WebHelperMagazine.com

by Scott Frangos

After an extensive development for Razorleaf of a custom CMS based on the WordPress platform, it’s easy to see why WordPress just won the award for “Best Open Source CMS” from Packt Publishing — beating out Joomla, Drupal, MODx and others.

Razorleaf is a B2B company specializing in process analysis, training and implementation of enterprise technologies including Product Lifecycle Management.  That’s a mouthful, and as you might imagine, the content marketing strategy called for education of prospects and clients in the form of articles, blog post and whitepapers.

Above, the custom designed homepage for Razorleaf.com called for rotating articles, blog posts, whitepapers, success stories and a “business benefit slideshow” at upper left.

Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 lead the Content Marketing Team, with Scott Frangos of WebFadds as the lead developer and landing page optimizer.  With a core team of six, including a couple of content managers from the client side, this cabal custom designed the interface (Joe Watson was our graphic designer) and configured a number of key plugins to make the magic happen.

Key plugins include:

• NextGen Gallery — home page slideshows
• Stray Random Quotes – used to rotate “did you know” items about the corporation on sidebars, with links to related content
• MaxRef Widgets to provide a variety of configurations for sidebar links to categories, posts, articles, and child page groups
  
  [click to enlarge] – Above, MaxRef widgets, developed by WebFadds.com, helps bring links to groups of “child pages” to the sidebar for this site
• cForms II for all forms — the team used the “alternative success page” method to set up thank you pages as trackable Analytics goals
• Custom Widgets to manage different widget configurations in different sections
• TPC Memory Usage & WordPress System Health to monitor site software performance on the dashboard
  
  [click to enlarge] – Above, both Memory Usage, and System Health overview provide key data and reporting for the IT members on the team.

• Headspace2 SEO for maximal SEO set-up — we’ve found it does much better than the popular “All in One” SEO plugin.

With over 120 pages in the system, the content managers find the latest WordPress admin editing features, with configurable screen options and quick editing tools, a time saving convenience.

[Click to Enlarge} - Above, the convenient quick editing controls in recent versions of WordPress really cut out a lot of time -- note the search filter at upper right... an important feature when you are dealing with hundreds of pages.

Jonathan Scott, of Razorleaf Corp., leads the internal team of content marketers and is responsible for the lively and frequently updated articles and posts, along with some excellent writers on the staff.

While the project has not been without challenges — we moved the project from GoDaddy to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with Liquid Web because of speed issues — we are all pleased to be working with an excellent CMS system.

The Team continues to focus on business blogging tactics for SEO, informed by a review of Analytics and other search behavior research.

About the Author: Scott Frangos is Managing Editor and Blogger in Chief for WebHelperMagazine.com, and also Managing Partner for WebFadds.com, a modern web development company focused on CMS and business blog solutions based on the WordPress platform. The firm also offers Social Media Marketing and Optimization services.