but who also provide help, support, useful products and services, and a sense of community.
Huge, huge thanks going out to all of our volunteers who rocked WordCamp like it was their jobs. Thank you for making sure registration ran smoothly, Happiness Bar patrons were helped, rooms were monitored, talks were recorded to video, speakers were kept on schedule, chairs were folded and unfolded, trash was cleaned up, and an endless assortment of boring, thankless tasks were tackled with enthusiasm and pride.
Thank you to our speakers, who not only volunteered the time they spent preparing and giving their talks, but many of whom also paid their own travel and hotel expenses in order to be at our Camp. Thank you for being generous with your time and with your invaluable knowledge.
Big thanks to our volunteer organizers, who took whole pieces of WordCamp LAX off our plates and made them even better than we ever could have. Thanks to Steve Zehngut for organizing the Business Workshop, Chris Ford for organizing the Design Workshop, Gregg Franklin for teaching the Beginner Workshop, Grace Park for organizing the speaker dinner, and Sé Reed for organizing a pretty epic after party.
Thank you to Greg Douglas for designing signage, schedules, stickers, tshirts, bags, and our web site.
And I’d like to personally send a big thank you to my fellow co-organizers, Alex Vasquez, Nathan Tyler, and Ryan Cowles – not just for helping to get things organized, but also for setting aside sleep and personal lives to make it all happen and for keeping a sense of humor even when things were going all wrong. It was a real slice, but let’s never run around in lawn sprinklers with all the tshirts again, k?
I know that for many of you, WordCamp LAX was your very first WordCamp. I hope you learned why we all love our community so much and are so proud to be part of it. Don’t forget that we stay connected throughout the year at meetups, in online groups, and with coworking sessions. Stay connected by getting involved in the community.
Now, who’s up for helping plan 2015?
Thom Meredith. With more than 18 years of experience in web development, digital workflow and communication design, Thom Meredith has served as art director for Looking, managing projects for Warner Bros., SONY and the Los Angeles Public Library; as interactive and print designer for the Los Angeles Times Magazine, overseeing the website, iPad app and print production; and as a solution architect and interaction designer at his own design and technology firm on projects for RE/MAX, Edmunds.com, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Kaiser, Nestle and Wikipedia. He serves on committees for the Los Angeles chapter of the AIGA and currently teaches interaction design and development at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
Robert Palmer is a digital problem solver in San Diego, California. After a decade of in-house and agency work for the creators of newspapers, magazines, television, hardware, software, sporting equipment, industrial products, and tract housing, he started his own web development and graphic design company in 2007. He has hand-crafted websites, WordPress themes, applications, identities, and technical illustrations for startups and Fortune 50 companies alike. He lives with his amazing wife Michelle, and works from home with their two cats, who are only occasionally helpful.
Greg Douglas is the Founder and Creative Director of Premium Interactive based in Hollywood CA. (http://www.premiuminteractive.com) An active member of the Los Angeles and Southern California WordPress community, Greg is the co-organizer of the popular Hollywood WordPress meetup group (hollywoodwp.com).
James Archer is the Chief Creative Officer for Crowd Favorite. He’s a future-focused optimist who loves identifying problems and designing solutions for companies that make a difference. Over the years he’s worked for clients like Microsoft, Motorola, Walmart, and Yahoo, and projects he’s worked on have appeared in U.S. News & World Report, Fast Company, Businessweek, Entrepreneur, The New York Times, AdAge, NPR, and others.
Brian Bourn is the chief executive at Bourn Creative, a full service design company and Genesis recommended developer in Sacramento, California. He also co-organizes the Sacramento WordPress Meetup Group.
Bryan Monzon has worked for Fifty & Fifty since 2010. Starting out as solely a designer, he eventually made the rare jump to full time developer. He manages a small team of six developers as they build solutions, both large and small, for non-profits around the world.
Taylor Aldridge has over 20 years of design and communication experience, with the last decade spent as the Creative Director for one of America’s largest food distribution companies. He is adept at motivating and inspiring creative teams and obtaining the highest quality design while still achieving targeted business objectives. Taylor’s expertise is creating communicative designs that are directly tied to enhancing usability.
Jessica Barnard is the Designer & Developer behind The Pixelista, a creative agency specializing in business branding and WordPress web development. Jessica has been making the internet more attractive since 2008, and her passion is working with small, women-owned businesses.
