As you probably know, we’re as fanatical about WordPress as we are about Apple these days. The agenda for this year is absolutely stellar. We’ll certainly be tweeting quite a bit and we may do some blog entries here from our iPhones.

If you guys have any questions you’d like us to ask or any specific information you’d like us to gather while we’re here just let us know.

With that out of the way, I’ll also tell you that we are BIG, BIG, BIG, on the “Create Once” philosophy; create your content once and then distribute that content in as many ways as possible. In keeping with that philosophy, we’re using the MailChimp RSS Campaigns to Auto-generate a lot of our Email Marketing content. I’ll give you a simple explanation on how it works.

1. MailChimp looks at a feed that we have specified on our blog. It doesn’t pick up the entire blog feed because there is content that we don’t necessarily want to use as an Email.
2. Anytime MailChimp detects new content on that feed, a new email is generated and sent to our subscribers.

This is just one of the many new enhancements that MailChimp has recently rolled out. We like the idea of this better than Google’s Feedburner because of course, we get loads of great metrics along with the MailChimp method.

If this sounds like something that interests you, please make contact with us. We’d be honored to help you make your blogging and email marketing as efficient as possible.

If not, do it, NOW! There are only 5 days left till we draw the four (4) winners of a DDS Web Presence Development Package.

So far, response has been great. We have 112 eligible followers and that number is growing daily.

We’ve also decided to give away one more awesome prize. A little hint, it’s made by a company out of Cupertino, CA called Apple, Inc. We’ll be announcing this prize and how to win it on our blog today at 1:30 P.M. EST.

In my recent posts, I talked about our move and also shared a little background about what really began driving us to make the move. If you haven’t read those posts, take a few minutes and get caught up before you dive into this one. It will make a lot more sense if you do so.

What we’ve learned through this move is that the WordPress “engine” is a great foundation and very capable of powering our one-stop Hub on the web. This is not just the case for a small two person company like Digital Design Solutions. There are many HUGE organizations using WordPress. Want some examples? How about…

• United States Postal Service
• Ford Motor Company
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• American Express
• University of GA

So at this point in time, we’ve fully embraced WordPress as our Content Management System and web development platform of choice. In fact, at present, between Kevin and myself, we have five web properties that are running WordPress. These include our business sites and our personal sites. We’re also in the process of helping a number of new clients develop their Web Presence utilizing the WordPress platform.

Here, at DigiDSolutions.com, we’ve created a full on communications Hub that we use for staying connected with our clients and prospects. If you take a look around you’ll find a number of very important connecting points. We really liken these connecting points to the Spokes on our Hub. All of these Spokes are web or cloud based services. As well, each of them is accessible outside of and independently of our Hub but, we’re integrating them all here to make it easier and simpler for our existing and future clients. I’ll list them below and I’ll be discussing each of them in a good bit of detail in future posts in this series.

Marketing and Social Media – On our Tribe page you’ll find quite a few connecting points. You’ll first notice the Social Media icons. These aren’t just pretty graphics, they actually link you back to our Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, and LinkedIn pages. At the bottom of that page is a form that can be completed for opting-in to receiving our email marketing communications

Highrise Client Relationship Management (CRM) – If you take a look at our Contact page you will see a form which new visitors can complete in order to make contact with us and talk about how we may be of service to them. What is great about this form is that once they complete it and hit the submit button, their contact information is entered directly into our Highrise CRM database.

Project Management – If you hover over the Tribe link in the menu bar you’ll notice a sub menu item entitled, Project Center. We’ve integrated our online Project Center so that it functions right here within our website. Our primary reason for this is that we want our clients to be able to visit one web page to interface with us, regardless of what type of information or communication is necessary.

Support/Help Desk – On every page of our website you’ll find a Support tab on the left hand side of the page. Again, we wanted to make it simple and easy for our clients to submit a Support or Help Desk Ticket from our website.

Billing/Accounting – Hover your mouse over the Tribe link in the menu bar again and you’ll also notice a sub menu item that is entitled Your Account Info. This is where our clients can go to login and check on the status of their account with us. Once logged in, clients can see and print their outstanding invoices, pay their invoices electronically, and can also see whether their payments have been received.

Hopefully you get the idea here. Our website is the Hub that our clients use to interact and communicate with us. All this is and so much more is possible with the WordPress “engine“. We have a number of other additions and plans in the works; what we’re doing with WordPress so far is really just the tip of the iceberg. That’s why we are now offering WordPress and Web Presence Development Consulting. If you, your organization, or anyone else you know is in the process of considering a new website, or an enhancement to their existing website, please let us know. We would count it an honor and privilege to receive your referrals. As a way to thank you, we’re offering an unlimited, 10% referral fee for every new referral that you send our way. Just have your referral mention the Promo Code DDSHUB in conjunction with your name when they first contact us.

