Many companies are turning to open source technologies to support their business. Many of the established platforms offer a large number of features right out of the box. With the proper setup, configuration and tailoring, an open source solution can compete with many licensed solutions.

We will look at a few platforms and identify how they could be used to support your business and marketing needs.

WordPress

For many companies it is important to have the ability to regularly update their portfolio, news and press, and blog. WordPress is one of the most popular open source content management system (CMS) on the market that powers many small to medium sized business websites.

• • Low cost of ownership
• • Supports a best-in-class website that users will love using
• • Easy-to-use administration
• • Extendable to where you can build just about any kind of website on it
• • Quick deployment cycle

WordPress Administration

BuddyPress

Ok, ok, ok, so BuddyPress is really just a plug-in for WordPress but since it changes the functionality so much I think it worth mentioning on its own. BuddyPress’ features make it easy to build a social network for your company, organization, non-profit or niche community.

Some key features include:

• • Activity Streams
• • Extended User Profiles
• • Friend Connections
• • Private Messaging
• • Blogging
• • Groups
• • Discussion Forums

In addition to these great features, it can be extended through one of the many community created plug-ins or through custom development.

BuddyPress Demo Website

Magento Commerce

Hands down, Magento commerce is the best open source ecommerce solution on the market. Not only does it offer an impressive out of the box feature set, the look-and-feel is equally impressive. Many of the alternative solutions have fewer features and are just plain ugly.

Magento is robust enough to run a large scale ecommerce website without the huge price tag that would be expected with many of the commercial solutions.

Magento Commerce Administration

1. Custom Post Types

This has to be the best added feature in this release. Up to this point WordPress has had only two types of content, Pages and Posts. This is great if you have a basic website that only has pages and news or blog entries. But what if you had something else on your site, like a portfolio or catalog of products? In order to list them you had to get creative with how you made use of posts and categories to make these pseudo ’content types’ .

Now we have the ability to define new content types and the fields associated to them. This makes it easy for non-technical users to add new content by simply filling out a form with all the required data for the type of content.

Another great feature to accompany this is that each content type can have their own taxonomy. After all, what good is custom content if you cannot properly tag and organize it?

2. Advanced Menus

Ok, so maybe this is the best new feature. It’s just as good as custom posts. In the past Pages and Posts were kept completely separate so you couldn’t have an easily managed menu that contained a mix of both Pages and Posts. Many themes had two menus, one for each. I guess I should clarify, this new version still handles them separately, however, they have added a new menu feature that allows you to create customized menus of any item you want. No more custom HTML and complicated PHP if statements in order to have the menu you want.

3. Custom Admin Account

In prior versions the system would automatically create a user with the username ‘admin’. One of the first things I would do would be to create a new admin user account and delete the ‘admin’ user. Removing this user helps with security. It’s a pretty safe bet that any given WordPress site has a user named ‘admin’. So if hackers wanted in your website they would point an automated script at you login using ‘admin’ and cycle through a list of passwords. Chances are, they’d eventually get in after trying enough passwords.

The safest thing was to delete the user all together. Now there is no additional step… just don’t use ‘admin’ when your own username.

It can be a little daunting on trying to figure out which sessons you want to attend since  you can only attend 30 (assuming you hit something for each timeslot). Despite trying to plan the best you can, you’ll enevitably go to one that you were really excited about and it ends up being a total dud. Other times, you are plesantly surprised at how well one turns out that you weren’t expecting to be really great. I’ve had a pretty healthy mix of both this year and wanted to highlight some great take aways for the various sessions I attended.

Social Media Marketing for Your Business

The first session I went to was Social Media Marketing for Your Business and it was a solid start to the conference. Chris Winfield presented some very enlightening points on how a company should approach using social media as a marketing tool. A couple key points were:

• Take the time to review and understand your site’s analytics. Knowing your customers and where they hang out online is ussually not where you assume. Reviewing this will let you focus your efforts more effectively.
• Don’t get caught up in hype. A good example of this is how the masses can blindly turn on a particular tool or network, such as MySpace. I personally don’t use MySpace, however, for many businesses and industries, it is a very important social network to reach their customers.
• Forums are the most overlooked social media tool. This is probably due to the sexy factor, or lack there of. It’s an older technology but they can have extremely large and active niche communities. Researching forums can be a valuable way to find and reach your customers.

Simple Steps for Great Web Design

Matthew Smith’s session on simple steps for great web design was another winner. There are a few reasons why I enjoy a session, one is that I leave with a great list of example sites or tools that I can later go back and review. These nuggest are better than all the free conferenmce schwag.

Before I get into sharing one of those examples, I want to point out that the examples may not be the greatest site ever made, but rather, they are solid executions where all of the details have been thought through and offer a really nice user experience. One of Matthew’s insights was that it’s not the budget of a project that gives you the opportunity to make a great site, it’s how you allocate that budget. For example, not all clients have a $100,000 budget to make a really great website. In many cases they have a budget of $10,000. His advice was to scope it out with $9k accomplishing the client’s requirements and set aside $1k to add in a nice gem or two so that the site has somethign that sets it apart from the competition who have the same budgets.

An example provided project using this idealology was blueskyresumes.com. There are several insipring details on this project that make for a solid user experience to where you really just enjoy using the site. Here are just a few nice details but there are many more (I encourage you to browse around and find them on your own):

• Using an slightly off-white gives you the opportunity to give users and unexpected white highlight when you roll over the logo.
• The promotion tiles in the sidebar offer a simple but fun bit of interactivity when you rollover them.
• This one is a bit hard to explain but if you visit the About Us page and scroll down, you will notice that the sidebar is stationary up until the pictures of the team appear and then it scrolls away so that the people’s hands do not interfear with the sidebar. Awesome touch!

Well, the next session is calling my name.