Organizers

Armed with next to no social life and a whole lot of Mountain Dew, 15 year old, Brandon Wickwire stayed in on a quest to learn to make and design websites. He launched his first website in 1996, indeterminate content, black tiled background, animated gifs, and all. Twenty-plus years later, Brandon is designing commercial websites exclusively on WordPress.

Younger Brandon also watched a lot of T.V., and was convinced he should become either a chef or interior designer, as his favorite shows were either on Food Network or Trading Spaces. After seeing a statistic on the divorce ratio for chefs, he went with the latter, and got a Bachelor’s degree in Interior and Environmental Design from Illinois State University.

Outside of web design, Brandon’s time and life-essence are leached from his being as a well-intentioned husband and woefully outmatched father.

Brandon may or may not be a robot.

Erika Knollenberg has a degree in Graphic Design and is a Web and Graphic Designer for AlphaMedia. Using her entrepreneurial spirit, she also designs and manages websites for local small businesses and not-for-profit organizations. Erika designed the WordCamp Peoria logo for us.

When she’s not playing the piano or with her two young grandchildren, she spends much of her free time studying current web and graphic design trends and fundamentals.

Scott Lungwitz is a Web Coordinator for the Digital Marketing Team at OSF HealthCare. Scott implements digital strategies which support marketing initiatives. His work has led him to be part of many award winning projects. He also leads efforts to empower others to manage their own web content via content management systems.

Scott is the current Membership Co-Chair and Vice President for the Illinois Society for Healthcare Marketing and Public Relations.

Mark DuBois is the Executive Director of Web Professionals. Mark assumed this role in 2016. Web Professionals is over 20 years old and focuses on both practicing and aspiring professionals. We offer certification, education, and community. We are a member supported not for profit.

Mark is a retired professor who has been working with web technologies for over 25 years. He created the first accredited degree in web systems in the world. He created the first accredited certificate in rich Internet application development. As a professor, he created over 21 classes (16 week semester long) on many aspects of web design, development, and server administration.

Mark served as the co-chair of the education task force of the Web Standards project. He has spoken internationally on many aspects of web design and development (including giving a full day seminar on best practices at the 17th International WWW conference in Beijing).

He runs a national web design and development competition (held every June in Louisville) under the auspices of SkillsUSA. Mark has also helped with WorldSkills web design competitions in Sao Paulo (2015) and Abu Dhabi (2017). He has personally supervised and been involved in over 35 state, national, and international web design competitions.

Tammy Finch is a website designer, social media consultant, and the founder of Web Services, Inc. in East Peoria, IL. She has been designing websites for over 20 years.

Tammy and her team currently manage and host several hundred WordPress websites and social profiles for her clients. A strong asset she provides is Online Reputation Management. Online Reputation Management is incredibly important to any industry and she shares tips on this topic on her blog and book.

She’s also presented on the topic of Online Reputation Management at several WordCamps across the country. She is active in the WordPress community and a Co-Organizer for the WordPress Meet-up in Peoria, IL.