News

Topic: How Losing My Son Gave Birth to So Many Blessings

Originally from California, Alex now lives in Houston with his beautiful wife Marie and their cat Zeke. Having worked with WordPress since 2010, he got his real start by working as an Internet Marketer at a digital agency building WordPress sites for local SEO clients. Since then Alex has had the opportunity to work for some of the best WordPress companies in the community such as Pagely, Pantheon, and Valet (formerly WP Valet) where he had the opportunity to grow personally and professionally dealing with support, processes, partnerships, and site development. Currently he works at cPanel, Inc as a Scrum Master (Agile Coach) for an internet development team. He also leads efforts in Business Development over at Jilt.com, part of the SkyVerge family, in helping merchant store owners recover lost revenue due to abandoned cart orders. Growing up he has always had a passion for other people, whether be just talking to someone he just met or serving others by loving on them. The WordPress community has provided many opportunities to meet so many people and build relationships. If you see him walking around please do not hesitate to come up and say hello!

How did you get involved in WordPress?

I first started getting involved in WordPress back around 2007-2008’ish trying to make websites for my friends and family in church. I would use a template and add their content, photos, and use the pre-built cool features as the selling points for other people. In 2012 I started working as an Internet Marketer at an agency shop building WordPress sites for local SEO clients. This is where I learned a lot of the inner workings of WordPress since I was in charge of troubleshooting, learning how to make something happen for a website, and helping in mocking up websites for different projects.

After working at that agency, I have been blessed to have the opportunities to work for some of the best brand names in WordPress such as; Pagely, Pantheon, Valet (formerly WP Valet). Today I help lead Business Development efforts with Jilt.com, part of the SkyVerge family, with exploring different ways merchant owners can benefit from recovering lost revenue through our abandoned cart platform.

What do you do with WordPress?

As mentioned in the previous question, I am working with Jilt.com by helping build relationships and partnerships through various channels to figure out WooCommerce and EDD shop owners can use our platform to not only increase revenue, but provide a seamless experience for their customers.

In addition to that I have a small set of clients I do work for ranging from simple content updates to creating new websites and WordPress development. I enjoy meeting new people, learning about how WordPress has influenced their life, and what they do with it.

I also work as a Scrum Master at cPanel with an internal development team performing as an agile coach. Recently I have been working with our internal teams that development the WordPress installation module to provide feedback and feature requests from our users and the general public by posting on social media, speaking at conferences, and talking with people I meet.

What has your experience with the WordPress community been like?

There are several areas of my experience that touch the WordPress Community. The first one would have to be the companies I have worked for. I can honestly say that every job I have had since 2011 has involved using WordPress in some fashion. How many people can say that? Even if it’s a lot, I am proud to be part of that statistic! Providing support as a Customer Success Engineer for Pagely and Pantheon was fantastic, it was an incredible part of my career where I stretched myself more than I ever have in learning. I was able to attend WordCamps as volunteers, work sponsor booths representing companies, and meet amazing attendees and speakers who use WordPress everyday.

Other channels that I have had experience with includes WP Elevation with Troy Dean, speaking at cPanel Conference on “The Marriage Between cPanel and WordPress”, volunteering for WordCamps, and most recently having the chance to talk at WordCamp DFW.

Why did you want to speak at WordCamp DFW?

I originally signed up as a volunteer because I have never been to WordCamp DFW and my wife and I just moved to Houston two years ago. Then one day Marc and I were talking and I randomly asked him if they were looking for speakers, and he said yes. He told me the theme is inspiration, and I instantly thought of my journey this year with my wife. Honestly, I have a story to tell and WordCamp is such a great opportunity to share how using WordPress has help touch thousands of lives and provide Marie and I an outlet in dealing with our grief in the season of life.

There is no doubt in my mind that this talk will be intimate, sad, yet very powerful.

Why did you decide to speak on the passing of your son?

The story about our son involved using the skills I have developed which are primary based around WordPress. I wanted to share this with others and how my wife and I used WordPress as an outlet to grieve, share our thoughts, communicate through social media and more. It’s an impactful journey of changing lives and the fact that I have made a living using WordPress for myself and our family for good, is just as important to recognize it can be used in times of need and hardship provide the ability to invite others to come along side you in support.

What do you hope the audience gets from your talk?

