As an experienced Internet marketing entrepreneur, consultant, speaker, and author, Brian has spent much of the past two decades helping companies excel on the Internet. His latest book, Content Marketing Ideas, has been highly praised by critics. He’s the head of well-established brands such as Uniseo (a boutique Internet marketing agency) and RedstoneX.com (a web design and online marketing company), where he brings a hype-free, seasoned approach to working with clients. You may have caught his appearances on CTV News or local radio shows. He writes about SEO, content marketing, social media, business, and entrepreneurship, among other topics. His work has been used by USA Today, ABC News, Social Media Today, Search Engine Journal, and other prominent sources. Brian holds two Master’s degrees, has taught university courses, and provides training services on Internet marketing. His love affair with WordPress began in 2005 when he started with version 1.6!

Follow @brianrotsztein on Twitter.

Brian will be giving a talk titled “Use Content Marketing to Better Reach Your Ideal Audience“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

I like the automatic updating feature.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

Thanks to WordPress, my companies and clients have been able to thrive. We specialize in WordPress and I appreciate what the software has done for us. As such, I’d like to give back to the community and help keep it strong by giving a talk.

What is your talk going to be about?

I will be highlighting some key ideas with respect to content marketing that anyone who uses WordPress for blogging or business should be using. Attendees will have clear takeaways to implement right after the session.

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

The right content can grow an audience… but how do you determine what the right content is? Find out!

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

I’ve been to every WordCamp in Montreal and many of the meetups. The organizing team is comprised of volunteers and they always do a great job. It’s a model to follow and inspiring.

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

I’d love to have front-end editing.

Dana has over 10 years of experience in Marketing, Communication, and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). She has worked on many exciting marketing and community projects with industry leaders in retail (like Starbucks), IT (like ITS and babyTEL) and NGO’s (like AFDC).

She’s inspired by innovation and technology and how it changes the human experience. She works in companies that make a positive impact on the world. She loves collaborating with passionate team members on projects as a customer advocate.

She sets marketing strategy according to their business goals and works with her design and development team to plan out project sprints to make sure they’re on track to achieve them. Having ideas is the fun part, weeding through these ideas and creating a project plan out of them and see them come to life is even more fun!

She also works closely with the sales team to talk to customers and partners and get testimonials, case studies and feedback to improve the company’s marketing efforts.

Follow @DizzyD7 on Twitter.

Dana will be giving a talk titled “How to Create a Website that Doesn’t Suck (Using SMART Objectives, Personas and Wireframes)“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

Streamlined plugin updates

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

It was exciting to be part of such an awesome event with developers, marketers, designers and bloggers. I look forward to sharing my learnings with everyone and learn from the other speakers and attendees

What is your talk going to be about?

How to create a website that doesn’t suck (using SMART objectives, personas and wireframes).

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

I would love attendees to be able to set up a web strategy so that their website will be successful in achieving their desired objectives – whatever they may be.

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

A variety of developers, designers, etc.

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

Better GA integration – Some plugins are available but not effective the ability to easily customize different pages of the same theme

Luca Sartoni is a media professional with more than a decade of technical and marketing background. Thanks to his extensive experience in different business environments, from SMEs to large corporate projects, Luca helps companies scale up their business adopting data driven strategies. He does not believe in Santa Claus, magical spells and everything that is not backed up by facts. Luca is a Growth Engineer at Automattic.

Follow @lucasartoni on Twitter.

Luca will be giving a talk titled “Why the Plumber Always Wins“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

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Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

WordCamp Montreal is a must-be event. I was there last year and I had such a nice experience that I totally wanted to be there again this year. What a great community!

What is your talk going to be about?

I’ll be analyzing why a plumber can afford not to have a site, not to have any personal branding, not to do networking and still have a strong negotiation power and excel in their business. I will teach WordPress freelances how to integrate plumber strategies in their marketing.

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

Being able to raise their prices, get better client, provide more value.

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

I’m inspired by all the WorsPress contributors who give a love of their time and effort to strengthen the community itself.

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

Instant install and better media management.

Andrea is a writer, translator, information designer and all-around WordPress enthusiast.

She started using WordPress in 2013 and in two short years, went from knowing nothing to using WordPress 60 hours a week for a variety of projects and clients.

Follow @andreazoellner on Twitter.

Andrea will be giving a talk titled “How I Made a Career Using WordPress Without Knowing a Line of Code“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

This might sound silly, but I was pretty excited about Emoji support. I’m sure there are far more crucial and important updates to WordPress, but being able to use the same vaguely meaningful drawings across all my platforms has been a revelation.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

When the call for speakers went out, several colleagues and friends encouraged me to apply. I had some ideas for Beginner Track topics, but I was terrified at the thought of being a presenter. But I didn’t want to let feelings of inadequacy keep me from giving it a shot though, and that’s exactly what my talk is about.

What is your talk going to be about?

In general, I fall into the content end of the WordPress spectrum. But in my experience, communications professionals and writers have a lot to contribute to the tech industry. I want to encourage beginners who think using WordPress professionally or learning to code is beyond them. I took a chance and pivoted my career towards more technical roles over a year ago and discovered it’s possible to leverage your unique skill-set for all sorts of WordPress-related projects.

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

If people are curious about the tech industry but afraid of the technical learning curve, I’m hoping they’ll feel encouraged and empowered by my talk. I want them to think: “Hey, I CAN do this”.

