For those of you that are interested in attending WordCamp NYC it will be held on June 9th and 10th at Baruch College. It will include over 60 sessions in 2 days of WordPressy goodness.

To buy tickets and find out more information check out the WordCamp NYC website at http://2012.nyc.wordcamp.org/ or follow them on Twitter at WordCampNYC and the hashtag #wcnyc. We hope to see you all there!

Brad will be giving a presentation on WordPress Multisite on Saturday.  If you plan on attending make sure you track them down and say hi!

For this month only we are offering a $25 off each support hours purchased this year when you sign up for one of our annual maintenance packages!* Our maintenance packages give you the peace of mind that you always have a recent backup of your website and it is running on the most recent and secure version of WordPress.

By signing up for one of our maintenance packages you have the opportunity to purchase some support hours at a discounted price and get those little miscellaneous tasks you’ve been thinking about completed!  Support hours can be used to update your website with design changes, additional features, speed improvements and more!**

Read more about our Maintenance Packages, Support Blocks or Contact Us now for more details on signing up!

* Maintenance package purchase must be completed by January 31, 2012. All packages are sold on an annual basis.

** Valid on any support hours purchase before December 31, 2012. Support hours are sold in blocks of 5 hours.

Merry Christmas from the team at WebDevStudios.com!

Tips on Trips and Camps

For years the people at Tips on Trips and Camps have had a website that required them to contact a developer every time they wanted to make an update to their site. They had grown tired of not being able to make changes on their own and they also felt that the site had become cluttered and difficult to navigate.  We worked with them to create a great new layout and reorganize their content in a user-friendly way. We also imported their existing Blogger blog to allow them to manage everything under one install of WordPress.

Read more about the new Tips on Trips and Camps website here.

Pigtronix

Pigtronix.com moved from a custom-built site that was designed by owner, David Koltai years ago. Dave and his partner Brian felt they needed a new image for their growing guitar pedal business. We worked with Pigtronix to create a new site that highlighted their pedals, the artists who use these pedals and the dealers around the world that sell their products.  We also built a great media section where the visitor can watch videos and listen to sound clips of the pedals in action.

Read more about the new Pigtronix website here.

A Garden for the House

Agardenforthehouse.com is the home to tips, tricks, advice and recipes from Kevin Lee Jacobs.  Kevin writes from his home in upstate New York that features formal rose gardens outdoors and lavish window gardens indoors. He also provides his readers with a number of mouth-watering recipes that feature many of his home-grown goodies.

We moved A Garden for the House off of the Blogger platform and gave it a completely new design. We worked with Kevin to create a new layout that focuses on his most popular categories and make the site easier to navigate when you are looking for information on a specific topic.

Read more about the new A Garden for the House website here.

If you are attending the event make sure you track Brad and Brian down. They are always looking to talk WordPress and might even have a few goodies to give away!

After attending so many WordCamps we decided to take what we have learned any apply it to planning a WordCamp here in Philadelphia. Together with Doug Stewart, Reed Gustow and Anthony Bubel, we put together a massive WordPress-packed weekend! Saturday’s conference at the Fox School of Business and Management @ Temple University included four expert-packed tracks, a lunchtime academic panel and a hands-on classroom for WordPress training and demos.

Sunday consisted of a 4-hour developer day at Philadelphia Center for Architecture where everyone got together for hands on training on contributing to WordPress core, releasing a plugin and releasing a theme.

We also had a great after-party Saturday night at National Mechanics where everyone got to enjoy some great food, drinks and WordPress chat at a popular local tech meetup restaurant. We even set up a turntable.fm room where anyone could be the DJ for the night!

As always, WordCamp would have never been successful without the wonderful organizers, amazing volunteers and all the help we received from a number of people in the Philadelphia area. We can’t thank everyone enough for helping to hold such a successful WordCamp and (after a short break) are already looking forward to making next year even better!

Brad and Chris will be attending WordCamp Boston this year and are looking forward to talking shop with other WordPress enthusiasts and all the great presentations Boston has to offer this year.

For additional information visit the website, download the WordCamp Boston mobile app, follow them on Twitter.

If you haven’t gotten your ticket to the event they are already SOLD OUT.  However, WebDevStudios will not be able to make it to the west coast to attend WordCamp San Diego this year so we are giving everyone a chance to WIN our tickets!  For a chance to win one of our tickets to WordCamp San Diego all you have to do is visit our Facebook page, Like us and leave a post telling us why you want to attend WordCamp San Diego.  Two people will be chosen on Friday, June 24th and given our tickets to the event!

There are many people looking for tickets to WordCamp San Diego so we ask that you please enter the drawing only if you are planning on attending this year.

For more information about WordCamp San Diego visit the website, follow them on Twitter, or find them on Facebook.

Billions was created collaboratively with TurboTax who contacted us looking to create a free theme focused on financial bloggers and would be available for download in the WordPress.org theme repository.

Some key features we included are advanced SEO options, sharing options, flexibility, and of course a great design. Working closely with the team at Intuit’s TurboTax, we crafted the theme to their specifications as well WordPress standards including:

• Advance SEO Options

  Get the edge in search ranking over your competitors with advanced search engine optimization features control out of the box. Easily set custom title, meta description and keyword tags on posts, pages, categories, and your home page. You can also include additional custom meta tags as needed.

• Integrated Breadcrumb Trails

  Billions integrates the popular breadcrumb plugin by Yoast to give easy breadcrumb control and page trails for your content.

• Facebook, Twitter and RSS link options.
  

  Get social and add your links to your social network profiles.

  Let your readers know where to find you on Twitter or Facebook by adding your facebook profile link and twitter user name in the theme options.




• In Post Sharing links
  

  The sharebox allows readers to easily share your article.

  Get your content out onto the web in more places by letting your reader share it. The post share box has easy share links for twitter, digg, stumbleupon, facebook, reddit and google buzz to let anyone share your post on their favorite networks.

• Custom Header Support

  With the release of WordPress 3.0 came custom header support for themes. Feel free to swap out the pre-uploaded header with an image of your own.

• Custom Background Support

  WordPress 3.0 also introduced support for custom background. Supported in the billions theme this allows the user to upload a custom image or a color to be used as their sites background.

• YARPP support

  Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Simply download the plugin and start seeing related content below each post! Select our custom thumbnail template for an added bonus.

• SiteMap

  Create a page and chose the sitemap template to give your readers and search engines a quick access page to all your content.

Take advantage of the built in options to make the billions yours.

Additional Features:

Building a theme for the WordPress Theme Repository was a great learning experience and I recommend it for any theme developer.  Make sure to check back for “Making a WordPress Theme for the WordPress.org Theme Directory” which will go in depth on exactly what is needed to get your theme into the Free Theme Directory, as well as some tips learned through the process of submitting Billions.

Billions is a new WordPress theme featuring advanced SEO options, integrated breadcrumb trails, and easy sharing links to help promote your content as well as much more. Download it now for FREE from the WordPress Theme Repository.