We are excited to announce another amazing speaker for our line-up, Jesse Friedman.
Jesse Friedman is a veteran WordPress developer. In 2012 he wrote the “Web Designers Guide to WordPress”. With years of a experience as a speaker and a Professor at Johnson & Wales University he delivers impactful and educational talks. Currently Jesse is the Director of Innovation at BruteProtect. Jesse co-organizes local WordPress meetups, and is very active in the community. He works closely with his students and others to share knowledge and bring forth a better future for web design and development.

He will be presenting on UX of Real-Time Site Personalization. Here’s what he says about his talk:

Last year, I started building what I like to call “Dynamic Web Environments”, which are way more than just websites. My idea was to create a web environment that changes and molds itself, much like how responsive websites mold to a device, but this time to a users needs. The trick is to change the website before the user asks for it, or even before they know what they want. An experienced marketer can isolate and leverage patterns through good user data. It’s often easy to predict marketing trends around user interactions. If I buy a pair of jeans on a website, it’s likely I need a pair of shoes to go with it. Web designers, developers and marketers have been “up-selling” for a while now. This is not enough; we need to push ourselves to the next level. With a good developer, some great data and a little imagination you can start delivering impactful, intuitive, personalized websites. Websites, that bring content to users rather than making them hunt and peck for it.

If you blog, then you should be building an email list. Period. In this talk, we'll uncover ways you can grow your audience, keep them coming back again and again, and form strong relationships with your readers – by moving your blog to your readers' inbox.

Brian Casel is a web designer and entrepreneur based in Norwalk, CT. He’s also the author of Design For Conversions, and blogs regularly at casjam.com. Connect with Brian on Twitter: @CasJam

Incredible speakers keep joining our team to make WordCamp Connecticut into a real can’t miss event. Our newest speaker to sign on is Jake Goldman. Jake is the President of 10up, a full service digital agency that imagines, builds, and grows amazing websites with WordPress. At 10up, Jake serves brand name clients like TechCrunch, ESPN, Consumer Reports, NBC Universal, and Google. In less than 3 years, Jake built 10up from 1 to more than 50 full time employees.

Jake has been building websites since the mid 90’s, and has built web-based solutions for Fortune 500 companies, the U.S. Navy, major universities, and high profile non-profits. He has been quoted on publications like c|net, written for Smashing Magazine, taught at Boston University, and presented at conferences around the country. He is a core contributor to WordPress, maintains some highly rated WordPress plug-ins, and organizes the Sacramento WordPress Meetup.

His presentation will be on Leveraging WordPress’s HTML5 Media Player

Lost in all the conversation about the post format “shuffle” in WordPress 3.6 was the addition of MediaElement.js to core, an incredibly elegant, light weight media player for video and audio assets. MediaElement.js is an HTML5 video and audio player that falls back to Flash on unsupported devices. It can be easily skinned, and has a nice little JavaScript API to control its behavior (say, auto playing a video when the visitor switches to a tab or scrolls down to a certain point on the page). If you’re still using a third party video player like JW Player, want to jazz up your product site with some local video, or just skin the native video player to fit your theme, this talk is for you!

We are proud to announce another incredible speaker that will be joining us at WordCamp CT- Alex Miranda, a seasoned WordPress SEO and Digital Marketing guru at Marknet Group Inc.  Alex has been optimizing websites and getting them to rank on top of Google since 1998.

We’re proud to announce one of our first headline speakers at WordCamp 2014 – Boone Gorges. Boone is an independent software developer and consultant, specializing in WordPress plugins. He is a Lead Developer for BuddyPress, and oversees development on such projects as Commons In A Box, Anthologize, and Participad. Boone is a former academic, and most of his clients are universities and other non-profit institutions. In his spare time, he is a competitive crossword solver, a jazz pianist, and an afficianado of pizza and barbecue. He lives in New York City with his wife and son, and blogs at Teleogistic.

Boone will be presenting on “Across The Social Continuum: Three Surprising Sites Powered by BuddyPress”. For those who haven’t used it, BuddyPress is a plugin that allows you to easily build a social community within your WordPress website. Boone is renowned for being an amazing presenter, and for those of us who saw him in October at the WordPress Stamford Meetup, we can all attest to that.