It’s been 4 years since we launched the current version of mobilestorm.com. We are coming out with two new products very soon, so it only seemed fit to create a new website that was more in line with our brand, the new products and who we are today. We wanted to build a great looking site that simplified our pitch, most importantly we wanted to spend as little as possible yet make it look like a million bucks. When building a website you have two major focuses, design and development.

Design:

The design of our current website was outsourced to a top notch firm but they were expensive. This time around we decided to hire a few individual designers (with a budget of $2,000 per designer), give them a framework for what we wanted, and like an open source project, make our design more collaborative. We ended up doing the final design in-house, taking bits and pieces from all of our designs mock-ups and creating one great final design. Instead of relying on one firm to do the design and spending a large sum of money we tapped into the power of multiple designers. There are great sites out there like elance.com where you can easily hire people on the cheap.

Development:

The development of our current site we did in-house with a full time programmer who earned a nice yearly salary. Sure this might have been a good way to conserve cash flow, but over the course of the year you end up paying the same amount of money in salary as you would upfront with a web shop, and it’s not like you do not need to continue to update the site once it’s built. With our current site we did not implement a content management system so anytime we wanted to add something or create something new it was custom and took lots of time. Enter the world of Word Press.

We currently use Word Press (WP) for our digital marketing blog and have become very impressed with it’s capabilities. Word press has become way more than just a blogging software, and because it is open source the number of plug-ins created for it is in the thousands and growing every day. We researched a few companies who can take the PSD files of your design create and turn that into a template that lies on top of the word press framework. We settled on one company called knowledgetown.com who charges $80 an hour for their work. What we liked about knowledgetown is that they have created their own plug-ins for content management on top of WP and they understand WP’s capabilities so well that anytime we run into a feature they either know how to get it done or know where to look.

It’s been amazing at the speed in which we are working, not to mention how much money we are saving because of all the free tools and plug-ins WP offers. Here are a few features we have been able to take advantage of where in the past we have had to design or code them ourselves:

1. Fast Page Loading: One of our requirements is that each page loads in less than a second. The Minify plug-in cleans up the code on every page and makes the file as small as it can be, automatically so the page loads very quickly.

2. Ad Management: There are multiple plug-ins for ad management. We really like OIO which helps us display ads anywhere on our site (such as a whitepaper download advertisement) and track the # of leads each promotion is getting.

3. Mobile Conversion: This is one of the biggest wins for use Word Press. There are multiple solutions that will take your site and make it available for viewing on any mobile device, there are even plug-ins for iphone optimization. Do you have any idea in the past how many things you would need to take into account just to have a site that looked good on the mobile device? Most of the time you would need to have a device sniffer and serve up a second site you built specifically for mobile viewing. With word press you just add this plug-in and whalla, your site looks good on mobile phones, and for a mobile company, that’s a big win.

4. Adding New Pages: With word press you simply add a new page. If you have a great word press design firm like Knowledgetown they will set it up for you so that your navigation is updated on-the-fly. Never again do you have to sit around and wait for your internal team to launch a page on the site. This is especially good for SEO since the more pages you have the better rankings you will get.

5. Blogging: Let’s not forget why we started using word press in the first place. mobileStorm maintains 3 blogs and its wonderful when you can log into one application to manage not only your blog postings but your website content.

6. Administration + Security: We didn’t have a system before that allowed multiple users of the mobilestorm.com website. Now I can break off an account to someone in marketing or tech support and grant them access to only the areas they would need to access. Collaboration at it’s finest. Also from a security perspective WP has some great features like IP address blocking, so you can limit who can log in and lock it down to specific location.

7. Custom Fields: Knowledge town provided us with the ability to use WP’s custom field feature. On our new site we have these call-to-actions for prospects to start a free trial or schedule a demo. These call-to-actions are basically banners and their placement and design varies from section-to-section. With the custom field feature we can simply place these call-to-actions on any page by simply adding in a command like “go” for our call-to-action to sign up for a mobileStorm Go account. Again not having to wait on an in-house programmer to add this to a page is heaven. You might say to yourself “Jared, content management is an old concept and has been around for a while”, and this is true but not with this many features and levels of customization for free.

8. SEO Tools: Search engine optimization is a big part of our success. The moment you launch a WP site, you are launching a site that has been developed with best practices in mind. Not only is the code incredibly clean and optimized but there are tools such as the SEO Pack, that provides further optimization so that your site can be easily indexed and ranked. No need to hire an SEO firm to tell you how to structure your site, instead focus with your firm on ranking high for your important keywords.

Just like the Blackberry and Tivo, we are going to ask ourselves in a few years what did we ever do without word press. There are so many options you could get bogged down in the “possible” and miss your deadline.
Creating an amazing looking interactive website used to cost millions and you had to hire MarchFirst or RazorFish. Now all you need is a good eye and Word Press ninjas. Our new site launches this month, feel free to tell me what you think.

Have fun building!

Jared Reitzin
Grow your business fast!