WP-CRM is a WordPress system for creating a basic Contact Manager / CRM.  The system requires a combination of plugins and a theme.  It was inspired by the great work David Yeiser did with WP-Contact Manager, and by 37signals Highrise.

Features:

• Add contacts from the front end of WordPress - no need to go to the admin screen. 
• Associate an image with each contact.
• Assign each contact to a company… or don’t.
• Create a note history for each contact.
• Clickable email and website links.
• Google map contacts address.
• Dial a phone number (works on cell phones with internet browsers).
• Fully hcard / vcard compatible.
  • To check out this feature, install Tails for Firefox; it will show you the hcard data and allow you to export a contact to Outlook.
• Written with BluePrint CSS.

>>Click here to see the demo<<

(Contact creation has been disabled in the demo, but you can add notes.)

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www.RubberClick.com

RubberClick is the leading directory of web services on the internet.  With a tag line of “Discover something new”, this simple, yet elegant design, presents the user with a search box and a tag cloud, making it easy for them to find cool new companies.  Options to view the most popular companies, and view a random company are also available.  Users leave comments about the companies and rate them on a scale of 1-5. Since this site is free, a full advertising campaign is displayed and generates revenue.

RubberClick.com features:  “Surprise Me!” button that brings up a random company, ratings system, advertising campaign.

www.SkyTrackCondo.com

SkyTrack Condo has 60 owner apartments spread out over four buildings and wanted a way to communicate with them easily. Their new website certainly does the trick! All new announcements are posted on the front page of the website, and immediately emailed to the owners. Sending messages to the Superintendent, Managing Agent or Board of Managers is just one click away, and the website keeps a log of all messages for future reference. An integrated calendar announces upcoming events, and the local weather is always displayed. Additionally, each board member has a user ID and password so they can easily update the website themselves.

SkyTrackCondo.com features: Email subscription service, three different contact forms, integrated calendar, local weather display.

Gmail is Fast, Reliable, Accessible from around the world, and you never have to worry about backing up your email. All things that Outlook is not.

Google has made setting up professional email addresses with your own domain name in Gmail very simple. So for instance, if you send an email to info@slipfire.com, it will be delivered to our Gmail account. When we reply to your email it, the address will be info@slipfire.com. You would never know that we were using Gmail unless we told you.

So here’s how you setup your professional email address:

1. At your domain host setup emails forwarders for the email addresses you want. For example: We setup info@slipfire.com as forwarding to our Gmail email address.
2. Once that’s done, sign into your Gmail account
3. Click on SETTINGS in the upper right corner of the screen
4. Click on the ACCOUNTS tab
5. Find where it says “When I receive a message sent to one of my addresses:” You will have two choices here and you need to decide which one you want to choose. This is a universal setting for all the email addresses under this account. For most businesses you should choose: “Reply from the same address the message was sent to“
6. Now, click on ADD ANOTHER EMAIL ADDRESS
7. A Popup box should open
8. In the NAME field, enter the name you want to appear your emails. For info@SlipFire.com, we have “SlipFire Info”
9. In the EMAIL ADDRESS field enter your new email address (i.e. info@SlipFire.com)
10. The REPLY-TO ADDRESS field is optional. If you want your email coming to one address, but you want your recipients to reply to a different address you would fill this in. Most of the time you would leave this blank.
11. Click NEXT STEP
12. Click SEND VERIFICATION

Gmail will now send you a verification email to your new email address, just to make sure it’s yours. Follow the instructions in the email and will have another email address.

You will also notice that when you compose a new email or reply to an existing one, you will be presented with a dropdown box that where you can choose which of your email addresses you want this email to come from.

SlipFire Website Design has released a new WordPress Theme based on the BluePrint CSS framework. The SF-BluePrint-WP theme uses BluePrint’s latest 0.7 code to create an easy to use, fully XHTML compliant WordPress theme.

“When we first came across BluePrint CSS, we knew it would change the way we design websites”, says the SlipFire team, “BluePrint has allowed us to create websites faster than before. It really cut down on our CSS design time.”

