WordPress for self administered web content

Recently I joind the board of directors for the Berks County Association for the Blind. This is a great organization and I'm still learning about all the great services they offer the blind, visually impared and other challenged people in Berks County. More about the BCAB later.

I wanted to talk today about my experience with WordPress during my effort to help the Blind association with their web presence. I had experimented with WordPress a couple years ago and I was impressed with it's potential but never implemented anything live. For the BCAB I wanted to keep cost down (WordPress is open source and cost nothing beyond normal web hosting costs) and I wanted to be able to hand all the administration of content over to the organization.

To make a short story long we bought a Domain and web hosting from Go Daddy. I installed WordPress right through the Go Daddy's interface, choose a basic theme (WordPress lingo for template), spent some time teaching myself how to use the many plugins available (open source for free) and was able to hand them a web site that they have total control over through a GUI dashboard (no coding needed). They can add pages, change content, add pictures etc... very cool. All in about 8 hours of my time including and mostly learning curve.

To see the sight click here:
www.berksblind.org

To learn more about WordPress click here:
http://wordpress.org/about/

Gary Brown

Partner / Business Development

Berks Digital Inc.

www.berksdigital.com

Google will tell you if you have a certain malware

Scroll to the bottom to see the message you will see on google search results if you are infected. Very cool that they can do this.

Can you use your reticular activator as a powerful force for good in your life?

Content from the website - http://www.youmeworks.com/what-is-the-reticular-activator.html

THE RETICULAR ACTIVATOR is a part of the brain the stays on alert. It's job is to make you notice some things and ignore other things (if you noticed everything, you'd be too distracted to function). When you buy a new VW, it seems like the whole world has bought VWs, because you notice them everywhere. That's the reticular activator at work.

Motivational speakers, business consultants, and authors of "success books" always stress the importance of having a clear goal. One of the reasons goals are so important is because they activate your reticular activator.

If you have the goal of writing and publishing a bestselling book, for example, you will start noticing things you've never noticed before. It seems the world is conspiring to help you out. You'll meet just the right people. You'll run into the perfect designer for your cover by an amazing coincidence. You'll happen to stumble across a magazine article that tells you about a software program that will really speed up your writing. And so on.

All these things are happening because your clear goal has set up the conditions for your reticular activator to work well. That's how it works. When you know exactly what you want, your reticular activator goes to work automatically to help you get it.

To read more - click here

Direct Marketing Web tools still free if you know where to look.

While as a provider of print services we know that quality printed materials are an important part of any companies marketing. I’m writing today to tell you about some web services that are not only effective ways to communicate your message but with the exception of your time investment are FREE.

First is email marketing, while there is a plethora of service companies out there, most will charge after a short trial period or limit you to a very short list of contacts and limit features so you need to upgrade to the pay version for any real useful functionality.

I have found that for full services and a subscriber list of up to 1,000 subscribers, that MailChimp.com offers a great service for FREE to businesses of all sizes. They offer simple templates to create, sent and track email communications that can easily include photos, dynamic links or video. For you skeptics, below is a link to an explanation of how their free business model works.

http://blog.mailchimp.com/going-freemium-one-year-later/

My next communication will discuss Survey tools, so stay tuned.

Gary Brown

Partner / Business Development

Berks Digital Inc.

www.berksdigital.com

Should we approach sales differently in PA?

PA consumers and business people have a different outlook, possibly more skeptical and "stubborn" or a more "closed community." Is this because of our mostly German heritage? PA is top on the list of residence who don't move out of state which makes our communities more closed-knit.

How do you break into old-established networks? It takes 3-5 years for anybody to gain a solid presence in a network. How do we get connected sooner?

Learn to Build Your Brand; Free; Three Part Wkshp