Sonet Dynamics Blog

There Are No Excuses: Get The World’s Number 1 Open Source CRM Today

Everyone in business knows that a website is a key marketing component, and most also understand that they should also have a customer relationship management system of some kind.

The fact is, businesses should have and integrate both into one seamless marketing system.

Everyone in business, regardless of how large or small their business is, should have a Customer Relationship Management system.  There is no excuse.

  • I have been told that staff won’t use a CRM system.  They like to do things their way and a CRM interferes with their process.
  • I have been told that a CRM system is too expensive or takes too long to learn.
  • I have been told that they have tried CRM and it just sat there.  They paid their fees but never got anything out of it.
  • I have been told many things but when it comes down to it, those are just excuses because CRM is not difficult to implement and it doesn’t have to be expensive.

So what exactly is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is designed to manage your organization’s relationships and interactions producing greater control, predictability and profitability.

CRM began with a focus on relationships with leads or prospects and customers with the simple goal to improve customer relationships. But CRM has evolved to encompass much more. Now, more comprehensive CRM programs support several business areas, including:

  • marketing and sales management,
  • inventory management,
  • personnel management,
  • supplier/vendor management,
  • marketing and business intelligence management.

You can select which area(s) are the most suitable for your business.

Automate Communications and Processes and Increase Profit

An effective CRM system assists in staying connected to customers, automating and streamlining processes, and ultimately improving your bottom line.

SuiteCRM is at its heart a tool that handles contact management, sales management, productivity, workflows and automation of processes more efficiently and effectively than humans.

I specialize in the world’s number 1 ‘open source’ product, SuiteCRM because it is equal to or better than any branded products and it’s FREE.  SuiteCRM enables you to focus on your organization’s relationships with prospects, customers, service users, colleagues, friends and family, vendors or suppliers, as well as business processes.  If they’re people, SuiteCRM can manage your relationship with them.

Christine Ely – WordPress and SuiteCRM Consultant from Christine Ely on Vimeo.

There is a cycle that is at the heart every CRM system.  It’s your life-cycle with people and that includes all aspects of the relationship from finding new customers, winning their trust and business, to providing support and additional services throughout the relationship. Every interaction is recorded and logged so the whole relationship from the first contact is in the system.

SuiteCRM serves everyone in the organization.

From the person at the top to the new recruit, SuiteCRM serves the sales department, marketing, customer service, opportunity management, business development, personnel, recruitment, dispatch and every other area in any business.  It also serves external interactions through customer portals and ticket management.

SuiteCRM is vast but so intuitive.

It is the place where you store customer and prospect contact information, identify sales opportunities, manage and record service issues, and of course automate and manage marketing campaigns.  Every successful business has a system in place and most of those systems are just manual practices.  SuiteCRM puts those practices into one place and it makes available all of that information to anyone in the company that has a need for it.

SuiteCRM is the ultimate collaboration tool. 

As SuiteCRM stores all interactions with your customers, and everyone in your company has access to the information they need from it, collaboration and productivity naturally increases.  When a customer calls, no matter who takes that call, he or she can see how the customer has been communicated with, see their previous purchases and when they purchased, whether they have had prior support tickets, whether they paid on time and so on.

SuiteCRM helps your business drive growth.

If you want a business that will grow and last, you need a sustainable strategy; one that can handle growth.  You need a system that will run the business whether you are there or not. You need a system that will take your business into the future.  You need to set goals, sales targets and business objectives and of course, you need to ensure that your business makes a profit.

SuiteCRM system features reports and dashboards’

SuiteCRM offersa clear overview of how your business is doing and again, all that information is in one place.  You’ll see the status of leads, orders, customer service issues, the sales pipeline, notes, outstanding tasks, status of projects and much more. You’ll be able to simultaneously monitor multiple campaigns, know where your prospect is in the funnel and what’s coming next.

SuiteCRM’s Superpower! Automated workflows.

Workflows schedule series of events to take place when certain actions are triggered.  A SuiteCRM workflow can take action whenever a contact form is completed on your website.  When a lead is created SuiteCRM will trigger actions. These could be to email back the potential customer thanking them for their contact and informing them that someone will be contacting them soon (as well as suggesting areas of the website to review) but then also emailing the relevant department, creating action tasks for appropriate personnel.  That lead will be managed throughout the workflow from first order and every interaction in the relationship into the future.

