WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

Release from WordPress deveoplers:

I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus dozens more…

Several of Voddie clients utilise WordPress for not only their blogging needs, but also as a content management system. The beauty is it’s free to use and is constantly upgraded by the hundreds of deveoplers that just keep improving both the platform and functionality.

Key Features

If you don’t know or haven’t heard about the benefits and features of Wordpress ….read on

• Full standards compliance — We have gone to great lengths to make sure every bit of WordPress generated code is in full compliance with the standards of the W3C. This is important not only for interoperability with today’s browser but also for forward compatibility with the tools of the next generation. Your web site is a beautiful thing, and you should demand nothing less.
• No rebuilding — Changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.
• WordPress Pages — Pages allow you to manage non-blog content easily, so for example you could have a static “About” page that you manage through WordPress. For an idea of how powerful this is, the entire WordPress.org site could be run off WordPress alone. (We don’t for technical mirroring reasons.)
• WordPress Links — Links allows you to create, maintain, and update any number of blogrolls through your administration interface. This is much faster than calling an external blogroll manager.
• WordPress Themes — WordPress comes with a full theme system which makes designing everything from the simplest blog to the most complicated webzine a piece of cake, and you can even have multiple themes with totally different looks that you switch with a single click. Have a new design every day.
• Cross-blog communication tools— WordPress fully supports both the Trackback and Pingback standards, and we are committed to supporting future standards as they develop.
• Comments — Visitors to your site can leave comments on individual entries, and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own site. You can enable or disable comments on a per-post basis.
• Spam protection — Out of the box WordPress comes with very robust tools such as an integrated blacklist and open proxy checker to manage and eliminate comment spam on your blog, and there is also a rich array of plugins that can take this functionality a step further.
• Full user registration — WordPress has a built-in user registration system that (if you choose) can allow people to register and maintain profiles and leave authenticated comments on your blog. You can optionally close comments for non-registered users. There are also plugins that hide posts from lower level users.
• Password Protected Posts — You can give passwords to individual posts to hide them from the public. You can also have private posts which are viewable only by their author.
• Easy installation and upgrades — Installing WordPress and upgrading from previous versions and other software is a piece of cake. Try it and you’ll wonder why all web software isn’t this easy.
• Easy Importing — We currently have importers for Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and b2. Work on importers for Nucleus and pMachine are under way.
• XML-RPC interface — WordPress currently supports an extended version of the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, and finally the MovableType API. You can even use clients designed for other platforms like Zempt.
• Workflow — You can have types of users that can only post drafts, not publish to the front page.
• Typographical niceties — WordPress uses the Texturize engine to intelligently convert plain ASCII into typographically correct XHTML entities. This includes quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, em and en dashes, multiplication symbols, and ampersands. For information about the proper use of such entities see Peter Sheerin’s article The Trouble With Em ’n En.
• Intelligent text formatting — If you’ve dealt with systems that convert new lines to line breaks before you know why they have a bad name: if you have any sort of HTML they butcher it by putting tags after every new line indiscriminately, breaking your formatting and validation. Our function for this intelligently avoids places where you already have breaks and block-level HTML tags, so you can leave it on without worrying about it breaking your code.
• Multiple authors — WordPress’ highly advanced user system allows up to 10 levels of users, with different levels having different (and configurable) privileges with regard to publishing, editing, options, and other users.
• Bookmarklets — Cross-browser bookmarklets make it easy to publish to your blog or add links to your blogroll with a minimum of effort.
• Ping away — WordPress supports pinging Ping-O-Matic, which means maximum exposure for your blog to search engines.

There’s much more, but these are the highlights. If there’s something that you really want, submit a request on the support forums and there’s a good chance someone will whip it up for you.

Voddie provide the website and web hosting free of charge and continue to provide web support to all their needs. The old site was looking slightly worn and needed a fresh look, along with added functionality such as cool image galleries, rss feeds from sports websites and a blog.

Andy Bradshaw, Voddie Creative Director, says, “We have been supporting Young Owls JFC for the last three or four years and enjoy the partnership created. We provide these websites to help the development of Junior sports around the area. Being a ‘true blue’ from birth, I feel Voddie is in the right camp!”

More and more people including companies are incorporating podcasts to get their message across and even have them included on iTunes for all to listen to.

Here is an outline of podcasting, will be adding more tips later next week.

What is a Podcast?
Below is a definition of podcasting pulled from Wikipedia that provides you with information about podcasting, its roots and some of the techincal aspects surrounding podcasting.  The following is provided free from editing and I take no credit for this wonderful explanation.

