Simply Put the agency blog

Somebody called me yesterday and asked me whether we were still in business as they had noticed that the last time we updated this blog was back in March. Well rest assured we’re alive and well! In fact, it’s been one of our busiest Summers to date. And fortunately, we’ve got a few things to show for it! Here are a few pieces of work we’ve released recently:

WooThemes

Back in June, we had the pleasure of working with the cool cats over at WooThemes - one of today’s leading experts and providers of premium WordPress themes. In their rebranding process, they came to us to hack-up and redevelop the purchase experience for the customers of its themes and its up-and-coming themes club. The trick was to integrate a secure 2Checkout payment system into their newly designed site and automate the creation of various types of user accounts once the payments were approved. Did I mention we did it all in WordPress? If you’re already a customer of WooThemes, I hope you’ve enjoyed their purchase experience. If you’re not one yet, go ahead and buy one of their wickedgood themes and sample the experience (I’m sure Adii won’t mind)!

LIVE Conference 2008

Back in its third and strongest year yet - LIVE Conference has always made a mark with its web presence that gave other leading undergraduate business conferences something to shoot for. LIVE Conference’s newly releaunch 2008 portal is no different. This year, we combined our WordPress hackery with the idea that the conference really needed a more robust and dynamic conference management system. The end product we delivered was a full featured WordPress-powered conference management platform that supported the scalable needs of a growing initiative and could support all its essential conference needs: registration, payment, scheduling, speaker profiles, and much, much more. Oh, and we think it looks pretty nice too!

What else is new?

A lot, actually. We’ve got a few secret side projects in the works, possibly including a newly formed super group of web 2.0 headbangers and internet rockstars. You’ll know it when you see it.

We’ve also made a few leaps and bounds with our WordPress work and are looking into releasing a few goodies back into the community. This may start with the public release of the conference management system, but that’s too far ahead to tell.

Sweetcron was also released recently and what can I say, we love it! If you don’t know what Sweetcron is, you’re out of the loop. It’s the WordPress of lifestreaming. Get on it! We’ve got an exciting new Sweetcron theme that we’re putting up for free download soon, but in the meantime, you can get a taste of it on Satish’s newly launched webfront: http://sati.sh.

It’s been a great Summer filled with many successes and we thank you for being patient with our absence here while we help our clients make an impact elsewhere. We’ve finally gotten around to updating our Portfolio as well, so give it a peak and see what else we’ve been up to.

The great thing about working with an open-source platform like WordPress is that it is well-supported by an enthusiastic, passionate, and forward-thinking community of developers, designers, and users. From this community spawns, among many things, a truck load of plugins that everyday users can download and install without breaking a sweat. These plugins help publishers make the most out of WordPress’ basic functions and optimize theirs and their visitors’ user experience.

Every new WP site we build begins with the activation of a number of key plugins. Many of these plugins would be really helpful to those of you running WP sites of your own, so I thought I would outline our list of essential WordPress plugins. Enjoy!

All-in-One SEO Pack - A great plugin to help you optimize your site titles, descriptions and keywords. A must-have for anybody who remotely cares about search engine optimization.

cforms II - This powerful AJAX-enabled plugin helps you build multiple custom forms for you to embed onto your pages. We use cforms to run the contact form on our Contact page.

Feed Count - If you’re tired of the FeedBurner chicklet and want to try your hand at customizing the look of your feed count, then this is the plugin for you.

Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin dynamically builds and updates your sitemaps to help search engines index your content more accurately.

Robots Meta - Another search engine friendly plugin that allows you to adjust your nofollow, noindex settings on a post-by-post and page-by-page basis.

Simple Tagging - Because WordPress’ native tagging function isn’t perfect yet. My biggest gripe against the native tagging function is that you can’t see a current list of tags that are already in-use. This plugin takes care of that in a very cool way.

Subscribe to Comments - Keep your commentors in the conversation by allowing them to subscribe to comment updates for any particular post.

WP-PageNavi - A great alternative to WordPress’ native pagination function that lets users browse content by page number.

Got more plugins that you consider essential? Tell me about them by leaving a comment.

The folks over at Automattic (the same brilliant minds that brought us WordPress, Gravatar, and a number of other web apps) have unveiled their latest creation: Prologue. It’s not exactly a new project, but a highly customized WordPress theme that takes the concept of Twitter and mashes it into an innovative new way to stay connected with members of a group/company. And all within the friendly realms of WordPress.

Its use is not limited to being a company communication tool, but that idea had by far gotten me the most excited. Here at Vdot Media, it’s hard to stay on top of what everyone is working on, and while we’ve tried internal blogs and other tools, Prologue may serve to be the simplest and least demanding/involving solution (a characteristic that makes Twitter the lazy blogger’s best alternative). I just might be curious enough to try to see if this one will work out.

Aside from the productivity benefits, Prologue gets my two thumbs up for taking something with simple functions (WordPress) and hacking it up to do something completely different and something completely awesome (for lack of a better word). This kind of innovation really drives our team, and it’s what made Can’t Wait for Christmas such a fun project.

I’d love to hear from others who have tried out Prologue as a company communication tool. If the team will let me, I just might have a few first-hand thoughts to report as well.

In the mean time, read up on and see a screenshot of Prologue here. Download the theme and take it for a spin here.

In early December, we launched a holiday microsite entitled Can’t Wait for Christmas that encouraged visitors to post their wishes and share exactly what they couldn’t wait for come Christmas day. The site was a hit and we happily received almost 300 unique wishes from people all around the world. More interestingly, the site was conceived, designed, developed, and launched in less than 19 hours.

The site was simply a great in-house project that let us flex our WordPress muscles a bit. In fact, a detailed tutorial on some of the WP techniques used in the making of Can’t Wait for Christmas has been posted here. And if you’re a real keener, you can learn more about the project by reading mine and Satish’s interview about the site over at HatchThat.com.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by and shared their wishes and counted down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds til Christmas with us. Hope you all had a merry one!