Website and CRM Integration – Your Organization’s Super Power

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software is arguably the most valuable software your company can utilize, but it is also the most misunderstood and under used.  A CRM system (such as SuiteCRM; which I specialize in) implemented correctly and used by all relevant departments has a dramatic influence on the company’s revenue and profit.  Increases in revenue, after just a few months, of well over 200% are commonplace.

Although the term CRM is now synonymous with software it is a concept that has been utilized for decades by companies that operate customer centric policies. It basically involves the processes and methodologies employed in managing the relationships between the company and the customer.

Anyone in business, and especially in sales, knows that customers are fickle creatures. They want to be looked after, nurtured, and made to feel special. A typical customer’s basic instinct is to be loyal. It’s like any relationship. It may not be everything you want but it’s familiar and comfortable. But just like a relationship, if you ignore and neglect your customers, they may get a roving eye… and your competitors are always out there trying to snap them up.

Startup companies  only have a few customers, so it’s possible for staff to remember and manage them with a minimum of technology. They will provide a good service, keep track of their orders, call them every now and again to see that they’re happy, send them thank you cards and so on. That’s effectively Customer Relationship Management.  But what if you have ten customers, fifty? Will you remember every aspect of every transaction? Will you remember to follow up on every call?

Just about every company, organization, club or group will have some kind of web presence.  For some, that may just be a Facebook page but for most, it will be a website.  Over the past decade, one web technology has dominated all of the others.  It is open source and free.  That system is WordPress and it’s a technology that anyone can learn in a single day and one almost every business should employ.

Most websites have a contact page and most of those contact pages have a form that visitors can fill in; which will send an email to the company behind the website.  If the company has any marketing savvy, they will take the details of that email and enter them into a database.  Sadly, many will just respond and then forget that contact.

 

If the website is integrated with a CRM system however, the contact form will trigger what is called a ‘workflow’ which can put into motion a whole series of events.  For example:

  1. The CRM system will send a personalize email back to the potential customer
  2. A copy of the contact request will be sent to the relevant department to respond
  3. A record will be created in the CRM’s ‘Leads’ module
  4. A call will be scheduled to follow up with the potential customer
  5. The person making the call to the potential customer will log against the record the interests of the potential customer and then either convert the ‘lead’ to a customer or mark the lead as potential for future business
  6. A follow-up email will be sent to the ‘lead’ to ensure that the customer received the best possible service
  7. A new workflow will then take over the management of that lead/customer based on the information from the follow-up

The point is, that lead will never be forgotten. The system will automatically pick up that lead based on the data and act upon it time and time again.

The purpose of CRM software is to enable your organization to manage multiple customers personally; to automate processes that ‘touch’ customers on a regular basis and then to remember every instance of every conversation, email, appointment, or transaction of any kind. All of these transactions are stored directly in your customer’s unique record so that your total relationship with that customer is always available.

Good CRM systems feature ‘Campaign Managers’, which can automatically create a sequence of tasks and events.

Let’s say you meet a bunch of people at an event who express an interest in your service. You’ll enter them into the CRM system and then allocate them to a specific campaign. A typical campaign (series of tasks and events to be posted to the person’s record) may be:

  1. Send an email to express how happy you were to meet the person
  2. In 1 day: Send a flyer or brochure of your services by mail
  3. In 3 days: Make a phone call to reconnect and confirm that your flyer was received and is there anything more you can do at this time.
  4. In 10 days: Send eNewsletter (and add to monthly newsletter mailing list)
  5. In 21 days: Invite to your own network meeting

And so on…

Multiple activities can be created and applied to existing customers, new prospects, network partners or anyone else in your database. The whole series of events is immediately applied to the customer record and the system updates all the relevant task lists, to-dos and appointment schedulers.

No matter how many customers or prospects you have, the CRM system will be managing the relationship, sending out reminders and thank you cards, emails, scheduling phone calls, remembering renewal dates and much more. And all of these events and transactions will be neatly filed against the individual customer records.

Good CRM systems are now ‘cloud based’; which means that the data is stored ‘online’ and accessible at any time via desktop computers, wifi enabled tablets, and mobile phones.

You may be a great networker and try to keep in touch with your customers, but no human can match the power and persistence of a CRM system.  Where, in the past, you may have neglected to follow up, thank, send out renewal applications, cross sale and up sale notifications, special offers, anniversary cards, newsletters and so on, your CRM system will methodically churn out personalized materials and your customers will continue to love you and do business with you.

