While attending the Ingram-Micro Spring Partner Connection Summit this May in sunny Hollywood, Florida, I watched lifeguards rescue swimmer after swimmer that lost track of their location in the ocean and were pulled out to sea in a dangerous riptide.

My wife and I couldn’t understand why swimmers weren’t splashing within the limits of the buoys – each time the lifeguards hauled someone in, they pointed out the buoys to the rescued swimmers AND to any swimmers within shouting distance on the beach.

A few days later, when we boarded a vessel for an off-shore snorkel adventure, we found just how easy it is to be whisked away by waves and scenery. While observing the schools of fish beneath us, I popped my head up to see how close we were to the dive flag the marked our boundaries. Mere inches!

We sometimes find ourselves in similar situations when working with small businesses; they may be unaware that they are caught in an undercurrent of poor technology practices, hardware purchases, dismal security and poor policies. Once businesses feel the pull and pressure of the current, they panic.  Businesses fight the waves and current instead of swimming parallel to the shore into the clear waters of prosperity and growth.

While we are happy to lifeguard for clients and rescue them from a sea of break-fix spending, we find much more satisfaction in working with clients to place buoys in the area where they are comfortable swimming.  Swimming within the buoys helps them stay clear of the dangerous break/fix riptides and enjoy the many benefits of leveraging technology to move their businesses forward.

A marketing session at the conference asked us to take a closer look at our passions to determine where to focus our marketing efforts.

Our passion is providing total support and peace of mind to our clients.

Iowa Data Centers and Infrastructure Technology Solutions – Trusted, IT solutions.

              

Before we built our data center and developed our consulting offerings, we built a lot of web sites for customers. With a guy to write code and a guy with a sharp eye for design, and we could roll out sites that showcased  businesses’ products and services fairly quickly.

The customers we worked with didn’t necessarily have a background in html, and couldn’t easily edit their pages without some sort of specialized software. Rather than encouraging clients to purchase Dreamweaver or Contribute, we wrote a Content Management System (CMS) that provided a user-friendly interface for inputting and editing information on the site.

Now, we turn to Wordpress.

WordPress helps small and large business alike have a website that’s easy to maintain by providing a built-in content management system.  While WordPress has several free themes to start you on your website adventures, a little knowledge of html and CSS will take you ever further.  Custom coding and sites can easily be developed to take advantage of all WordPress has to offer as well.

In addition to the CMS, WordPress is an open-source platform, which means that developers are constantly adding new plugins, themes and tools for other users and developers.  These plugins are snippets of code that run in your website to help you flash through photos in a gallery, connect clients to your social networking sites, provide a “contact us” form, or even count and track visitors to your new website.

A simple and secure WordPress login allows users to author, edit and publish pages on the website, depending on the amount of permissions given to them.

After converting our website to WordPress, we are excited to roll out our first client sites in the next few weeks.  We know that our clients are excited to have a web presence that is eye-appealing, user-friendly, and cost-effective.  And, we are excited to show you what a WordPress site can do for your business.