WordCamp Denver is grateful for GoDaddy’s sponsorship, and their kind thoughts in this sponsor post that welcome you to our camp!

If you’ve never been to a WordCamp before, you’re in for a treat.

WordCamps are an amazing thing. They’re inclusive instead of exclusive. They have a hallway track instead of an exhibitor hall. You’ve even got WordPress experts at the Happiness Bar offering up one-on-one support, no purchase required.

WordCamps bring out all the businesses that have sprung up because of WordPress. You’ve got the web professionals – the digital agencies, the freelancers, and the consultants who solve problems and build websites for clients. You’ve got the product companies and developers who build plugins and themes and custom solutions to make it all easier to do.

(And of course, there are companies like GoDaddy, who provide the underlying global infrastructure of domain names, hosting, and site management tools. But I digress.)

You’ve got presenters from down the street and presenters from across the country coming to WordCamps on their own dime because they’re there to share, to see old friends, to make new ones, and to just have a good time geeking out over WordPress.

And if you’ve been to a WordCamp before, well, you know all this.

But you also know that every WordCamp is different, because every WordCamp is local. These aren’t industry conferences or trade shows. These are volunteer-run, community-focused get togethers. They all have a flair unique to the places where they’re held.

Behind the scenes of every WordCamp you’ve got a team of volunteers pouring hours of days of weeks of months into creating a memorable experience. And sometimes those volunteers love it so much that they do it over and over again, year after year, not just for WordCamps but for meetups and for workshops and for hackathons.

And from these moments, from these events, from these special occasions where everyone is coming together around a single piece of software, you realize that it’s not really about the software at all.

It’s about the people.

All of this happens because of the people who make WordPress possible. The people that were on their own journeys that, somehow, led them to WordPress, and then led them to give something back to it.

So, if WordCamp Denver 2018 will be your first WordCamp: Welcome! We hope that it’ll be the first of many to come. And if you’re a WordCamp regular? Welcome back.

Wherever you are on your WordPress journey, we hope that you’ll use this weekend to not just learn more about the software, but to also learn more about the people who build and support it.

Remember: WordPress powers the web, but WordPress is powered by the people.