Sprekers

Michiel Heijmans

COO & partner at Yoast • SEO, UX, H2O & WordPress on a daily basis • Hates full inboxes

Started working with WordPress since Joost introduced me to it back in the days. Learned a lot from building websites myself and working at Yoast for the past years. Building a company on WordPress is a blast.

Laurent Maillard

28 years old belgian, I was born in Brussels, grow up in Brazil and now live in Luxembourg after completing a master in business administration (ICHEC).
After a couple of years working in a (traditional) marketing agency, I’ve founded AdoraWeb (adoraweb.lu) in 2013. My goal was very clear form the beginning: offer up-to-date results-driven marketing services in a market that is particularly outdated.
3 years later, I’ve never been so close to achieve this goal. I’ve stopped selling websites and focus on selling growth to my clients using the digital technologies.
I’m currently facing new challenges as the size of my clients grows and I now need to build a rockstar team.

Alain Schlesser

Alain is a freelance software engineer and WordPress consultant living in Germany.

He started out as a government agent working in prison administration in Luxembourg, and has recently made the switch to self-employment to enjoy productive work without the bureaucratic hurdles.

He has worked with numerous platforms and programming languages for the past 25 years, and is now trying to settle down on modern web development with the WordPress platform. He is passionate about software architecture and code quality and never misses an opportunity to share best practices.

He offers his WordPress services and expertise through his company Bright Nucleus, while you can catch some of his more personal ramblings at http://alainschlesser.com/.

Claus van Vught

Claus van Vught is mede-eigenaar van online slagerij BBQuality.

Dr. Marieke van de Rakt

Marieke studied Sociology and Communication Sciences at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. She obtained my PhD in Social Sciences in January 2011. As of September 2013, she gave up her academic career and joined her husband (Joost de Valk) and Michiel Heijmans to lead Yoast.

Marieke is CSO at Yoast, her main focus is on strategic and product management. In the last two years, she has written several eBooks and constructed 3 online courses on SEO and SEO copywriting. Besides that, she is a frequent blogger on Yoast.com.

David de Boer

David is internet-ondernemer sinds 2003 en heeft veel ervaring met verschillende e-commerce oplossingen. Hij is ondernemer, programmeur en iDEAL expert. Momenteel werkt hij aan Paytium, de eenvoudigste manier om iDEAL betalingen in WordPress te ontvangen.

Hij is dagelijks bezig met het ontwikkelen, verkopen en ondersteunen van zijn software producten. Hij is een iDEAL expert geworden door sinds 2008 duizenden Nederlandse webwinkels te helpen met hun iDEAL integratie.

Dr. Evert Semeijn

Dr. Evert Semeijn is neuropsycholoog en werkt al sinds 2004 met WordPress en sinds 2011 met WooCommerce. In 2009 heeft hij FourLeafed opgericht waar hij zich is gaan richten op het optimaliseren van WordPress en WooCommerce websites voor startups, kleine ondernemers en grote bedrijven.

Evert is WooExpert, organisator van de officiële WooCommerce Amsterdam meetup en hij deelt zijn kennis en ervaring met de community tijdens WordPress en WooCommerce meetups.

Joel Bronkowski

I got his start in WordPress eight years ago when I moved from California to Cape Town to help run a non-profit. WordPress has been a part of my life ever since. From starting my own online store using WooCommerce to later helping lead WooCommerce, it’s hard to imagine my life without WordPress. I’ve recently moved over to work for Shopify where I will be growing partnerships in Europe, Middle East anf Africa. I am incredibly excited about helping people succeed and grow their businesses. You an find me sipping on coffee in my favorite neck of the woods in East London where I live with my more interesting better half.

Pascal Birchler

Pascal is a 23-year-old student and web developer from Switzerland. He contributes to WordPress by organising local events and through direct core contributions.

He’s been working with WordPress for years and he’s involved with both the German-speaking and the international community.

Pascal received commit access to WordPress core after leading the embeds feature plugin included in WordPress 4.4. For 4.6 he helped polish Shiny Updates.

