Introducing WPCampus Speaker: Dave Wynne

Dave Wynne will be joining us at WPCampus 2017 to discuss security for WordPress. You can see him in action on Saturday, July 15 at 2:30 p.m.

Tell us about your first website or digital project. What was the spark for you?

I was working in desktop IT support. The College of Education at UGA was using an HTML coded site. When they no longer could keep up with the demand, I was brought in to help using Dreamweaver. I was treated like the red-headed coder. I used Dreamweaver and not pure HTML.

Why higher education?

I have worked in higher education for 22 years. I like higher education better than the business environment. These systems are very different, and both have pros and cons. I’ve just chosen the system that works best for me.

Tell us about the topic of your session. Why is it important to you?

Security for WordPress sites is critical to me. I feel that WordPress has a bad reputation in the media, with regards to security. With so much hacking and spamming going on in the world we need to make sure our websites are secured. We want to protect our valuable site(s) and the clients that interacted with it.

Who do you follow on Twitter?

COLOURlovers to help me with color. I look for color schemes to be using for the web. Though I’m not a fan of his books, I follow Stephen King for his corgi and how he looks at the world. Finally, Robin Roberts. I find her positive outlook on life contagious.

Why do you ♥️ WPCampus?

I like that people in higher education have a forum to come and learn from each other. It is a special subculture of the WP community. I always learn so much from this conference.

If someone designed a wapuu for you, what would it look like?

I would have a corgi wapuu. I have a 12-year-old corgi and love Mr. Kaiden! I think there is a great niche not filled as of yet without a corgi wapuus.

What WordPress, or other, tool can you not live without?

Wow, so many tools that I use, it will be hard to narrow down to a few choices.

• Formidable for online forms.
• Max Mega Menu to provide my menus with a lot of flexibility.
• TablePress for building responsive tables.
• Wordfence for security. Wordfence helped me through some tough issues.
• WP Smush for image optimization.
• WPBakery Visual Composer for page building.
• WP Engine, server platform.