The site is built on WordPress (no surprise there) and includes a cool navigation hover feature that we created.  There is a blog on the “Who We Are” page and a contact us form on the “Contact Us” page.  Let us know what you think!

Listen to the short mp3 here

We worked on their website and implemented some very cool features, including the ability for fans and listeners to sign up and blog directly on the site alongside the hosts.  Now we’re in the midst of a mini-makeover to keep things fresh, and as part of that we’ve worked with the guys on a new logo.  In this logo we wanted to call out the fact that it was a radio show (you’ll see we’ve tranformed the letter ‘i’ into a radio antenna) and also include some quality, customized poker chips.  We’ve stuck with the black and deep red theme and also dropped a reflection for a modern touch.

Our next step in this makeover is to re-do the header on their website.  We’ll clean it up and include the new logo.  Let us know what you think!

The first thing we wanted to improve is how they branded themselves.  While they’ve clearly carved out their space in the tech world as Apple/Mac experts, they hadn’t used this mind share to build out a recognizable brand for themselves.  They have a great brand name that really needed to be played upon and called out in their logo… this wasn’t taking place with their old logo seen below:

When one thinks of the word ‘Maciverse’, it conjurs up ideas of ‘Mac’, ‘Apple Computers’, ‘the Universe’, ‘Planets’, and the like. While these are great thought images to work with, they were not being utilized and taken advantage of in the logo.  The Mangoco team brainstormed ideas around the words that come to mind when you think ‘Maciverse’ and then got to work on creating some logo proposals for client review.

Below is the final, approved iteration of the Maciverse logo.  We all think it does a great job of conveying a very hip and technical feel and makes a whole lot of sense for a company called Maciverse.  The next phase of this project is to do a full-site redesign now that we have a logo to build their brand from.  Come back soon to see what we’ve come up with for them!

WordPress benefits in the following ways due to its large and loyal user base:

• A vibrant user community that actively develops plug-ins and themes to improve its functionality and aesthetics
• A large number of skilled designers and developers able to work on it
• Sustained improvements and upgrades over time
• A large number of specially trained users who will use, review, and fix issues (such as security or user-interface experts)
• Vast amounts of free support and assistance for almost any problem imaginable

Just like anything else, however, someone is always someone trying to ruin the fun. In WordPress’ case, hackers are now looking to exploit the system because figuring out just one loophole would mean that they could gain access to millions of websites.

This type of thing goes for any software that is widely used – Just look at Microsoft versus every other operating system. Microsoft is targeted because, among other reasons, it has the most users.  If you figure out just one little virus or exploit, you could infect a very large amount of people.

Back to the issue at hand… WordPress security.  Yesterday, WordPress was attacked by a worm that infected older versions of WordPress and allowed hackers to gain access to the WordPress system, all the way to the database. The important piece of that sentence is that it infected ‘older versions’.  If you were up-to-date with your WordPress install you didn’t have a thing to worry about.

Trust me, the good significantly outweighs the bad for WordPress.  Don’t let a few hackers scare you away from using WordPress. At the same time, you must be proactive and always be upgrading your WordPress install to the latest release.  If you skip this part you are very susceptible to hackers exploiting older versions of the CMS.

Think of it this way…

If you were opening up a little shop or store, would you choose to open it up on prime real estate with lots of foot traffic walking by?  Or would you choose to build it in the mountains, hidden in a forest?  SEO is what puts you on the busy corner. SEO puts you in front of the people ready to buy your product and look at your advertising.  It plucks you from obscurity.

A recent project we undertook was to increase the traffic of a blog that has been around for about a year and a half.  The site is Maciverse.com and they are a blog that covers information, tips, tricks, and how-to’s for Apple products. From ipods to mac laptops and desktops, they cover a wide range of topics relating to Apple.

The site has a massive amount of content and receives most of its traffic through the search engines.  Our goal was to develop ways to increase the amount of traffic it receives and to look for opportunities to increase the site’s monetization strategies.