Jeroen van Dijk

Jeroen van Dijk is Technical Consultant at Enrise, a Netherlands-based open source development company, and former board-member of the PHPBenelux team. He has been doing development with PHP for more then 15 years, with a passion for high-performance and high-volume web applications based on open source. Nowadays Jeroen also has proficient expertise in building mobile apps using the technologies like Appcelerator Titanium and React Native for cross-platform development.

Remkus de Vries

Remkus de Vries houdt zich al meer dan 10 jaar professioneel bezig met WordPress met Forsite Media.

Daarnaast is hij net zo lang al verantwoordelijk voor WordPress Nederland, het vertaalteam en de forums. In 2009 was hij één van de oprichters van WordCamp Nederland en in 2013 van WordCamp Europe.

Remkus laatste avontuur samen met zijn vrouw (don’t worry, it’s SFW) vind je op ThemeMix. Meer informatie vind op zijn blog. Of hier @DeFries.

Peter Martin

Peter Martin loves the freedom and possibilities that open source software gives you as user and the knowledge sharing that you can only find within such open source communities. Peter has been active in the Joomla community since 2005: at first as regular forum user, and later as Global Moderator at Joomla forum and member of the Community Leadership Team.

Peter has his own business www.db8.nl (founded in 2005) and supports companies and organizations with Joomla implementations, support and custom Joomla extension development.

Furthermore he organizes Open Coffee (a monthly networking event for small businesses and self employed people) in his hometown Nijmegen, The Netherlands and Linux Nijmegen (a Linux User Group with monthly meetings).

His other interests are open source software, PHP, Linux (Debian, Raspbian), Raspberry Pi, music (collecting vinyl records), art house movies, trivia.

Pieter Daalder

Pieter is werkzaam bij een Nederlandse webhoster: Vevida. Op de klantenservice helpt hij daar dagelijks mensen met allerlei uitdagingen. Daarnaast is hij actief op de Nederlandse WordPress supportfora, houd hij zich bezig met vertalingen van de WP core, plugins en thema’s. In de vrije tijd die hij daarnaast nog overhoud bemoeit hij zich onder andere met de organisatie van de lokale WordPress Meetup.

Jeffrey Visser

Jeffrey works at digital agency Van Ons with a passionate team of developers building websites and apps. He works on promotional campaigns for Johnson & Johnson and several major Dutch blogs through Sanoma among other clients. In 2015 Van Ons worked together with several clients building a solid plugin connection between Salesforce CRM and WordPress.

Hieke van Hoogdalem

Hieke van Hoogdalem is a self-taught woman concernig WordPress and almost everything that comes with it. She builds websites and is copywriter for solo serviceproviders (like herself). She never starts with a site or with texts; there’s always some business coaching needed before. Together with her clients she determines very precisely what his or her fanclub is and what services and giveaway those fans need. Only then it makes sense to build the website or write the salespages.

She never just does what a client asks, she always gives (unsollicited) advice. She asks probing questions, using her experience as a journalist. She asks questions until everything is as concrete as possible. Only the best result is good enough, and sometimes that makes it necessary to turn clients plans/ideas/mindsets upside down. Afterwards, those clients are always happy to have learned much more than predicted.

Hieke van Hoogdalem studied to become a music teacher and musicologist, worked as a chief editor of a local newspaper and then became editor for several magazines and content manager for organizations like the Dutch Heart Foundation and VvAA. There she learned a lot about writing for the internet, CMS and so on. She worked in several lines of business, both for profit and non-profit organizations. Her experience, skills and network are huge, but more important: she knows a lot about very different professions, organizations and so on. Hence she’s able to sympathise very quickly with people in different situations and professions and to see what they really need in their online marketing or in their business in general. And to think of examples that fit their situation in a split second.

She blogs about everything that has to do with websites, the internet and marketing (in Dutch).

Hieke followed courses with business coaches and now has a successful company.

Manuela van Prooijen

Begin 2011 is Manuela gestart met Weblish (WordPress & online marketing trainingen/webbouw). Sinds 2014 organiseert Manuela elk kwartaal de WordPress Meetup Utrecht. En als gecertificeerd Guerrilla Marketing Coach adviseert ze zzp-ers over low-budget/creatieve online marketing oplossingen. Dol op oldskool takkeherrie en een goed belegde bagel!

