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Hey {{lead.First Name:default=there}},
This is email three in the "Marketing Transformation" series. If you missed the first two you can read them here.
The purpose of this email is t build upon the last email "New Website, Old Website - A Journey", and demonstrate how rebuilding our website laid the groundwork for supercharging our website moving into the future. Most notably, through the use of outsourced development, in the form of "Plugins". |
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The Nexthink website is run on WordPress. This is a very popular CMS that powers about 25% of the websites on the internet.
Most companies turn to WordPress for it's ease of use, development community, and OF COURSE.... the plugins. WordPress has thousands of plugins that deliver hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, in value and save companies years in development time.
However.... up until this point, Nexthink has not been able to partake in the majority of these plugins, because the underlying architecture of the website prevented us from using any of these plugins.
With the complete rebuild of the Nexthink website architecture (discussed in my previous email) we've solved all of these issues (and many more), allowing us to use the below plugins to solve a great many of our web / business problems.
Again, these plugins represent hundreds of thousands of dollars in value, and will save Nexthink years in development time and thousands of headaches.
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| Here are the big "rockets" we just strapped to the back of our website... |
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| Yoast SEO |
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| This is the industry standard WordPress SEO plugin. It will help us tremendously improve SEO for the website as well as a number of other things discussed in the below video. For all of you that ask, "what is marketing doing on the SEO front?" This is in large part, the answer. |
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| Watch a demo |
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| WordPress Multilingual |
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| WPML is the industry standard multilingual plugin. This plugin puts an interface behind a lot of the translation work being previously done by Renato in the code, making the translated content of our website accessible to everyone in marketing. |
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| Watch a demo |
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| ACF |
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| Advanced custom fields is a plugin that transforms WordPress from the "blog" solution that many view it to be, into the fully fledged CMS that everyone wants it to be. It provides an interface for custom field management not present in pretty much every other CMS. |
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| Watch a demo |
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| Beaver Builder |
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| There are a lot of page builder solutions for WordPress, but the majority of these solutions when deactivated completely break a WordPress website by turning the "content" of the website into a Gobbletygook of shortcodes. Beaver builder does not do this, and in a world where we may need to divorce ourselves from a page builder in the future (because of WordPress' potential Gutenberg editor).... this is critical. |
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| Watch a demo |
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WP Rocket
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| WP Rocket is a "behind the scenes" plugin that does a lot of work to optimize the delivery of the website. It integrates with Cloudflare CDN, concatenate WordPress scripts, css, and html, and about a million other things. |
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| Watch a demo |
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Migrate DB Pro
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| It is almost impossible to develop for a website that has about a hundred changes being made to it on a daily basis. This plugin provides a way to sync all changes made to the database and media of our live site to any development environments that also have the plugin installed. It's truly wonderful. |
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| Watch a demo |
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Gravity Forms
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| Gravity form is a WordPress based form building solution with a great API. Think of it like Wufoo or Google Forms built directly into our website, and with a ton of integrations. WE've already used it for surveys, kickoff registration, and a ton of other things! |
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| Watch a demo |
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Admin Columns Pro
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| Admin columns pro is one of the best administrative plugins around. It provides an interface for rapid editing of WordPress content. It has helped us make 1000's of changes to the website in a fraction of the time. |
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| Watch a demo |
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SearchWP
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| This plugin allows use to specify search weighting and other criteria as well as build search engines for content based on these criteria. It is great for regular WordPress search, but also for pulling contextually related content. |
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| Watch a demo |
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| Facet WP |
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| This plugin, in conjunction with SearchWP, adds faceted search to WordPress. This is what allows us to add search criteria such as industry, region, and topic to supplement regular search. |
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| Watch a demo |
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| VaultPress |
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| It is absolutely critical to have a backup plan for when things go wrong. VaultPress is WordPress' backup solution that backups changes to our website in real time. This, in conjunction with a couple of other plugins and backup solutions ensures that we never endure catastrophe. |
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| Watch a demo |
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| Here is the full list of plugins powering our website |
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The above was just a list of the big hitter plugins that we use. Below you can find a list of all of the plugins including the not so sexy administrative ones. We obviously don't use ALL of these plugins all of the time. Many are deactivated when not needed to avoid bloat.
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