Tickets are now on sale.  Go get them while they’re still available!

Ok, it might be a bit early to assume we’re going to sell out like last year, but if we do then don’t say we didn’t warn you!  Our least favourite part of organising last year’s event was taking phone calls and answering emails from people looking for tickets after we’d sold out.  We even started to offer refunds (something we’ve never done before) so we could resell those tickets but only a handful of people took us up on the offer.  Our plans for this year’s event are much more ambitious.  Everything will be bigger and better with lots more to see and do and when our promotional efforts kick into high gear we expect ticket sales to increase significantly (remember the Dalek on the mountain last year?).  The only way to guarantee your ticket is to go get one now.

In other news, we’ll be running a Meet & Greet again this year.  Alas, Ianto is no longer with us but his Coffee Club lives on and tickets are currently on sale.  We’ve increased the number of tickets available to 50 and increased the time for the Meet & Greet to 1 hour so we can accommodate more people.  But, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, the coffee club tickets sold out last year too so if you want one then go get it now.

I’m finally up-to-date with tickets.  The latest batch were sent out this morning.  If you haven’t got yours yet then it’s for one of two reasons.  It’s either got stuck somewhere in the internet tubes (email us and we’ll send them again) or you didn’t provided the information we asked for when booking a ticket.  In the later case, you’ll have an email asking for the necessary information.  Just reply with the details and we’ll send you your tickets.

To those who are intending to buy tickets, please read the information on the booking page.  It makes life so much simpler for me when processing bookings.

I’ve added a few more questions and answers to the FAQ and posted a provisional schedule, the same one you’ll have received in your update with your tickets.  Like the page says, use this schedule as a guide to plan your day but small changes are likely so check the website the day before the event for the final schedule.

Finally, I hope you all enjoyed the Doctor Who Easter Special.  Unfortunately I won’t get a chance to see it ’till I get home next Sunday.  I’m trying to avoid spoilers but I gather from twitter and Facebook statuses that it’s gone down pretty well.

Hope you’re all having a good Easter.

Just a quick post to let you all know that the Vortex FAQ has been posted.  There’s not a lot there at the minute but as new questions come in we’ll answer them and add to the FAQ if necessary.  You’ll find that a lot of questions will be answered by the” Update” that is emailed to you with your eTickets.  I’ll get that on the site for downloading soon.

Please check the FAQ and the Update before sending us your questions.  It’s not that we mind answering them, it’s that we’ll probably just direct you to the answer in the FAQ and you can save yourself the time waiting on a response.

Just a quick update today.  Some more characters have been added to the Live Characters section.  We’ve got quite a collection now so don’t forget your camera on the day.  There’ll be a lot of photo opportunities.

Next the FAQ.  It’s small at the moment.  In fact, it’s not much more than a template.  But now that it’s there we’ll be adding more answers as the questions come in.

Our next guest announcement will be made later tonight.  Want a hint?  She has appeared in two episodes of Doctor Who with David Tennant (season 2 & 3), as well as two audio plays for Big Finish Productions (playing a different character).  Yes, that’s pretty vague but see how close you can get.  Have a guess in the comments below.

Tickets for Vortex will go on sale at 9am tomorrow morning.  You’ll be able to book on-line through our website or download a booking form to print and post to us with a cheque.  Unfortunately we can’t take bookings over the phone for this event but give us a call on 07709 176 544 if you’re having any trouble getting your tickets and we’ll sort it out for you.

Oh, one more thing.  We didn’t want to be posting yet another self-promoting blog about this but I thought I may as well drop it in at the end of this post.  The Newtownabbey Times ran an article on their website and in print about our Snow Dalek.  They gave us a nice write-up and hopefully piqued a bit of interest in the event but they forgot to include our website address!

Newtownabbey Times Article

It’s been a relatively productive weekend.  I have a tidy living room for the first time in about 9 months and a bunch of pages have been added to the website.  Information about the Autograph Session, Photo Session, Weakest Link and Ianto’s Coffee Club has been posted, along with info on the venue and some of the live characters we’ll have wandering around during the event.  There’s still an FAQ and a sample/provisional schedule to come and a Downloads & Promotions page where we’ll have some banners and buttons you can add to your website to help us promote the event.

I’ve also added links to all the social networks we frequent on the page footer.  Feel free to follow/friend us wherever you hang out.  I’ll dedicate a blog later in the week to the different networks you’ll find us on and the various ways to keep up-to-date with the latest announcements and UT Events information.

On-line booking won’t be available for at least another week while we sort out a few final details.  We’ll give you a few days notice before tickets go on sale because we know a few of you like to try for a low registration number.

Now I’m off to get about 30 minutes sleep before getting up for work (thanks Superbowl!)

So, here it is.  The new UT Events website.  It’s quite a step up from the static site we had before where a little Javascript for mouse-overs and some “server side includes” to cut down on code repetition was the extent of web technologies used.

Now were up and running with WordPress, a blogging style CMS coded in PHP and backed with a MySQL database.  CSS maintains a consistent style with Pixeled used as the base theme (tweaked a little to suite our purposes better)

It’s going to give us an opportunity to make the website more dynamic and get feedback right on the page.  Don’t be afraid to leave comments on any of our blog posts.

The site is a little light on content at the moment but we’ll be adding a lot more pages soon.  We’ll have plenty of information about the upcoming Vortex event and, later on, some pictures from our previous events.  I’ll be integrating our twitter feed and linking to our various social networks.  There’s already an RSS feed for this blog and once everything is integrated there’ll be a Friend Feed you can subscribe to for just about everything we post anywhere.

So, let us know what you think in the comments or email us directly.  We want to hear from you.