Tom Hermans

Tom Hermans is a Belgian Web Developer, developing end-to-end solutions with a strong focus on UX, design & front-end code.
Worked in the past few years for Sony, Unicef, Studio100, Axe and nowadays working as a frontend developer on the digital TV platform for Telenet (Yelo, SPA) along with freelance projects.

He speaks regularly at the WordCamps and meetups and is co-organizing WordCamp Belgium. Played with Lego as a kid according to his Twitter bio and can also communicate fluently in gifs and Star Wars memes.

Sally Mayor

Sally is a freelance copywriter and blog trainer. She works with some very large – and very small – businesses, helping them find and communicate with their online audience in the best way. She was a WordPress newbie five years ago and she certainly wouldn’t call herself an expert now, she uses WordPress to market herself, and she teaches other people about the wonders of blogging, so WordPress has played a significant role in her life.

Mark Gruntjes

Mark is account manager en marketeer bij Chef du Web, een online bureau dat zich specializeerd in een mix van design, development en marketing communicatie.

Met de 10 jaar ervaring op online marketing kan hij zich met recht een specialist noemen: een gedreven persoon die zijn klanten helpt de online conversies te laten stijgen, door zijn technische achtergrond te koppelen aan zijn jarenlange ervaring als online marketeer.

Robert van Eekhout

Robert is de co-founder van Van Ons uit Amsterdam. Van Ons is een technische partij opgericht in 2006 met een sterke focus op techniek en WordPress. Het portfolio loopt uiteen van projecten voor televisieprogramma’s tot De Bijenkorf en van Bol.com tot Bruna.

Scott Basgaard

Scott Basgaard (@scottbasgaard) lives somewhere in the mountains of beautiful Southern Norway. Born and raised in New Jersey, he moved there to live with his wife Renate. He loves all things WordPress and organized the first WordCamp Norway in 2012. Scott’s got years of experience with WordPress and has worked previously at WebDevStudios, Time Inc., WooThemes and Human Made. He’s passionate about helping others and recently organized a 24-hour-long WordPress event, which was free for community, called WordSesh.

Hristo Pandjarov

Hristo has been working for SiteGround as a WordPress expert for more than eight years now. He’s done it all: supported WordPress clients, built websites, designed WordPress themes. In addition to that he’s author of many online tutorials and guides about WordPress. He’s been fortunate to have his passion for all things WordPress and his job overlap at SiteGround, where he develops and implements various in-house performance boost solutions to help make WordPress websites faster and more secure.

Franz Vitulli

Franz works at Human Made, a top-tier WordPress agency (WordPress.com VIP partner) that provides development and consultancy for large-scale sites and enterprise clients, creates awesome products online—such as Happytables, BackUpWordPress and Nomadbase—and organises WP and FOSS related events. He focuses on the marketing & bizdev side of the agency and he’s passionate about WordPress, open source, social media and online products.

When he’s not in front of his laptop, he’s either playing one of his bass guitars or hitting the gym. Chat with him on the Slack main WordPress team (@franz) and find him on Twitter (@franzvitulli).

Theo van der Zee

As the founder of ConversionReview, Theo van der Zee helps organizations to improve their websites through website reviews, training, coaching and A/B testing. Theo is a psychologist, keynote speaker and profound lover of beaches.

Taeke Reijenga

WordPress professional and owner of Level Level, a full-service WordPress agency

Samuel Sidler

Just a individual.

Robert Heessels

Robert Heessels is a Dutch entrepreneur and software developer. He has a real passion for helping small-business owners successfully promote their business on the internet.

Robert started several new business over the years and generated many millions in Internet sales. He is happily married and proud father of four teenagers.

Robert is co-founder of SwiftySite, helping people who struggle with creating a decent website to be successful with WordPress.

Petya Raykovska

Petya is a Senior Project Manager at Human Made where she helps large projects across big publishers and enterprise succeed. She is a huge WordPress enthusiast, active member of the WordPress community and is one of the WordPress Polyglots team leads supporting the people who translate WordPress to more than 160 languages. Petya helped organise WordCamp Europe 2014 and WordCamp Europe 2015 and lead the team that organised WordCamp Europe 2016 in Vienna.

