After kicking the tires on a variety of blog engines for the past few years, we now turn to Wordpress by default for blogs - and, increasingly, for low-level content management needs for our clients’ sites. For a simple (and free) blog, we might help our clients by setting up and training them on a Wordpress-hosted blog: a fully-working, hosted-for-free blog at an address like yourcompany.wordpress.com can (if the name isn’t taken) be setup in a matter of minutes. The blog’s administrative screen are both powerful and easy to use; built-in design options make it easy to incorporate your own logo and color scheme.

For blogs requiring more capabilities and/or closer integration into an existing site, the Wordpress blog engine (the web and database code which runs the blog itself) is available for free download. Hosting Wordpress on your (or our) server gives us the ability to incorporate more complex creative designs - to match, that is, the skin of almost any existing site - and to make custom changes to individual blog-post pages. A self-hosted blog also allows us to integrate the blog more closely into other areas of an existing non-blog site: we might show the most-recent three blog posts on an area of a client’s existing homepage, for instance.

Lately, we’ve turned to the Wordpress engine as a content-management system, using the code to enable easy client administration of traditional, non-blog sites. As open-source software with extensive online documentation and a thriving user community - and being built on PHP and MySQL - we can customize Wordpress to fill just about any content management need.

Please contact us to find out how we can make Wordpress work for you.

Our client Fiddlehead is a maker of a hardware solution designed for schools in which a single PC can be turned in four or more computers. Each virtual computer can run a different operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux), teachers can view/control each student’s desktop, support folks have fewer PCs to maintain - these and other benefits make Fiddlehead an attractive solution for schools, especially in computer labs.

To highlight the hardware, software, energy, and support savings, we built a Javascript-based total-cost-ownership/acquisition calculator; we’ve recently updated the calculator to better match the reality of school technology support and maintenance. The calculator makes great use of the Prototype javascript library and - for the printable report generated by the user after submitting the form with his/her unique assumptions about cost of equipment, energy useage, support costs, etc. - the FPDF dynamic PDF library.

The calculator offers school-technology decision makers a tool for easily and quickly evaluating this product’s value for them, as well as for sharing these data with other stakeholders within their organization.