SlipFire is commited to designing websites that beautiful and easy to use, and are always XHTML & W3C CSS compliant. Additionally, most of their website design is also “Bobby Approved” for accessibility. Being Bobby Approved means that people with disabilities can use tools like screen readers to access websites.

Features: An easily customizable grid, Sensible typography, Relative font-sizes everywhere, A typographic baseline, Perfected CSS reset, No bloat of any kind, Cross-browser compatible, WordPress 2.3.2 compatible, Widget ready.

For more information:

SlipFire’s BluePrint WP Theme

Live Demo of Theme

SlipFire Website Design

Bobby Approved Website Design

BluePrint CSS

SlipFire’s BluePrint CSS Theme for WordPress, is not the first WP theme with BluePrint, but we think it’s the best.We first became aware of BluePrint CSS in late 2007 and immediately knew it would change the way we work. With it’s easy to use grid system, BluePrint CSS has dramatically cut down on our website design time.

First we started using the BluePrint CSS Theme designed by Fire and Knowledge. After a while we realized we hacked the their theme pretty good and decided to upgrade it to BluePrint 0.7 and release our own version to the WordPress community.

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One of our clients, Gotta Knit, didn’t want to use a real calendar for events since many of them are general, like “Fall 2008″, so we decided to use Posts and Categories instead. Though the process of maintaining these events are manual, it really works well for them.

We split the sidebar into different sections (go to www.Gottaknit.net to check it out). The sections marked, “Events”, “Classes” and “Trunk Show” are three different categories. Actually, they are sub-categories of the main category “Events & Classes”, which you’ll find in the Menu section on the top right.

When they want to create an Event, they just write a normal post and select the “Events” category. The Post automatically appears in the proper place in the sidebar. The same with creating “Classes” or “Trunk Shows”.  You’ll also notice that the post does not appear on the home page.  That is because we used the static front page option, which you’ll find under: Options - Reading - Front Page.

Since these are all sub-categories of the main category “Events & Classes”, when you click on the “Events & Classes” link in the Menu section you get a list of all the posts under all the sub-categories. Essentially allowing you to view all the Events, Classes and Trunk Shows on one page.

You’ll notice at the bottom of the “Events & Classes” page there’s a link marked “See our past Events and Classes”. This is another category. Once an event date passes, our client edits the Post, unchecks the current category, and then checks “Past Events and Classes”. The post is removed from it’s section (category) in the sidebar, and is added to the “Past Events and Classes” page.

NOTE: WordPress doesn’t do a very good job of displaying different categories separately in the sidebar. We used Scott Reilly’s “Customizable Post Listings” Plugin, which you can find here.

Hopefully this post will inspire you to be creative with WordPress Categories.

Wikipedia defines SEO as: “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results”.

Essentially this means that your website is designed in a way that allows search engines, like Google, to easily scan it and understand the content. This allows Google to show your website to people who are doing searches for similar content.

As you would guess, search engine optimization is one of the most important things you need to consider when designing a website, and still many sites are not search engine optimized.

There are plenty of services out there that promise to optimize your website and get you to the top of Google’s rankings. Be very careful. Google is smarter than you think, and this is usually impossible to pull off. They can even ban your website from their search engine results, which obviously would be very bad. To read more about what to look out for, read this article on Google website.

If you’re going to build a brand new website, or redo your old one, consider using opensource software like “WordPress”. Since WordPress is opensource, it’s free for you to use and can be downloaded here. It’s designed to be SEO friendly so you really don’t have to do anything.

Though WordPress was originally intended to be the best blogging software available, it can easily be manipulated to run massive websites. Our website, Slipfire.com, is built on WordPress, as most of our clients websites are as well.

If you don’t believe me maybe you’ll believe Matt Cutts from Google. Matt’s the Head of Web Spam at Google, a group within Google that’s in charge of search quality. Just watch this video. You don’t have to watch the whole thing, just about a minute and a half. Start paying attention at 1:26, that’s where Matt says “if you’re using WordPress you’re pretty much covered with SEO”.

For existing websites, we recommend visiting www.MikeMoran.com. Mike was employed at IBM, and was in charge of optimizing their website. He published a book, which we highly recommend, and regularly does public speaking events. If you want to optimize your existing website, Mike is the best resource. Keep in mind that sometimes it’s less expensive to rebuild a website than optimize it for search engines.