Mario Peshev

Mario is the CEO of DevriX, a distributed WordPress development agency with a team of 25. He’s been a WordPress Core contributor since WordPress 3.7, an author of dozens of plugins, and a technical aficionado with over 12 years of software engineering and architecture experience.
Over the past 5 years he’s been leading a remote team around the world, leading the technical business development of large platforms in the automotive, airline, media, educational and marketing fields, and consulting businesses on growth, business development and architecture.

Luc Princen

Luc Princen is co-founder and lead developer at Chef du Web. An online agency which specializes in a mix of design, development and marketing communication. He works a lot with WordPress. He loves open source, elegant code, fast load times, barbecueing caveman meals and playing the occasional (grand) strategy game. You can find him on Twitter with the handle @LucP.

Juliette Reinders Folmer

Juliette Reinders Folmer is an all round consultant and web-developer who tries not be a geek. Juliette is a long-standing member of PHPWomen which helped her immensely to find her feet in the PHP world. She is ZCE, actively contributes to a number of open source projects, has published several articles and speaks at conferences when given the chance. She loves it when you give her a chance to refactor spaghetti-code to something elegant and maintainable.

Juliette is self-employed and based in the Netherlands.

John Blackbourn

John is a WordPress core developer, a member of the WordPress security team, and he was the release lead for WordPress 4.1. He works as a senior WordPress developer at Human Made in the UK.

Jaime Martínez

Jaime Martínez. A long time WordPress enthusiast & happy coder @ Level Level; a full-service WordPress agency building beautiful and effective websites. As an allround developer both back-end and front-end code is keeping him connected with WordPress. When it comes to his contributions to the community it all started with working on WP-CLI, continued with random Pull Requests around the web and right now the focus is on the Clarkson project. Besides coding he co-organizes the Rotterdam WPMeetup010 and enjoys dropping by at other meetups and WordCamps. Contact him on Twitter via @jmslbam.

Francesca Marano

WordPress professional, community junkie, business explorer. I make WordPress things happen from Torino, Italy: Polyglots and Community team member, Meetup and WordCamp organizer.

Founder of C+B (http://cpiub.com), a blog for Italian female creative entrepreneurs, with an editorial staff offering daily advice to women who work on their own.

Author of two e-books for freelancers who want to take it to the next level: “Who’s afraid of the business plan?” and “Solopreneur”.

I am a passionate speaker and you can find me in Italy and around the world talking about WordPress, community, open source, women in tech, small businesses.

Danny Dagan

Danny Dagan is a Senior Web Strategist for WordPress agency 10up, who are key contributors to WordPress core. He is also legally educated and wrote a dissertation about the new data protection regime.

He loves combining the two ‘geek professions’, tech and law, and promises not to use Latin unless it is entirely necessary (though Dothraki and Klingon may be featured).

Chris Vermeulen

For the last 15 years, Chris has been helping shopkeepers like his sister Caroline, self-employed guys like his friend Roy and volunteers such as the ones running the parents association at his kid’s school to properly present themselves online. In fact, he has been able to help well over 20.000 of them through his web hosting company, web design company, and Swifty BV; a software development company dedicated to helping small businesses succeed online. Swifty is most well known for bridging the gap between WordPress professionals and their clients through SwiftySite; a free WordPress plugin.

Besides God and his wife and his kids, this is what he loves most; helping people succeed in their business, in their organization, in life.

Björn Wijers

Björn Wijers is a senior software developer with an Interaction Design background focusing on webdevelopment using Open Source software.

He’s been using the moniker Burobjorn.nl since 2006 to offer his services as a freelance / interim professional to small and large clients such as De Belastingdienst (Dutch Tax Services), Pharmeon, Voorjebuurt.nl and many others. Even though his been working with WordPress for more than 12 years, he still doesn’t call himself a WordPress developer 😉

Andrew Killen

Andrew has worked with the web for 22 years, at the moment he’s the Technical Lead for RNWmedia (an NGO). He works to provide digital products to the most difficult places around the planet. RNW is “Radio Netherlands Worldwide”, the old Wereldomroep. On average they get 30m hits per month in 7 languages.

On top of that he’s the CTO of SpeckBoy Design Magazine and a member of The WP Crowd

WordCamp Nederland 2016 is over. Check out the next edition!