We began with our “Must Have” SEO package where we do in-depth research to uncover opportunities for quick-wins and important keywords that can quickly drive large amounts of traffic to the site.  Once these words and phrases were identified, we worked on special content that targeted these words and then pushed the posts onto the site.  We developed a strategy for long-term success for sustained growth and built out a monetization plan to ensure that traffic and revenue will continue to grow well into 2010.

Some quick numbers:

We began our work with Maciverse around the middle of July.  Here are the traffic stats over the past 2 months:

Unique Visitors

July – 31K
August – 45K

This was an improvement of over 50% in just one month.   Month-over-month numbers for the past year have demonstrated an average increase of 7%, so the large jump was directly attributable to the SEO work provided by Mangoco.

Revenue

While we need to hold the exact revenue numbers close to the chest, income at the site increased 77%.  This is due to the increase in traffic as well as an improvement in monetization based on our recommendations.

This project was, overall, very successful.  The guys at Maciverse are great and we had a good time doing the work and research to expose their blog to the masses.  The quality content was always there… we’re glad that now a large number of visitors are, too.

The great part about SEO is that it is fairly easy to quantify how much money it would bring in your door if you were to rank #1 for a particular keyword. We have good working numbers on the percentage of click-throughs you’ll receive if you are ranked #1 (its probably not what you think it is) and we can help you determine the dollar amount each site visitor is worth to your business.  Using these numbers in our formula, we can give you a pretty good estimate of the value of ranking #1 on a monthly basis.  Then, you can use that to determine if it is worth it to you to spend money on SEO.

Whether you need a company very familiar with Virginia SEO work, or you need rankings on a national level, we can assist you with providing all the research and work to help you with your rankings. We’ll research the most valuable keywords for your company or organization; we’ll analyze how many people search those words, how likely they are to convert to customers, etc and then we’ll build an aggressive plan to get you to rank highly for those keywords.

Contact us today to discuss how SEO can turbo-charge your business.

Lately, however, I’ve really been doing a lot of work in WordPress.  WordPress was originally built as a blogging platform, but now it can do oh-so-much-more.  Doing a side-by-side comparison of the two is difficult because they really do target different end users, but I will say that for most of my clients, WordPress has proven to be the best solution.

WordPress can do almost everything Joomla can do – so I’m told.  I italicize almost because that is what I’m told.  I’m told WordPress can’t do everything Joomla can but I haven’t run across anything that I used to do in Joomla that I can’t do in WordPress.  As a matter of fact, I find that many of the things I used to do in Joomla are even easier to do in WordPress.  A great example of this is customizing the title tags… it is so easy to do this in WordPress by just installing the free All-in-one-SEO plugin.  In Joomla this has always been a pain point for me… I’ve used so many different add-ons that have kinda done this, but each has been flawed and anything decent came at a price ($30 or more).

Another issue with Joomla was the User Interface… there is just so much ’stuff’. It isn’t exactly easy to get up an running quickly and its difficult to train someone on how to use it.  Sure, it offers a lot of customizability, but almost too much.  When I train someone to use WordPress it usually takes around 20-30 minutes and they get it intuitively.  With Joomla, it would take an hour or more and they didn’t really ‘get it’, they just knew how to do the simple tasks that they would have to do going forward.

So, to conclude, while I still know Joomla well and we support it for many clients, we are almost exclusively building new sites on WordPress right now. As a matter of fact, we are even converting  many legacy Joomla sites over to WordPress so that the client’s users can easily work with them.

Our past Mambo and Joomla projects include:

• Forum implementation
• Mileage calculation and processing based on distances between two coordinate points (longitude and latitude)
• SEF Advance customization and implementation across multiple domains
• Text Increase/Decrease JavaScript functionality
• Header rotation/management
• Helpdesk integration

If something above is what you are looking for, or if you’re dreaming of something else, feel free to contact us and we’ll get started!