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

I’m going to use this opportunity to highlight the tremendous work of fellow speaker Kathryn Presner (I hope you’re going to see her talk!). She’s a Happiness Engineer at Automattic and has encouraged me and many others to hone their skills, learn to code and even become WordCamp speakers. She’s also involved in the Montreal grassroots initiatives Girl Geeks and Ladies Learning Code, mentoring young women to get involved in the tech industry.

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

While this goes against everything I preach, I’m terrible at keeping up a regular blogging schedule. I need a WordPress bot that threatens to post a really embarrassing blog post if I miss a post day. That fear would be motivation enough.

And someone should figure out how to make a portmanteau of the words feature and future. It’s a puzzler.

Shanta R. Nathwani is a Web Design and Information Architecture Consultant as well as an Instructor in Web Design and CCIT Capstone at Sheridan College, located in Oakville, Ontario, Canada which includes teaching WordPress. The ICCIT program is a joint program with the University of Toronto at Mississauga. She teaches students and small businesses how to use their websites and social media to increase their online presence leading to increased revenues and improved customer service. She has assisted companies to incorporate social media in the real estate, financial, non-profit, education and technical fields to name a few. She is from Toronto, Ontario, but now lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Follow @ShantaDotCa on Twitter.

Shanta will be giving a talk titled “Posts vs. Pages & Categories vs. Tags“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

Implementing Theme Customizations. Makes it so much easier to make small changes to your themes without learning how to code.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I missed the deadline last year and wasn’t going to miss another. Been years since I’ve been to Montreal and miss the city.

What is your talk going to be about?

Content Architecture helps find the focus of your website as well as how to lead visitors through your website to find what they seek.

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

A starting point for organizing your content. It may not solve everything, but this will help you to narrow down what should be on your site and what shouldn’t. This is a spiritual journey in many cases and you won’t solve it in one sitting. This stuff takes time. You’ll walk away with a lot of post-it notes!

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

Al Davis inspired me to do my WordCamp Tour last year and this year. Now I’m crowdfunding my way across the continent! The other person that I really enjoy seeing is Mendel Kurland. He’s easy going and is supportive of everyone in the community, no matter who they are.

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

I would love to have WordPress be capable of becoming a full-blown LMS for academics, not just single students here and there. Long shot I know, but not impossible for WordPress.

Shawn is a partner at Fivesense Technologies in Ottawa, Canada. A lifelong computer geek, Shawn wrote his first database application at the age of 12, and ran a bulletin board system while in high school. He has been a web developer since 1995, and a WordPress developer since 2011. He has experience building applications for clients in government, non-profit and the private sector in both Canada and the United States.

Follow @shawnhooper on Twitter

Shawn will be giving a talk titled “WP-CLI: Save Time by Managing WordPress from the Command Line“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

From a developer’s point of the view: The updates to WP_Query. The improvements made in the last year have allowed you to perform much more complicated queries against the database.

From a user’s perspective: The updates to the plugin management screens. They’ve made finding, and updating, your plugins so much more pleasant.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

Montreal is full of active members of the WordPress community, who have been really supportive of the community in Ottawa. It’s nice to give back.

What is your talk going to be about?

I’m going to be talking about using the WP-CLI tools to manage your sites from the command line. I’ll be teaching you how to install it, and then going through my favourite features. I don’t want to give too much away, but you can do a lot with it.

This talk isn’t only for developers, but also for theme designers, and those who implement sites using existing themes and plugins.

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

I want everyone to come away with the tricks that will help save them hours of time when designing, developing and managing their sites.

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

Everyone who spends time to give back to the WordPress project. Whether you’re writing code, testing patches, updating documentation, running local meetups or helping others in the support forums, you’re the ones who make WordPress so great.

Who do I follow? That’s a long list. My WordPress people list on Twitter has over 400 people in it.

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

I’m really looking forward to the WordPress REST API to be integrated into core. I think that’s really going to solidify WordPress as an application framework, leading our favourite open source project to be used in ways we haven’t yet dreamed of.

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.

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.

Follow @digibomb on Twitter.

Brendan will be giving a talk titled “How to A/B Test with WordPress: Conversions Aren’t Just for Landing Pages“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

As a marketing and social guy I would have to say my fave improvements would be post embeds for stuff like Tumblr and more specifically Kickstarter. And talking social, there has been great improvements made to PressThis.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

Same reason I have always participated at WordCamp’s across NA for the last 6yrs – to give back to the community. WordPress has always been a huge part of my “life” so the opportunity to help those who help me is great.

What is your talk going to be about?

I’ll be talking about best practices for integrating A/B testing tools and plugins like Visual Web Optimizer and Optimizely. I’ll touch a bit on marketing, but really this is about how to properly integrate these tools, embed tracking codes, work with template pages, etc.

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

I love cliches, because generally they are true – meaning they come from a genuine place. That being said I want people to walk away as coder, designer, or publisher with a real understanding that nothing we do online is for us, it is for those we intend to engage with. Basically, don’t code or design your site based on what you like or want, do it for you audience! This is why A/B testing is so crucial and it is so underused beyond marketing pages.

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

That’s a loaded question :) As a parent you learn to not pick favourites, at least you don’t verbalize it. There are great people everywhere doing great things in the community. The question is really more a matter of what “topics” I follow and who is most active at that time in those areas as oppose to who I “follow”. So anything theme related or cross-device and platform is whats interests me the most. I’m inspired by those that do great things.

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

Hmm. Good question. When asked this question last year I said responsive. This year I would have to say that I think improvements can still be made to WordPress when it comes to the responsive web. But, considering my talk this year I would say that the ability to test more would be cool. A built-in way to weight pages by traffic would be cool.