So, you’ve heard by now that we’re moving…to the cloud. Throughout this series of blog posts we’ll be explaining and sharing our entire experience with you. This post should really frame everything and give you an overall perspective on why we’ve decided to make this move.

A little background

Our move to the cloud really began in late 2008. During our end of year review and planning one of our biggest topics of discussion was our website and blog. At that time, we were using a very capable WYSIWYG, (What You See is What You Get), Website design software package called Rapid Weaver. We chose Rapid Weaver as our Website design software shortly after we began business. Our primary reasoning for making this choice was the WYSIWYG feature because at that time, we knew just enough HTML and CSS to be dangerous. Rapid Weaver had the ability to create a blog page and we initially used that feature until we quickly realized how inconvenient it was to use. Essentially, every time we wanted to add a new blog post, we had to open up the software, draft the blog, and then re-publish the changes to the website. While this is not a huge deal if you only have one person blogging, it is quite inconvenient when there are multiple authors.

In an attempt to make it easier for both me and Kevin to blog at will, we opened a Typepad account, largely because it was web based and either of us could access it from a web browser (and because Kevin really liked the iPhone interface). Our dilemma with that however was that we had a fairly static website at one web address and our blog located at a completely different web address. So, if we got traffic to our website, people didn’t have access to our blog content, and if we got traffic to our blog, people didn’t get a lot of the important information they were looking for about our company. Plus, we were paying a monthly fee for Typepad as well as paying a monthly hosting fee for our website.

So, to bring this back around to the subject at hand, we discovered and began investigating the WordPress platform late last year. Both Kevin and I had heard about WordPress in the past, but had never really given it much consideration because we thought that it was quite similar to Typepad. What we learned was that WordPress is quite possibly the most innovative Content Management System platform in the world. As we began to investigate and learn more about WordPress, we realized that it was exactly what we had been looking for when we started our business three years ago. We realized that WordPress had become much more than a blogging engine, and could function as our Hub on the web and be a central place where our clients and prospects can connect with us.

In the next post, I’ll be giving you some examples of how we are utilizing WordPress as our Hub.

In case you didn’t hear, you can win one (1) of four (4) Web Presence Development Packages that we are giving away by simply following us on Twitter. If you haven’t done so, go there now and follow us. The drawing for the Web Presence Development Packages takes place on August 1, 2009.

We’re moving…to the cloud. You’ve probably heard of the cloud, but just in case you haven’t here’s how Wikipedia explains it:

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the “cloud” that supports them.

Another term that is often used interchangeably with the cloud is Software as a Service, or SaaS. Essentially, the software lives in the cloud, on someone else’s technology infrastructure, and it is accessed over the internet with a web browser. Simply put, by moving to the cloud, DDS won’t have to continue to invest our hard earned capital in Server ownership and maintenance. Instead, we’ll be paying a monthly subscription fee for the Software as a Service (SaaS) that we utilize.

Since we began business, a little more than 3 years ago, we’ve utilized some very good desktop applications that have helped us run every aspect of our business. Many of these desktop applications connect back to a Server side application running on our Macintosh OS X Server. These applications have included Daylite, Billings, and MYOB Account Edge, to name a few. They are top notch and they have served us very well.

As great as these applications have been, we’ve concluded that moving to the cloud is what will help DDS continue to to bring our Clients the best service and value in the long term. There have been many factors that have impacted our decision and we’ll be sharing those and chronicling our move to the cloud experience here on our blog. It is our hope that by documenting our experience here that we can help you and your company make a determination about whether such a move is right for you and, if so, hopefully you can learn some best practices. You might even learn a few things that you shouldn’t do.

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for us along the way, please leave us some comments. We’d really like to engage as many of our readers as possible during this process.

We’ve decided to make the DDS birthday celebration a month long event. So, here’s what we have planned…

We’re going to be GIVING AWAY some of our services for FREE. Yes, you read that right, FREE! Here’s how the giveaways will work:

• We’re giving away four (4) free Website setup and design packages. On August 1, 2009 we will select the four (4) lucky winners. They will be drawn at random from our Twitter followers. (Please visit DDS Birthday Celebration Rules for details).

To enter, just click on the Twitter icon in the right hand sidebar and make sure you are following us. Or, click this link: Follow DDS on Twitter

We’re really excited about how our business is growing. Because of our growth, we have embarked on some really big changes at DDS. We’re excited about these changes and know that they will benefit not just us, but you, our clients as well. We’ll be talking about these changes during a series of blog posts that will begin on Wednesday, July 1 ,2009. Be sure to visit our subscribe buttons over on the right hand sidebar and get subscribed in whatever manner you wish so that you can learn about the changes and how they will benefit you and your business.

I’m going to go ahead and let you in on the biggest change that we are making. WE’RE MOVING!!!

I can’t really say any more than that at the moment. You’ll have to subscribe or check back in here to get the details.

Once again, we’d like to say thanks for making the past three years a huge success for DDS!