CRM software has become an incredibly important category. How well you know your customer will determine how much business he or she will do with you. As Sir Francis Bacon once said, “Knowledge is Power”. That knowledge can be contained in your CRM system.

Marketing Is Not Just American For Advertising

Many years ago I went to marketing school and on the first day the professor told a little story about the circus coming to town.  It’s a great story!

If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying, “Circus is coming to Fairgrounds Sunday,” that’s Advertising. If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk him through town, that’s a Promotion. If the elephant walks through the Mayor’s flower bed, that’s Publicity. If you can get the Mayor to laugh about it, that’s Public Relations. And, if you planned the whole thing, that’s Marketing!–Author Unknown

 

Times have changed but the principal remains the same.  In a Web 2.0 world, you still need to advertise, promote, publicize, and do your PR but there are new tools AND new challenges out there!

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “you only get one chance at a first impression” but that warning should be doubly heeded in business.  Let’s say you’re going to a MeetUp network meeting to promote your new business to a room full of fellow business people.  You’re a little short on funds, so you decide to get your nephew (who knows a bit about computers) to create some business cards for you.  He can use a template on Microsoft Publisher and print them on your inkjet printer.

You know you should have a website so you Google search to find a hosting company that’ll register and host your site for next to nothing and has tools to build the site in under an hour.  Great! So that’s what you do and you’re on the web!

You have your details and email address on your business card:

Email:  tommyljonesenterprises@hotmail.com.
Website: www.tommyljonesenterprises.com.

So off you go to network, talk about your business and hand out your cards.

1.      Your business card is obviously home made because the ink ran when a drop of coffee splashed on it.

2.      You’ve gone for a free email account because it’s easy to setup and costs nothing but says nothing about your business but too much about you.

3.      Your point and click website is bland and formulaic.  It says little about what you really do but says an awful lot about what you don’t do!

Every business, whether small are large, has to portray its identity. If you hand out business cards that look like you designed and printed them yourself, what does that say to your potential customers? Is that how you’ll work for them?

The moral of that story is be professional at what you do best and get professionals to work on your behalf with the other stuff.  Your amateur ‘first impression’ will linger long after you come to your senses and present yourself professionally.

Preparation, Preparation, Preparation.

Don’t waste that first impression!  When it’s gone, it’s gone!

Marketing is about creating a comfortable and reassuring environment for your potential customers.  Once you achieve that, your products and services will sell themselves.

We don’t all have access to an elephant to parade through town but we can all create our own mix of marketing components.  The following details how to get your show on the road!

  1. A comprehensive website that is tailored to your services and clearly addresses the needs of your potential customers.  It should have a clear navigation system with easy access to what you do.  Contacting you should be just one click away.
  2. A website video.  No amount of text compares to actually seeing you.  Many potential customers will prefer ‘check you out’ before actually meeting you face to face… so why not let them meet you through a video on your website?  You can say a lot in 2 minutes about what you do and who you are.  Once you have the video, link it to your social network profile, create a YouTube page, put it on Facebook… then link it all together.
  3. A consistent business identity is essential.  Wherever your name appears, it should be consistent with other materials.  You should have a recognizable logo which appears on all of your marketing materials; website, truck, store front or forehead sticker! (ok forget the sticker)
  4. High quality business stationery.  Everything you pass out should be professional.  It shows intent to your customers and it reflects on you.
  5. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software. You cannot hope to remember everyone you meet so when you get a business card,  enter it into a system that will remember for you.  Follow up is vital in the marketing process.  A good CRM program allows you to keep track of all your customers, prospects, appointments, tasks, emails, and events.  It will also synchronize directly with your iPhone or Android device.That gives you real time access to marketing ‘intelligence’.
  6. Get some marketing training.  Marketing is about the mix  of events.  Remember the circus story and you’ll realize that marketing is not just an American term for advertising.

One final tip. Nothing beats word of mouth marketing.  Impress someone and they’ll tell a couple of people.  Appear unprofessional and provide a bad service – they’ll tell everyone they know!