Good Luck.

Our Lightbox form will do the following:

• Automatically load a subscription form in a lightbox when a specified webpage is called.
• Give the user the choice of signing up for our newsletter, or opting out.
• If the user signs up, we redirect them to a thank you page.

The first step is to download and install the necessary plugins as per their instructions:

• Subscribe2
• WP-Greybox

CREATE A NEW PAGE TEMPLATE:
When we create the subscription page that will pop-up in the lightbox, we want to remove the header and footer. To do that in Wordpress, we need to create a new page template. We’ll call it: lightbox-subscribe.php

1. Copy your themes page template and name the new file: lightbox-subscribe.php
   • Remove all references to the header and footer
   • Place this code at the very top. This tells Wordpress the name of the template:

/*
Template Name: lightbox-subscribe
*/
?>

2. Save the file

CREATE A NEW SUBSCRIPTION AND THANK-YOU PAGE:

1. Create a new page called “subscribe”
2. Enter the following text: “Our mailing list rocks, so subscribe now”
3. Make sure to include the Subscribe2 token in the page or you won’t have a form. The token is:

   <!--subscribe2-->

4. To allow your readers to opt-out of signing in, put this code on the page as well:

   <a href="#" onclick="parent.parent.GB_hide();">No Thank you</a>

5. On the right side of the Wordpress screen you should see a section called: Page Template. Click on the dropdown and select: “lightbox-subscribe”. That’s the template you just built.
6. Click Save
7. Create a new page called “thank you”.
8. Thank your reader for signing up.
9. Place this code in the page:

   <a href="#" onclick="parent.parent.GB_hide();">close</a>

10. Select the “lightbox-subscribe” page template as described above and click Save.

EDIT THE SUBSCRIBE2 PLUGIN TO REDIRECT TO THE THANK-YOU PAGE

1. This part is tricky and dangerous. One wrong move and you’ll have to go back and upload the subscribe2.php file again.
2. Got to your plugins, find Subscribe2 and click edit.
3. Find the following code:

//set this to not send duplicate emails
$this->s2form = $this->confirmation_sent;
} else {
// they're already subscribed

and change it to:

//set this to not send duplicate emails
header("Location:/thank-you");
//$this->s2form = $this->confirmation_sent;
} else {
// they're already subscribed

4. Click “update file”. At the top of the plugin page Wordpress will either tell you that you were successful or you made a mistake. If you did it correctly, congratulations! If not, overwrite your current subscribe2.php file and start again.

That completes the first major step; creating the Subscription and Thank You pages. Now let’s place them in a lightbox pop-automatically.

We need to create a new page template for triggering the lightbox :

CREATE A NEW PAGE TEMPLATE FOR THE TRIGGER PAGE

1. Copy your themes page template and name the new file: lightbox-home.php
2. Place this code at the very top. This tells Wordpress the name of the template:

   /*
   Template Name: lightbox-home
   */
   ?>

3. Place this code right before the footer call and then save the file. This will auto load the page titled “subscribe”:

<script language="javascript">
AJS.AEV(window, 'load', function() {
          GB_show("Subscribe", "/subscribe");
     });
</script>

CREATE YOUR TRIGGER PAGE

1. Create a new page called “welcome”
2. Enter whatever text you want.
3. On the right side of the Wordpress screen under Page Template, click on the dropdown and select: “lightbox-home”. That’s the template you just built.
4. Click Save

Now whenever someone visits www.your-site.com/welcome, they will automatically see a lightbox subscribe form.

I would like to thank Hani Musallam for his enormous help with this project.

So, SlipFire moved OEM’s email to Google’s Gmail system. OEM’s employees now have the best of both worlds. They use the familiar Gmail interface, and get to use the OrientExpressMFG.com email address. Since Gmail was designed to handle large amounts of email, OEM’s email problems are gone. Additionally, the Gmail search feature allows them to find emails from 5 years ago in a matter of seconds, and it still works with their Blackberry’s. “SlipFire really came in and solved our email problems”, said Mr. Ross, “we never have to worry about our email system again”.