Expanding on the previous question, I hope to communicate that WordPress is more than just a tool, but rather an experience that has the strength to have an impact and connect people together in their lives. I hope that they are touched in hearing our story. I hope that they walk away with the feeling that if a situation comes up in their life, there is a powerful community out there that wants to help.

Tickets are now on sale for this year’s WordCamp DFW held on Nov. 11-12. There are also plenty of opportunities to sponsor the event or help run it. We hope to see you there!

Topic: Chatbots: Why Your Business Must Adopt Conversation Based Marketing

Kevin Fontenot is the Director of Marketing at TrainedUp.Church. He also likes to refer to himself as a professional interneter. In the past, he was worked on all kinds of WordPress projects including building (and selling) a marketplace built using EDD. Kevin is passionate about helping organizations reach people with marketing that is actually engaging. He lives in Carrollton, TX, with his wife Brooke and their two dogs.

How did you get involved in WordPress?

My first experience with WP was building a site for an organization that I started. I had a tech background and had built static HTML & CSS websites before, but wanted something that was much easier to maintain. I ended up liking the experience so much that I started building WP websites for friends which eventually lead to building websites for clients and creating (and failing) a DIY website builder platform for churches with WP multisite.

What do you do with WordPress?

As a marketer who loves to get my hands dirty, I build a ton of pages using WP with both Divi and BeaverBuilder. In the past, I’ve built and sold a media marketplace website that I built using EDD and WP. I also run my personal website on WordPress as well as a side hustle that I’ve started on WP + Woo.

What has your experience with the WordPress community been like?

My only experience with the WP community has been in the BeaverBuilders Facebook group and it has been great. I love that the WP community is helpful and always willing, for the most part, to go out of their way to help someone learn.

Why did you want to speak at WordCamp DFW?

I love learning and with that, love to teach. There is a ton of bad and outdated marketing advice out there. I used to read all of it and got frustrated when it didn’t help to grow my business. Small businesses and freelancers have a unique advantage over large businesses in that they are closer to their customers. I want to help them leverage that.

Why did you decide to speak on chatbots?

Since taking on my role as Director of Marketing at TrainedUp earlier this year, we’ve seen huge growth thanks to conversational marketing. It’s the future of sales and marketing.

What do you hope the audience gets from your talk?

You don’t need to be a huge company to do marketing well. In fact, by implementing conversational marketing, you can grow your business while connecting with your customer in a way that will delight them and provide you with great feedback.

Tickets are now on sale for this year’s WordCamp DFW held on Nov. 11-12. There are also plenty of opportunities to sponsor the event or help run it. We hope to see you there!

Topic: The Future: Why Open Matters

Aaron is the WordPress Security Team lead, has been a regular contributor to WordPress for more than ten years, and is currently funded by GoDaddy to work full time on the WordPress open source project. He has over seventeen years of web development experience and worked with clients ranging from small local businesses to Google, Yahoo, Disney, and Harvard. He’s been called both a coffee snob and a beer snob, but considers both to be compliments. When not buried in code, he enjoys spending time with his wife and son, riding his motorcycle, and reading sci-fi/fantasy books.

How did you get involved in WordPress?

In 2007 I had been building client sites on WordPress for a couple years, when I ran across an issue in WordPress core that I had to patch for a client. In order to avoid the site breaking again on every update, I decided to learn how to get the fix into WordPress itself. When my code got committed, I was hooked. I’ve contributed to every release since.

What do you do with WordPress?

I lead the WordPress Security Team.

What has your experience with the WordPress community been like?

It’s changed a lot over the last ten years or so, but overall it’s been amazing. I love the way the community shares, encourages, and trains others rather than just competing against them.

Why did you want to speak at WordCamp DFW?

DFW is my local camp since there isn’t one in Oklahoma and I think that everyone has something to share. Something that they’ve learned from experience, a perspective they have that others don’t, or maybe a problem they faced and solved (or didn’t).

Why did you decide to speak on the open web?

I’m extremely passionate about the future of the web. I think it’s effect on the future of mankind is going to be enormous, but only if we can keep it open and accessible.

What do you hope the audience gets from your talk?

I hope they share some of passion and help keep the web open forever.

Tickets are now on sale for this year’s WordCamp DFW held on Nov. 11-12. There are also plenty of opportunities to sponsor the event or help run it. We hope to see you there!