Podcasting, created by former MTV VJ Adam Curry, is a term that was devised as a crisp way to describe the technology used to push audio content from websites down to consumers of that content, who typically listen to it on their iPod (hence the “pod”) or other audio player that supports mp3 at their convenience. The term podcasting is meant to rhyme with broadcasting and is a derivative of the iPod platform. While not directly associated with Apples iPod device or iTunes music service, the company did contribute both the desire and the technology for this capability. Podcasting is not unlike time-shifted video software and devices like TiVo, which let you watch what you want when you want by recording and storing video, except that podcasting is used for audio and is currently free of charge. Note, however, that this technology can be used to push any kind of file, including software updates, pictures, and videos.

Podcasting uses an XML-based technology called RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. Content publishers describe new content in an XML RSS file which includes dates, titles, descriptions, and links to MP3 files. This auto-generated file is called an RSS feed. The key to making podcasting work with RSS is enclosures, a feature supported by RSS 2.0.

What makes podcasting special is that it allows individuals to publish (podcast) radioshows, that interested listeners can subscribe to. Before podcasting you could of course record a radio show and put it on your website, but now people can automatically receive new shows, without having to go to a specific site and download it from there.

It is also important to stay abreast of industry trends, the latest technologies and proven business strategies. Their FREE webinars are geared for audiences of all types from individuals to fortune 500 companies, so feel free to register today no matter what your background or knowledge is.

Omnistar Interactive invite you to register for their Featured Webinar of the Month.

In this featured Webinar, Omnistar’s Vice-President of Sales and Marketing, Arlen Robinson will explain how anyone can have success with Google Adwords in a few straight forward easy steps.

Covered within the Webinar:

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Fortunately, Webinars do not have to be scary or expensive, and many organizations have successfully adopted online technology to launch their own Webinar programs.

Join them on May 15 as Dave Lee, VP of Marketing at Infusion Software, shares how to get a Webinar program off the ground, from planning and promoting to following up with attendees.

Attend this Webinar to learn how to:

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The key to avoiding this kind of frustration is to see where things are going and become an early-adopter in the next big wave of the commercial Internet. Of course, even if you’re already doing well, it never hurts to take a look forward, right?

This free Teaching Sells report from 10-year online marketer Brian Clark is your guide to what’s coming next, and what some savvy online entrepreneurs are succeeding with right now.

In this quick and easy 22-page report (or optional audio recording), you’ll learn:

• Whether blogging is dead or not
• How to avoid the tyranny of Google
• Why you should forget the “Long Tail”
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Optimizing B2B Email Marketing for Lead Generation

When it comes to email marketing, B2B companies have unique needs that are not served by traditional email providers. The days of batch email marketing campaigns with low response rates are over. To convert raw inquiries into sales ready leads, modern marketers need 1:1 dialogue marketing capabilities.

These include drip campaigns with automated lead nurturing and the ability to trigger follow-up activities based on specific consumer behaviors such as whether the prospect opened a prior email or visited a specific web-page. By augmenting prospect profiles with targeted information like this, marketers can improve lead scoring and better measure prospect interest and engagement.

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Join them as they discuss Optimizing B2B Email Marketing for Lead Generation, including:

• Improving the odds of your emails being noticed and read, and your offers converted
• Allocating and justifying your budget for email marketing
• Developing creative that will improve your click through and conversion rates
• Increasing sales-ready leads with segmentation, automated nurturing and follow-up activities

Live Webinar Register Now

They are offering a free webinar on social networking on Wednesday, 9th April, that has got to be a must view.

Learn how to harness the power of the social mediasphere - facebook, digg, del.icio.us, reddit, and many others - to get found by more potential customers, develop meaningful relationships with others in your industry, and position yourself as an expert in your field.

Register now for the free webinar.

Who should attend?

This webinar is intended for marketing professionals and business owners who wish to learn about leveraging social media for their business. No prior knowledge is required.

If keyword is the word you hear most often with SEO, then links or linking is the word you hear second-most often. Links are the foundation of topical communities, and as such they have as much, if not more, weight with search engine crawlers than keywords do.

A web page without links is like a desert island. It’s sitting there, right in the middle of the ocean, but no one really knows it’s there. The island could be littered with diamonds. The plants that grow on the island might heal every disease known to man. But if man doesn’t know the island is there, none of that matters.

Take the time to read other articles at Swift Media UK.

To read the article in full, please click here.

Have you ever wanted to be more relevant to your B2B audience, but didn’t know their role as a buyer and where they are in the buying cycle?

Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro and Wes Funk of Omniture talk about keys to give searchers what they really want.

They discuss:

• Media consumption throughout the phases of the sales cycle
• Discovering and leveraging the roles and objectives of B2B searchers
• What is “Satisficing”?
• Visual scanning patterns on the home page

This free webinar can be downloaded here