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In this continuing series on using WordPress as a Content Management System — CMS, we’ll take a look at NEXTbusNews.com — a corporate marketing site to get the word out about NEXTbus technology service for bus companies.

by Scott Frangos

NEXTbusNews.com features a features & benefits slideshow on the home page plus static elements and dynamic elements (posts at bottom and live map in sidebar).

Form is a revelation of essence — Meister Eckhart

NEXTbus News is corporate website where the marketing managers wanted to take advantage of getting the word out using all the strengths of WordPress, but with static pages in addition to “News” pages (using the WordPress blog post functions). Primarily a “B2B” Business to Business) site, it was developed with the idea of explaining the company technology to bus service managers, though riders can easily understand the concept as well.

Key Plugins Used:

• MaxRef Widgets - To show separate link blocks in the sidebar with parent/child hierarchies
• NextGen Gallery - for the slideshow on the home page
• Plain Old Text Widget (comes with WordPress) - for the javascript code to display the live NEXTbus map in the sidebar

Theme Development: Based on a 2-column news theme by Brian Gardner, the team changed the styling for corporate colors, modified the header and background images, and added some PHP work to particular pages. Mr. Gardner has produced a series of “News” style themes which the team found to be an excellent solution for presentation of NEXTBus content.

What’s interesting about the home page, is that it is a cross between a “static” (items at top rarely change), and blog page with posts appearing under the static elements.

Above, the MaxRef Widget was used to show both the Parent (”About Us”) and its four “children” page links on the sidebar in one convenient link group.

The team also wanted a “slide show” which I formated horizontally to fit the page structure so that other important content would also be visible on the home page. The “show” uses the excellent NextGen Gallery plugin which allows creation of multiple galleries and slideshows.

The site was co-developed by Newt Barrett of SucceedingToday.com, and WebFadds.com (my company), with help from the marketing and technology team at NEXTbus . Mr. Barrett is a great proponent of “Content Marketing,” and has co-written a book on how the right content helps you get customers, “Get Content. Get Customers.”

Those of you who work as designers might be familiar with the phrase, “Form Follows Function.” Applied here, that would indicate that we used WordPress to form the site so it would function with both dynamic and static content to take advantage of a number of automated marketing techniques including pinging and RSS feeds.

I also like this quote: “Form is a revelation of essence,” (Meister Eckhart). Here, to get to the essence of what NEXTbus is and does, we used a news-style theme in WordPress with a visual presentation of NEXTBus features and benefits on the homepage, and a collection of plugins to allow prospects (those seeking the essence of NEXTbus), to navigate easily to important content.