10 Reasons Why WordPress Is Your Ultimate Marketing Machine

Nothing handles web content quite like WordPress. Here’s why…

  1. Traditional websites were effectively brochures on the web.
    They looked nice, had a certain amount of information but were static.  By contrast a WordPress Website and Blog is a living thing.  It is designed from the ground up to radiate ‘I’m here!’ to the search engines, social media sites and Cyberspace.  It’s a connected technology that communicates with the world.
  2. WordPress has unlimited capacity to grow.
    Unlike traditional websites, WordPress sits on top of a database (MySQL) which handles the web pages and posts, organizes and collates the images, videos, brochures and documents.  It is highly extensible through themes and plugins.There is a development community out there that create add-ons to WordPress enabling it to undertake just about any task.  WordPress is almost infinitely expandable and extendable.  You’ll never outgrow it!
  3. WordPress lives and breathes Search Engine Optimization.
    Every page and blog post you create with WordPress is designed to attract attention.The URLs  (page addresses) are editable to provide descriptions of the content on the page.  Where you call a page ‘About Us’, your URL can read‘wordpress-training-consulting-development-blog-writing-seattle’;which offers a stickier phrase for the search engines to catch hold of.Search engines cannot read what is in an image so WordPress gives you many ways to describe an image.  You can create a caption, a pop-up message and a full description so your images become part of the search engine optimized content just as much as your posts themselves.You can add keywords and tags to posts and articles, and those tags get indexed by Google as well as the article title (long description as mentioned above) and content.You can create excerpts of your pages and posts.  These are summaries that are picked up by the search engines, are easy to enter and very effective.  The short answer is that WordPress is a great environment if you want your content to be found.
  4. WordPress is a Content Management System
    where you as a developer, administrator or author can make fast updates to the site.  No longer will you have to wait for your developer or Web Master to change a picture, update some prices or post a new article.  All of that can be done by you.
  5. Dynamic Content, Dynamic Updates, Dynamic Home Page.
    WordPress can pull in content from different places, feeds and resources; combining it all onto your page or post.  Pages and posts can be scheduled to appear when and where you want them to that your website is always fresh and alive.  Search engines begin to ignore static sites.  There is nothing static about WordPress.
  6. WordPress and Niche Marketing.
    Chris Anderson’s book ‘The Long Tail’ revealed how niche marketing has become main stream.  Through the unlimited capacity of the Internet… digital marketing and distribution has encouraged niche markets to thrive.The main body of sales comprises the best sellers.  The major retail stores have to hold inventory that has to sell in numbers to justify the cost of the ‘shelf space’ Therefore the market has traditionally limited itself to a relatively restricted number of products; effectively ‘The Hot 100’, The blockbuster, The top 10,000 book titles etc.  But that has all changed.What ‘The Long Tail’ revealed is that the market is much bigger and more varied than people imagined.  As ‘search’ became more effective than advertising and display, niche products could be offered and found as easily as the latest Lady Gaga CD.  Although individually, sales down the far end of ‘The Long Tail’ may only be in single digits, the combined sales of all of these niches actually rivals that of the best sellers.  The Long Tail is a market of niche products and we can all be part of it.WordPress is the perfect vehicle to develop and promote niche products.  Niche products by their very nature are targeted to small groups.These groups seek out products and services that are unavailable in local stores but are available online.  And nowadays, the more unique the product, the less competition for search engine key words and phrases.If you have a niche product, a WordPress website and blog is the perfect vehicle to ‘open shop’ to a market searching for you.  Product descriptions, testimonials, blog posts and articles, embedded videos and case studies are all a few clicks away.  Every time a new article or product is posted, the blogosphere and search engines will be ‘pinged’ and the market will grow.
  7. WordPress integrates with Social Media.
    WordPress is designed to get you up and running fast.  Once you have your products and services on your WordPress website, visitors can interact with you!If you post an article or case study, visitors can leave comments or questions.
    Customer Service becomes transparent and interactive as customers openly discuss good or bad service and you can respond quickly, honestly and directly.Social Media links and tags can be incorporated into your posts which makes it just a simple click for a visitor to bookmark an article or offer… or to share that offer with his/her Facebook friends.  The effectiveness of the Social Media Links cannot be over emphasized.  Let’s say you post a case study on how your business resolved a problem for one of your clients.  Soon after someone else has a similar problem and searches a solution.  Your case study pops up and they call you… but not only that; they also share it on their Facebook and click the Twitter link.  That Twitter link gets shared with their 120 followers, a few of whom ReTweet the link to their combined 10,000 followers.Because WordPress  makes it so easy to share and integrate with other social media sites, your message can get out there quicker and further than you ever dreamed possible.
  8. The WordPress Dashboard.
    Developing a traditional website can be a tricky business.  You need to learn a system like Dreamweaver or Frontpage.  You have to know how HTML and FTP works.  But the WordPress dashboard presents you with every tool you need to create an effective website and blog in a clean and intuitive manner without having to be a web developer.The Dashboard features:a.  Blog Posts.  Using the in-built text editor (essentially a word processor with full formatting) you can create posts and articles and allocate them to a sophisticated set of relational categories.b.  Media.  WordPress makes it a breeze to upload images, brochures, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations and more to its media library.  It automatically files these away giving total access for inclusion in your websites and blogs.c.  Links.  Here you can create links to all of your favorite sites or indeed pages within your own site.a.  Pages.  WordPress Pages are created the same way as Posts but are more like traditional web pages; although  they have the bonus of Parent/Child relationships and dynamic content.b.  Comments.  Here you can monitor and moderate and respond to the comments visitors have made on your site.c.  Appearance.  Comprises a set of tools to change, update and configure the appearance of your side including themes, widgets and more.d.  Plugins.  There are thousands of plugins that have been developed to extend the features of WordPress.  These range from simple slide show presentations, contact forms, photo galleries, statistic packages right through to highly sophisticated eCommerce systems.e.  Users.  WordPress is multi-user and here you can create new users with varying degrees of access and security.

