Jonathan Howard
Topic: Cracking the Tribal Code – create strong emotional bonds among online communities
Former archaeologist, strategic planner at major advertising agencies, theatre trainer and improviser. Now teaching creativity, leadership and strategy to startups, ad agencies and others.
Jonathan surprises and delights us always with his creativity and with the insights from marketing that he luckily shares with his audience. As our keynote speaker he will be a highlight of WordCamp Riga.
His presentation will be valuable for anyone who wants to build a user base, follower base or community, either for yourself or for your clients.
Carlo Becchi
Topic: The Corporate WordPress Experience.
The speech will give an insight of the activities of designing, developing and managing WordPress websites for corporate clients, a rewarding market full of opportunities and challenges.
Carlo is Partner & Head of Development of 77Agency, an award-winning independent full-service digital agency founded in 2003, headquartered in London with offices in Riga, Milan, Rome, Frankfurt, Moscow and Los Angeles.
Italian, he moved to Latvia in 2010 to lead the development team for Client’s Products in the agency’s central Research & Development center, opened in Riga in 2006. WordPress is a key platform for 77Agency’s web development activities.
Toms Vārpiņš
Topic: The Benefits of Messaging
A common issue businesses have with their customers is miscommunication or to be more precise lack of understanding what customers actually want. The presentation will focus on identifying the problem audience has and how to solve it in a manner that makes sense.
Doer of things at tawk.to with a passion for UX and advocate of making sense. Previous experience in the industry ranges from client support, understanding business inefficiencies and solving them with software as well as helping teams deliver projects of different scales.
Kaspars Dambis
Topic: How to Write Better Code Automatically
Learn how to quickly and easily add test, coding standard and continuous integration (CI) support to your WordPress theme or plugin.
Bio: Kaspars is a professional WordPress developer and core contributor working at XWP from home in Riga solving the toughest web publishing challenges for some of the largest online publishers. He has created many free and paid WordPress plugins, themes and developer tools, and has been blogging about all of that at https://kaspars.net since 2007.
Frank Leusing
Topic: What you need to know to sell web design to the German market. And how to avoid expensive errors.
The German web design market is huge and very attractive for many foreign agencies and freelancers. But make sure you know the rules and legal regulations of the German web design business to avoid a lot of trouble and unhappy clients.
Frank is webdesigner and WordPress developer from Münster, Germany.
Michael Kondurov
Topic: What You might not know about promoting & monetizing your site.
Bio: Michael Kondurov is a Platform Operations Lead at Lifestreet Media, what delivers breakthrough monetization levels for publishers and extraordinary volumes of engaged users for advertisers. He was a guest lecturer at Cal State University and Stanford University.
Michael has been within Lifestreet Media since the beginning and saw how technology evolved since then. He is excited about more and more sites are moving towards WordPress. Taking into account his expertise in Online marketing, Michael would like to share some knowledge on what strategies to use in order to promote your site and what monetization techniques are the most common right now.
Bjørn Johansen
Topic: Create and Maintain a Secure WP Environment
With more than 16 years of experience from the web industry, Bjørn has touched many areas such as development, consulting, training, project management, client support, and DevOps. Currently, he is a senior developer at Dekode, a WordPress.com VIP Service Partner agency in Norway.
At WordCamp Riga he will talk about the processes and layers to secure your WordPress environment. There will be ideas for all kinds of WordPress professionals (developers, project managers, site owners etc.) to pick up.
Karlis Ievins
Topic: Building a print-on-demand store with WordPress & WooCommerce
Bio: I’m an experienced web developer that enjoys getting deeply involved in all aspects of building and running online businesses – coding, new product development, designing user experience, marketing, strategy and project management. My primary focus is e-commerce software development.
Arunas Liuiza
Topic: WordPress child themes.
Bio: Arunas is an experienced WordPress plugin developer. He has been working with WordPress since version 2.6.3 and has developed a number of free, premium and custom plugins. Arunas has 14 years of experience in Web development and has been teaching at Kaunas College for 8 years. He is a WordPress Core Contributor, WordPress Kaunas Meetup co-organizer, WordCamp (Lithuania, Riga, Stockholm) speaker and one of the editors of the Lithuanian WordPress translation team.
Zane Eniņa
Topic: Let’s blog! (Or maybe not)
How to create a blog? Should you? What benefits does it bring? What problems you might face if you are “Just a User”.
Bio: Zane Eniņa is a communication and traveling professional. Her CV includes 15 years of work in a communication area in Latvia and 5 years of blogging around the world. Zane will share her experience traveling and blogging with WordPress.
Vova Feldman
Topic: How to Build a Sustainable Plugin or Theme Business in The Subscription Economy
Bio: A serial entrepreneur and full-stack developer who loves to turn dreams into reality. Passionate about helping fellow plugin & theme developers to become more data-driven and building prosperous subscription-based businesses while working on products with Freemius.com.
Justina Baskyte
Topic: Beginners guide to WooCommerce
Bio: I fell in love with WordPress more than 10 years ago and never looked back. Threw my economics diploma and job in retail through the window and started making websites. Today I am a Project Manager and a business owner, working mostly with WordPress. My area of specialization is e-commerce, so WooCommerce is my second love. I am also co-organizer and speaker of WordPress Meetup Kaunas, co-organizer of WordCamp Lithuania, a founding & current board member of Lithuanian WordPress users association KodoPoetai.lt, Locale Manager & GTE of lt_LT at WordPress.org, translator and validator of lt_LT at WordPress.com. Last, but not least, I am a Mom of two amazing kids! I am crazy about cats, baking, classic rock music, red color and all things geek. I am always positive, optimistic, curious and too much talking (even when playing poker).
Pēteris Jurčenko
Topic: Responsive charts in WordPress
Devoted UX (User Experience) designer, who strongly believes in the necessity of user-friendly websites, with a 10 year experience in the field of information technology and service.
I enjoy constantly learning something new and making sure that my team does it as well. Building my coworker competence and qualification in their field I consider to be one of my biggest day-to-day tasks.
As an acknowledged UX expert in Latvia for more than 5 years, I evangelise the importance of a user and manage to educate not just my clients, but the Latvian society as such.
At WordCamp Riga he will speak about data visualisation and responsive charts.
Jevgenijs (Jeff) Tihonovs
Topic: Communication across generations
Currently, there are 3 most economically active generations out there. X’es, Y’es and Z’s. Every generation is used to their preferred communication method and that becomes an issue for the whole corporate website community. I’m going to talk about several methods on how to combine various communication methods in one website and connect virtual world with real.
I’m with WordPress for a while and most of the time was a power user but without any IT background. Now I’m co-founder of It company in Delaware.