Expert WordPress Developers « C. Murray Consulting

WordPress is a free, open-source content management system that offers simple and elegant administration, a wealth of extensions, and incredible control over design.

We have qualified expertise with all avenues of WordPress development and implementation, including full content management system implementations, custom template design and integration, development of plug-ins, and integration between WordPress blogs and third party content management systems. We also provide one-on-one WordPress training and strategy services.

Two of our WordPress implementations (Museums in the Park and the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship blogs) have been featured on the official WordPress Showcase. Our was plug-in lists.

We’ve also authored several popular posts delving into advanced WordPress template subjects. Check out our featured WordPress Power Tips article, and all of our other articles that touch on WordPress, including the development of an iPhone optimized WordPress template!

Featured on WordPress Showcase

WordPress as a Website Content Management System

WordPress is a great choice for websites whose primarily purpose is to provide marketing or informational content to the general public, as well as websites centered on a blog or news feed.

Its modern template (skinning) system fascilitates integration of bleeding edge designs, and it is a fast performer, meaning you can realize a beautiful website that performs quickly at a reasonable price. It supports intuitive, search engine friendly URLs out of the box; combined with some freely available and popular extensions, WordPress can be quickly and inexpensively search engine optimized.

With roots as a blogging platform, WordPress was built from the ground up with non-tech savvy content managers in mind. The entire administrative console is modern, attractive, and intuitive, and help is always a click away. The WYSIWYG (visual) page and post editor provides the right balance of control and design protection out of the box, and can be extended with freely available plug-ins for more HTML sophisticated editors. Fully integrated media library tools make it easy to embed and manage pictures, videos, sound clips, galleries, as well as PDFs, spreadsheets, and other attachments. Full content revision history allow you to roll back to previous versions of content – or even compare two versions side by side – at any time.

WordPress facilitates multiple content contributors, offering pre-configured user roles out of the box, and intelligent content protection. You can make that strategic partner a content “contributor”, so he or she can log in and write a blog post, but can’t touch page content or other users’ content, and can’t publish the post without content editor / manager approval. If a content manager tries to edit a page that’s being worked on by another user, the manager will be alerted that the content is actively being edited, and won’t be able to save changes.

WordPress Integration with 3rd Party Content Management Systems

Many clients elect to implement WordPress as a premiere blogging solution, independent of their primary site. Typically, this is due to a decision to keep an existing primary content management system with more advanced membership management tools, or for cost reasons.

We’ve helped clients like Direct Care Alliance and the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship implement WordPress as a blogging platform with seamless integration from the end user point of view. Our rapid integration process involves:

Migration of overall site template to WordPress for a consistent look and feel.
Set up of WordPress on a subdomain (i.e. “blog.mysite.com”) for consistency.
Integration of WordPress blog feed onto primary site home page with automatic updates (cached at the ideal interval for the client, to maintain snappy performance).
Programming of WordPress template to dynamically “pull” and update theme elements that change regularly from the primary site, such as top level navigation.

We’ve already developed custom WordPress template code to facilitate quick, low cost integration with third party systems. Both Boston College and Direct Care Alliance use our CitySoft Community Enterprise navigation integration system, so that changes to top level navigation are automatically updated in the WordPress template (featuring, as always, caching for fast performance).