Roles and Capabilities « WordPress Codex

Suppose you have 30 sales people in your company- and they are constantly sharing information they find on the web with the other sales people- via e-mail.

A sales person might send an e-mail to his peers:

Our competitor is bragging about their 6 million hits on their website monthly at site xyz- our web site has 6 million unique visitors- with way more hits. Go tell that to all the clients who are considering advertising on their site.

Instead- he could post it on his WordPress driven site- for all to see- with comparisons. Depending on his level- he could have different abilities to post:

• Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features
• Editor – Somebody who can publish posts, manage posts as well as manage other people’s posts, etc.
• Author – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
• Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts
• Subscriber – Somebody who can read comments/comment/receive newsletters, etc.

If the sales manager wants to keep control of what his sales people post- or let legal take a look- he can make them all Contributors– and make the lawyers Editors.

The great thing about letting everyone post- is content drives visitors and higher search results- so a small company of 30, posting often can create a high ranked site in a short period of time. The key will be making sure the posts are all properly categorized- and that everyone makes a good effort not to duplicate content.

Copyrights must also be observed- making sure that all content is properly attributed.

It never hurts to also hire an “editor” to try to make different writing styles all fall into one corporate voice. Look to hire a freelance writer- who is familiar with WordPress to help keep your site as grammatically correct as possible.

If you are looking for an editor- we can connect you with a few (it might be good if we hired one of them too- note to self).

On Tuesday, we had a full day of seminars. Intro Blogosopher in the morning, and the first WordPress advanced in the afternoon. To showcase the power of categories in WordPress to gather ideas in several posts into a super post- I searched The Next Wave news blog for anything about the super hot agency “Crispin Porter + Bogusky” in Miami and created a new category of the same name.

We searched Google for any mention of The Next Wave when searching for “Crispin Porter Bogusky” and gave up after the 300 th or so reference (30 pages in). Today I added a post about “CB+P” to the site- and then went to Google again a few hours later. We were now number 7! And that is out of 176,000 results. A few articles above ours, was a great article about CP+B from Business Week– so we used the “Press-it” function of WordPress to add yet another post to the site.

The goal is to get to the top of Google, using real content, instead of nested pages, or paid postion, to be next to the hottest ad agency in the world. Of course, we think we’re the second hottest agency- along with half the agencies in America- but the difference is- we’ve figured out the secrets of search- and content management- and even Crispin hasn’t got that part quite mastered.

If you want to learn how to get your site, and yes, we’ll even teach other ad agencies, to the top of Google- without paying for it, you need to attend one of our seminars.

NewsForge | Choosing an open source CMS

The above link is an overview of the many Content Management Systems (CMS) that are available to run a website. All are open source software- meaning the source code is open to the public to tinker with and adapt for their particular use. Don’t think that open source just happens- there are huge communities of people sheparding the software to make sure it’s stable, secure and viable.

The key to these packages is that your site exists in a database- with the content extracted and formatted for display on the web as opposed to a hard coded site that is created one page at a time- and the pages don’t change.

We really like WordPress because of it’s simplicity. If you want to later move up to a more robust package- you can easily import your existing WordPress site into Drupal. The difference is, Drupal requires a geek to really make it sing- WordPress just works.

The article doesn’t really get into the main reasons we love the WordPress CMS so here are a few:

• Your site will automatically have RSS (Really Simple Synidication) so your readers can subscribe to your site and be notified any time you change or add material.
• Each time you post- WordPress automatically notifies Google that there is new information on your site and you get indexed.
• WordPress allows you to build 2-way communication via comments and trackbacks with people interested in your subject.
• Posting is as easy as writing a document in Microsoft Word- and that makes keeping your site up to date a snap.
• If you pay attention to your webstats, and use the Categories feature properly, you can end up on the front page of Google quite easily- at least it’s worked for us.

So- take a look at the article and it’s list of Content Management Systems- but, if you are new to having a database driven site- trust us- and start out with WordPress.