Visitors Guide to Philly

There is a lot more going on in Philadelphia besides a great WordCamp! If you are looking for the city’s best cheesesteak, interested in seeing where our forefather’s made history in historic Philadelphia or hoping to reenact Rocky Balboa running up the Art Museum steps you can find this information and more at VisitPhilly.com.  The website has a number of weekend itineraries that are sure to fit everyone’s interests.

We have also compiled a short list of major Philadelphia attractions, food options near the Comfort Inn Penn’s Landing and a few popular tour companies. Click here to view the PDF.

If you are looking for something specific while visiting Philadelphia be sure to tweet us @WordCampPhilly. We will have our WordCamp and Philly experts monitoring Twitter throughout the weekend to help you with any questions you have or problems you may run into!

Sticker Sponsor: Sticker Giant

StickerGiant is the sticker company that does it all. The latest digital production methods, as well as old school silkscreen printing are all available at StickerGiant Custom Sticker Printing. Customer Service at StickerGiant is available from real people that are very knowledgable about all things sticker and can help any company create any kind of sticker to stand out.

StickerGiant writes about its customers, and tells their stories on its blog at http://www.stickergiant.com/blog/ where every sticker has a story.

Follow StickerGiant on twitter @stickergiant and on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/stickergiant.

Bronze Sponsor: Semper Fi Web Design

Semper Fi Web Design is an established provider of online business solutions. We are based in Raleigh, North Carolina and provide web site maintenance, web site design, web site development, web site programming, web site hosting, web site marketing and more to a wide range of business throughout the US.

Semper Fi Web Design can help you quickly and reliably address your web site maintenance needs, build your online store, develop your company’s extranet and so much more. For more information please contact us for a free consultation.

Venue Sponsor: Fox MIS

The Fox School’s Management Information Systems department was founded in 2000. Dean M. Moshe Porat formed the department to support the three strategic pillars of the Fox school, entrepreneurship, globalization, and information technology. Dr. Munir Mandviwalla, founded the MIS department and currently serves as department chair. The Fox School’s MIS department is one of the youngest business oriented IT academic units in the U.S.

The newly revised (2010) vision of FoxMIS is to be a worldwide leader in transformative research and teaching on the design, use, and effects of information technology in a digital world.

Fox MIS prides itself on being connected and innovative.

The Fox School’s MIS department offers undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs in information systems and includes more than 750 majors and minors and 14 faculty members. The associated Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) connects students and faculty with industry leaders through a membership structure, and provides project and professional development opportunities. More information at: http://www.ibit.temple.edu.

Bronze Sponsor: All-in-One-SEO Pack Pro

All-in-One SEO Pack Pro optimizes your WordPress website for maximum search engine visibility and Semper Plugins has just released v2.0 which is full of great new features such as:

  • NEW Feature Manager and plugin modules
  • NEW XML Sitemap Generator module
  • NEW Performance module
  • NEW user interface that looks great on any screen size
  • NEW edit your Meta data using Quick Edit
  • NEW advanced custom post type options

All in One SEO Pack Pro v2.0 improves on the most popular WordPress SEO plugin.  With All in One SEO Pack Pro you can set site-wide defaults in WordPress as well as customize the search engine settings for each individual WordPress post and page.  All in One SEO Pack Pro gives you complete control over exactly what appears in the search engine results.

All in One SEO Pack Pro is easy to use right out of the box, so you can start improving your search engine results right away!

WordCamp Philly Costume Contest Details

As you probably already know, this year’s WordCamp Philly is completely Halloween themed! It wouldn’t be a Halloween WordCamp without a costume contest. We plan on having two contests: Best Presenter Costume and Best Attendee Costume.

Best Presenter Costume

We are asking all presenters, should they want to participate, to wear costumes for their presentations. Attendees will vote for their favorite Presenter costume throughout the day. At the end of Saturday, during closing remarks, we’ll announce the winner of the Best Presenter Costume award!

