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.

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.