Matt Johnson Interview

Matt JohnsonMatt Johnson is is co-founder and managing partner of Alley Interactive, a full-service web agency that works with large media companies and nonprofit organization. Matt is speaking on Content Migration: Beyond WXR at WordCamp Minneapolis.

What got you into working with WordPress?

I co-founded a firm called Alley Interactive that works on web projects for large media companies and other content producers. When we started Alley, Drupal was one of the only games in town for this kind of work. As WordPress began increasing in popularity with individual journalists for their own personal sites, we began to see increased demand to use it for actual newsroom operations, and eventually began building major client sites with it. It’s been a major positive feedback loop since then.
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Anthony D Paul Interview

Anthony D PaulAnthony D Paul is a user experience researcher, designer, and prototyper at EightShapes, offering strategic, design, and full-stack development skills to clients large and small, spanning government, non-profit, and commercial. Anthony is speaking on Lean Requirements, Without Skimping on the Meat at WordCamp Minneapolis.

What got you into working with WordPress?

I taught myself PHP by writing plugins for phpBB. WordPress was a natural progression with a similar plugin and templating system, and ultimately matured into a better system.
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David Laietta Interview

David LaiettaDavid Laietta is the owner of Orange Blossom Media, a web development and site health service and lead organizer of WordCamp Orlando. David is speaking on Remember to Breathe: Productivity Tips for Freelancers at WordCamp Minneapolis.

What got you into working with WordPress?

“I wanted to try my hand at affiliate marketing, as well as start my own blog talking about video games. I used to collect older games and consoles, and played a lot of terrible NES games while testing them out.

I had been building static websites for clients for years, and getting into WordPress made me realize how much easier it could be to continually update and edit content over time.”
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Dan Griffiths Interview

NAMEDan Griffiths is an obsessive WordPress developer since 2007, known for founding Redux Framework and as a core developer for Easy Digital Downloads. Dan is speaking on Staying Sane: Writing Compatible Code at WordCamp Minneapolis.

What got you into working with WordPress?

Necessity. I’ve been a developer since the late 80’s, but for most of that time I did predominantly Linux work. In 2007, I realized that I couldn’t depend on the government for my income anymore after getting out of the Marines, but I had no education to speak of and few marketable skills. I’d been playing with developing websites since day one of the Internet, but hadn’t considered trying to make a living off of it. WordPress seemed like a good starting point, so I finally took the leap and never looked back.
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A Thank You to our Lake Minnetonka Sponsors

We can’t say enough about how sponsors in the community showed up to support WordCamp Minneapolis. Thank You! Our Lake Minnetonka level sponsors include WooThemes, ServerPress, Sucuri, and the Prestige Conference.

woocommerce_logo
WooThemes is a proudly WordPress company of 50 fifty across sixteen countries. From humble beginnings selling a handful of commercial themes, Woo now offer the ultimate WordPress Toolkit of themes, plugins and extensions to help people build great things with WordPress, including WooCommerce. Proudly bootstrapped, work-life balance believers and passionate about prospering people.

ServerPress
ServerPress.com streamlines WordPress based web design and development with tools and tutorials to help you design, develop, and deploy WordPress solutions quickly. ServerPress.com’s award winning DesktopServer development tool is the only localhost server that integrates WordPress with Adobe® Dreamweaver® and Panic’s Coda with WYSIWYG features for theme design and web developer professionals. DesktopServer was given Editor’s Choice Award by independently reviewed WebHostMagazine and Buyer’s Guide. Creating local WordPress development test sites that work just like real world servers and deploying right from your desktop is simple with ServerPress.com’s suite of services.

sucuri
Sucuri prevents hackers from abusing your WordPress website, and offers professional response services to those already compromised. At Sucuri, our labs are dedicated to researching and thwarting the latest and emerging threats to websites like yours. Our team handles your security needs, so that you can get back to what you’re best at: running awesome WordPress websites. Passion is at the heart of everything we do, and we cut through the noise to provide you with complete security solutions. Our services are built around three defining principles – People. Process. Technology.