Best Attendee Costume

The Attendee costume contest will take place at the WordCamp Philly After Party @ Buffalo Billiards Saturday evening. We will be awarding prizes for the top 3 costumes at the party as voted on by everyone at the party. You can wear your costume all day Saturday if you’d like, but if you want to wait until the after party that is fine.

Prizes

What costume contest would be complete without awesome prizes? We’ve gathered some amazing prizes to give away to the winners of each contest!

Best Presenter Costume: New iPad (16 GB/Wifi)

Best Attendee Costume:

  • 1st place – Google Nexus 7 Tablet (16 GB)
  • 2nd place – Kindle Fire (8 GB)
  • 3rd place – $50 Amazon gift card

Now you have no excuse not to break out your best, most creative, Halloween costume at the event!

Please remember to thank our sponsors for making this possible!

Silver Sponsor Spotlight: BackupBuddy

BackupBuddy is another great product from the folks over at iThemes. It allows you to backup, migrate, and restore your entire single or Multisite WordPress install including the widgets, themes and plugins. To keep your backups safe, BackupBuddy supports sending your backups offsite to Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, Dropbox, FTP, and email. Quickly and easily restore your site on the same server or migrate to a new server with a different domain and database. The process is easy, fast, and reliable.

The iThemes team isn’t going to be able to make it out to the event this year. They have already given away two tickets, but now they would like to give away TWO MORE! iThemes is giving away 2 more free full access tickets to WordCamp Philly 2012! The event is less than 1 week away and this really is your last chance to get one!  To be in the running for one of the 2 iThemes full access passes just leave a comment below letting us know why you want to attend WordCamp Philly.

*You must leave a comment by October 17th, 1:00pm Eastern time to be eligible. Winners will be chosen and notified later that day.

 

Gold Sponsor Spotlight: WebDevStudios

WebDevStudios is a website development company specializing in WordPress development and design. We have an amazing staff who live and breathe WordPress and we pride ourselves in being WordPress experts. Our clients range anywhere from a single blog site to a WordPress Multisite network with thousands of sites to a BuddyPress site with thousands of members. Working with WebDevStudios, you can feel confident that your project will be completed quickly and correctly! For more information check us out at http://webdevstudios.com/.

Thank you to WebDevStudios for your support! Make sure you say hi to the WebDevStudios team at WordCamp on Saturday!

Silver Sponsor Spotlight: US Server Net

US Server Net grew out of a small, local web design and hosting service that began in 1997. Our Managed WordPress Hosting is designed specifically for small business owners, busy professionals, home-based and virtual businesses, groups, and individuals who need an easy way to manage web publishing. By using WordPress as a Content Management System, our clients learn to organize their online information using pages and posts, pictures, audio and video clips.

In 2011 we developed Site Insurance Management Services (SIMS), a website bundle that brought peace of mind to the clients who took advantage of this hosting option. At the beginning of 2012, SIMS was folded into our WP Server bundle and ServerNet.us was born. Today we are growing rapidly, as more individuals, groups, small businesses and organizations learn how easy it is to get a WordPress site up and running, without having to worry about the technology and software management details that we provide as part of every site subscription.

Starting at just $33 per month, sites include a complete WordPress installation with premium theme framework, our suite of security and productivity plugins, web and email hosting, domain management, WordPress core, theme and plugin updates, site monitoring, malware scanning, and automated scheduled backup. Training options include both site administration workshops at our King of Prussia office as well as Introduction to Web Publishing, a series of four 90-minute webinars offered monthly.

 

Gold Sponsor Spotlight: Inverse Paradox

Since 2007, Inverse Paradox has provided high quality and robust solutions for businesses’ design, internet and marketing needs. Specializing in content management systems, in particular WordPress, Inverse Paradox has created user-friendly, engaging designs for hundreds of clients across a wide range of industries. These industries range from medical and educational institutions to sports & entertainment and retail. The IP team always looks to use WordPress functionality in innovative ways to achieve their client’s business goals, often implementing e-commerce capabilities and custom catalogs as well.

Thank you to Inverse Paradox for your support at WordCamp Philly! Be sure to say hello to the Inverse Paradox team on Saturday!