Speaker Spotlight: Brendan Sera-Shriar!

Brendan Sera-Shriar has been an interactive designer, developer, college and university professor, community manager, author, consultant, and professional speaker at some of the largest corporations and festivals in the world, including Microsoft, Mozilla Firefox, Sun Microsystems, WordCamp, BlogWorld, SXSW and more. His work has also appeared in TechCrunch, TechVibes, WordPress TV, and a host of other blogs. He was also featured in the October 2012 issue of Marketing Magazine.

Not only does Brendan help others build their businesses he has also founded a few himself, including StartupBump, Creer Magazine, and PressWork.

Despite being known best for his work as a WordPress designer, developer, and WordCamp speaker and organizer, Brendan’s best communications skills lie in his ability to help organizations understand how they can build communities around their products and services.

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Brendan will be giving a talk titled Build a Responsive WordPress Theme with Zurbs Foundation Framework.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

I wouldn’t exactly say that this improvement was implemented this year, however it has become more relevant – responsivity!

The ability to truly make a as site respond to screen sizes and resolutions is very very different than multi-screen design.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I have been involved with WordPress as a developer, designer, evangelist, teacher, organizer and more since version 1.2. Open source is all about giving back and helping others and WordCamp is a perfect opportunity to this with the community. On side note, as an ex organizer and veteran speaker at many a WordCamp – it’s in my blood!

What is your talk going to be about?

Responsive design is becoming an expected standard for web developers. Your website or blog needs to look good and function on all screens and devices all the time, and just choosing a “responsive” WordPress theme isn’t always the best choice. In this session you’ll learn how easy it is to integrate foundation.css into your WordPress theme and how to get added functionality from their jQuery and zepto libraries. We’ll also dive into the css to understand how “responsivity” works.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

That guy is AWESOME!

Joking aside, I want new and veteran WordPress developers and designers to walk away with understanding of the importance of design developing “responsive” on the modern web. Building responsive sites today is a must!

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

This might be cop out – but I’m most inspired by 1000’s of open sources out there pushing the limits of WordPress in an effort to continually make it better software for every type of user.

Who do I follow – that’s a tough question. It constantly changes as new “stuff” is being developed all the time.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

Well, that’s easy! I’d like to see all wp themes on .com and .org built on a responsive framework.