Anne McColl helps brands find the right words + pictures to tell their story. As The Best D@mn Copywriter, she works with a slew of agencies, studios and businesses and has had the pleasure of collaborating with amazing brands including Four Seasons, Hawaii Visitors Bureau, TurboTax, San Diego Zoo, eBay, PETCO, WD-40 and Rubio’s Fish Tacos. When she’s not surfing the Internet she can often be found surfing the juicy waves in San Diego. @annemccoll everywhere. AnneMcColl.com
Steve Zehngut founded 
Chris Lema has been managing high performers and overseeing new product development for twenty years. 
Jennifer Bourn is the Creative Director and Digital Strategist for
Cody Landefeld is passionate about helping organizations solve problems creatively. He is a user experience problem solver by nature and has over 10 years of experience in the creative field. He currently leads the team at 
Karim Marucchi is the Founder and Chairman of the 
Blossom Wright has been working with creative teams since 1997 in the Film and Music Industries. She enjoys the challenge of balancing the business and technical needs of a project while maintaining a stimulating creative environment, where collaboration amongst team members and departments is encouraged.
Kevin Michael Gray is the founder of 
Dre Armeda is an old-timer, he has been using WordPress since 2004. You may know Dre as one of the Co-Founders of Sucuri Inc. where he was CEO from 2010-2014. These days you’ll find Dre on the mat practicing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, or on the ball fields with his girls!
Robert Griffin started in the Mortgage/Real Estate industry in 1996 as a loan processor. He became licensed in 2000 to further pursue a career in real estate and by 2003 he was a Branch Manager for Direct Lender. In 2004 he Co-Founded and launched Catalyst Investment Solutions. Robert started the BPO/REO division in 2007 to specialize in distressed properties. He enjoyed the fast-paced environment of working with banks, lending institutions and asset managers, which utilize his analytical mindset and extensive operational skills in providing a solid foundation that guides his entrepreneurial instincts and enthusiasm.
Wes Chyrchel has been building websites for 17 years. He has worked with WordPress since 2006 and exclusively with WordPress, since 2008. He is passionate about creating great websites and personal customer experiences for visitors and his clients. Wes loves to talk about the business of web development and is committed to making his clients successful.
Nathan Tyler is the Principal and Lead Developer at 
With a graduate degree in psychology, Jeff Turner looks beyond the “how” of social and internet technologies to get to the “why” that unleashes their true power. He applies the beauty and science of creative communications not just to his own organizations, but to those of his clients. His insight has helped his companies and clients achieve measurable, practical, real-life success … time and time again. As founder and CEO, he led his former company, J.J. Grace to Inc. Magazine’s list of the 500 Fastest-Growing Companies in America and was at its helm when it won Cisco’s “Growing With Technology” award, is the former President at Zeek Interactive, and the founder of RealEstateShows.com. He is currently the President of RealSatisfied North America, a fast growing real estate brand management tool, is Chairman of the Board at Mothers Fighting For Others, a charity dedicated to educating orphaned Kenyan girls, and serves on the Board of Directors for Aumnia, a full service mobile application development company.
Jeff Zinn started web development in the mid 1990s. In 2004 he founded Pixel Jar with Brandon Dove, a custom web development firm in Orange County, CA that began specializing in WordPress work in 2007. Early in 2014 Pixel Jar was folded into the Crowd Favorite family where he currently works.
Lisa Tsou has been helping technology and new media startups raise money since she graduated from law school in 1997. Since then, she’s spent time on Wall Street working on financings for companies like DoubleClick, TheKnot.com, and Mapquest and done numerous acquisitions of websites like ApartmentRatings.com, DoItYourself.com and BBOnline.com.
Bob Watson is the co-founder with his wife, Kathy Kilingaman, of the highly acclaimed Social Media Mastermind Orange County – SMMOC – 5 years running on Saturday mornings. SMMOC is a free, facilitated discussion focusing on the internet, technology and social media.
Gregg Franklin will kick off the day with a 4-hour introduction to WordPress. Gregg is a WordPress Developer and team member over at ServerPress LLC, the creators of Desktop Server – and all-around awesome and great guy. We suspect he walks around with a superhero costume under his clothes. He’ll cover setting up a local copy of WordPress, then will walk you through posts, pages, categories, tags, menus, and widgets.
Adam Silver will explain themes, theme frameworks, and child themes so that you can get your WordPress site looking just the way you want and decipher many of the conversations happening in the WordPress community. He’s also a podcaster and a talented dancer, as Facebook videos have attested. Adam owns and operates Silver Lining Productions and spends his days working as a social media manager, website developer, and photographer.