PRS-Prestige_Mpls-Logo
Prestige Conference is a premium business & career development conference geared towards small businesses, agencies, and freelancers operating in the digital marketplace. It’s all about the business behind making money with WordPress products & services, and it’s where you want to be when you’re ready to “level up” your biz.

We’re flying in some of the most successful entrepreneurs & company founders from around the country (and pulling in a couple talented locals) for our next event August 1st and 2nd in Minneapolis. Early bird tickets are on sale now, with in-person and livestream options available. As an extra bonus, all tickets include access to our session recordings for 6 months after the event. Speakers announced include the following:

Nancy Lyons, Owner & CEO of Clockwork
Jason Cohen, Founder & CTO of WP Engine
Lea Newman, Owner of BALANCE Wellness Coaching
Tony Perez, Co-Founder & CEO of Sucuri
Dre Armeda, VP of Operations at WebDevStudios
Shane Pearlman, Partner at Modern Tribe
Lisa Sabin-Wilson, Co-Owner & COO of WebDevStudios
Jennifer Bourn, Founder of Bourn Creative

Joe Dolson Interview

NAMEJoe Dolson is plug-in and theme developer, a contributing developer to WordPress, a web accessibility consultant, and most heavily involved with the Make WordPress Accessible team. Joe is speaking on Automating Accessibility at WordCamp Minneapolis.

What got you into working with WordPress?

Blogger.com. Basically, I’d built a blog using Blogger, and found it to be a horrible experience – so I needed to find something better. WordPress filled that slot very nicely.
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A Lake of the Woods Thank You

Pantheon is our Lake of the Woods level Sponsor. We are thankful for Pantheons sponsorship, and really appreciate how they were one of our early sponsors that jumped right in to support our event and community.

pantheon
Pantheon is the website management platform top developers, marketers, and IT use to build, launch and run all their WordPress websites. Pantheon includes all of the tools professional developers need to build best-practice sites—like staging environments, version control, backups and workflow. Powering 80,000+ sites with hundreds of millions of pageviews, Pantheon’s container-based infrastructure allows you to launch websites faster, without worrying about traffic spikes, security or performance. It’s free in development. You can scale in software on the same infrastructure from day one, and never touch a server again.

Niles Flores Interview

Nile FloresNile Flores is a sassy Southern Illinois mom who is also a WordPress designer and developer. She’s been helping the WordPress community for years… like since it’s beginning. Nile runs Blondish.net and All About WordPress. Niles is speaking on Why You Should Be Blogging at WordCamp Minneapolis.

What got you into working with WordPress?

I got into WordPress because it was being forked from b2 cafelog. I enjoyed using b2 cafelog, and the community back then was awesome. It was just a natural choice to make the change to a project that was going to keep continuing to be developed. 🙂
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Thank You Lake Superior Sponsors

Lake superior is the biggest lake around, and likewise, these local sponsors stepped up big. Thank you to LeadPages and Flywheel for believing in the WordPress community and supporting us to the max!

LeadPages
LeadPages is a lead and sales conversion platform. It’s the centerpiece of digital marketing campaigns that allow our customers to collect more high-quality leads and convert more of those leads into customers.

LeadPages is the only platform that captures leads and drives sales conversion via email, web pages, social media and SMS text messages. Our goal is to create insanely useful and beautiful tools that work almost instantly, make life easier, and eventually change our industry.

We believe compelling online marketing doesn’t need to be time consuming and tedious. Our mission is to take the best and latest of what’s been tested and proven in marketing, and create apps that just do it for our customers.

flywheel
Flywheel is a managed WordPress hosting platform built specifically for designers and creative agencies. Flywheel makes it simple to build, launch, and manage client sites with its easy-to-use dashboard built from the ground up for the modern web designer. With nightly backups, blazing-fast load times, WordPress-specific security, and an awesome support team full of WordPress developers, Flywheel helps thousands of designers across the world launch projects every day.