Lucy Beer will tell you everything you need to know about plugins – how to find them, evaluate them, install them, and configure them. She’ll also share some of her plugin recommendations so you’ll have some great plugins to get started with. You’ll also get a chance to check out Lucy’s stylish haircut – the result of having shaved her head for the St. Baldrick’s Foundation to raise money to conquer childhood cancer. Lucy has been using WordPress since 2004 and teaches people how to use WordPress for a living.
Suzette Franck will cover making and storing backups of your site, and also some basic security measures you can take to keep your site safe. Suzette’s a WordPress Evangelist at Media Temple, an LA-based hosting company and all-around terrific WordCamp speaker. If you’ve attended any of our local meetups or pretty much any WordCamp ever, chances are that you’ve run into Suzette! She jet-sets all around the country spreading the WordPress love!
Philip Artinyan is going to explain hosting and domains. Philip is a part of the SiteGround Customer Service team and he’ll be stepping workshop attendees through choosing a reliable host – what to look for in a hosting company, what your hosting options are, and when to use them. He’ll also go over how to choose and register a great domain name.
Shaimoom Newaz an artist, musician and coder and has a particular fondness for CSS. He’ll be speaking on a starter theme workflow that involves such fancy things as Roots, GitHub, Grunt, and Bootstrap. And if all that sounds scary to you, well, let me just assure you that Shaimoom will show you how he accomplishes all that without getting too deep into code. Create custom themes with less bloat and easy deployment.
Roy Sivan has been using WordPress since something like version 0 and has built out his fair share of WordPress sites. Currently, he just likes to take WordPress and make it do incredible amazing stuff nobody else thinks is even possible. He’ll be speaking on using WordPress as an application framework to build out client-side and single-page applications. Maybe a little bit of his awesomeness will rub off on you.
Matthew Boynes is lead developer at Alley Interactive. He loves solving complex problems with WordPress and helping others to get more from WordPress. He’ll be speaking on turbo-charing WP_Query so that you can build complex queries and super amazing sites without taking a big performance hit.
Konstantin Obenland is really tall. And also probably really sick and tired of people talking about how tall he is. He’s also a core contributor and was backup lead and theme developer for some recent themes you may have heard of like Twenty Thirteen and Twenty Fourteen. And he loves Dr. Pepper. He’ll be speaking on the seven defined philosophies of WordPress core development and how these philosophies shape every decision made about WordPress.
Shanta Nathwani is an IT and Social Media Consultant and also an Instructor in Web Design and CCIT Capstone at Sheridan College. She’ll be speaking about how WordPress helps non-profits get the most out of their web site budgets and encourages members of their organizations to contribute content.
Dave Jesch, owner of one of the most amazing ‘staches this side of the Mississippi, is the Principle and CTO at SpectrOMTech.com. He’s a full stack developer who works with stability and scalability in mind. He’ll be speaking on writing code that scales for WordPress plugins and themes. His tips will come in handy for building out high traffic sites and also for developers who want to release plugins and themes.
Sé Reed has a special place in her heart for small business owners. In addition to her work helping out small business owners with their websites, she also does all sorts of WordPress-y stuff and is a musician. She’ll be showing us an awesome combo of plugins that small business owners can use to take their websites from basic to bada$$ without having to wrestle with code.
david t pisarra is a regular columnist for the Santa Monica Daily Press, a contributor to the Huffington Post and the Good Men Project, and author of 5 books. He’s also got a podcast – Men’s Family Law. No stranger to producing content on a deadline, he’ll be speaking on creating and using editorial calendars to take the hassle out of blogging and podcasting.
Trevor Wolter oversees all testing at Zeek Interactive. He’ll be speaking on testing for independent developers and freelancers. If that’s you, you know you’ve got to wear a lot of different hats, but Trevor will convince you that your tester hat is an important one for making sure your code works as expected and that client and user expectations are met and exceeded.
Gary Magnone loves craft beer, cocktails, and coffee, but more importantly, people, he’s a digital marketing consultant and entrepreneur. He launched Highrise in 2012 and helps his clients drive traffic, leads and revenue. He’ll be speaking on search engine optimization in 2014 – a world where Google is constantly changing and SEO is more nuanced than ever. He’ll also cover some WordPress-specific tips, tools and tricks for maximizing your site’s reach.
Joe Chellman thinks he probably started using WordPress before Roy Sivan. He’s an experienced builder of themes and plugins, author of Introducing WordPress: Learn by Video on Peachpit, and author of several JavaScript titles on Lynda.com. He also chose the title of Supreme Dictator for Life to describe his role at Shoofly Development and Design. He’ll be talking about version control, specifically Git, and why you should be using it.