    f.  Tools.  A set of tools including the facility to import and export your whole WordPress site along with images, video and other content

    g.  Settings.  A complete set of tools to configure your site for the outside world.

  9. The Value of FREE.
    Not only is it one of the best web development and blogging systems available on the planet at any price but being free it allows you to experiment and learn without risk.  It allows you to interact and develop without the worry of cost.  The value of free extends way beyond monetary value.  It empowers you to express yourself in an open and expansive way.
  10. Blogging beats Advertising and WordPress excels at blogging.
    You can unleash your creative self and if what you have to say is worth hearing, the world will find you and listen.

WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world and is used on nearly 75 million websites

According to WordPress, more than 409 million people view more than 23.6 billion pages each month and users produce 69.5 million new posts and 46.8 million new comments every month. It also powers more than 25% of the world’s websites.

Whether it’s personal blogs or major magazines and news organizations such as The New Yorker and the BBC, WordPress is gradually eating the internet and it’s not stopping. In 2017 its ubiquity is expected to increase further and it may even eat the world.  Even more importantly it is the CMS that Forbes itself uses.

This report from Forbes,

For contributors to this site such as myself, it is a publishing platform that allows me not only to write easily, it also has simple bells and whistles (as well as more complicated ones) that add content to my work, add links to appropriate places and has the facility to include images and even tweets. While it takes some time getting used to, for me it IS the internet.

For some time now, however, it has been a little like the Wild West with hundreds of WordPress suppliers in a more-or-less unregulated industry with no widely acknowledged qualifications. In many cases, a monkey could do it, but that has changed hugely over the past three years; the numbers don’t lie.

There are thousands of so-called widgets, plugins and themes that are just as important for a one-person blogger than the world’s largest publishers. Gartner’s recent pace-layered application strategy shows that organisations can accelerate their innovation by choosing an array of systems that support business requirements on long-, medium- and short-term timescales.

Systems that maximise connectivity between the pace layers offer organisations competitive advantage. WordPress’ ubiquity has driven it to enjoy a rich ecosystem of connectivity and integration, something that the baked-in WordPress REST API now extends that connectivity infinitely. This is why things will accelerate in 2017.

WordPress’ success as CMS of choice for brands like Conde Nast and News International as well as the forementioned publishers speaks louder than the often-repeated myths of limited functionality and security concerns. Corporates are now looking at the license fees, proprietary IP and jack-of-all-trades approach of enterprise platforms.

One UK company that is passionate about the evolution and progression of WordPress from its origins as a simply blogging platform is Pragmatic, based in the maturing tech hub of Brighton, based on the coast 50 miles south of London.

Other companies in the city doing great work include local poster boy social media monitoring company Brandwatch and, according to market analyst Beauhurst, 1,500 other technology companies.

Pragmatic is increasingly rapidly after outgrowing its current offers and believes it is the open source nature of the platform, which is owned by the community and its easy integration with other platforms that make it the popular product it is.

Moreover, the company is seeing a huge difference in the quality of inbound big brands and existing client brands who are finally tapping into its potential.

“Over the past couple of years we’ve seen a sharp uptick in enquiries from large corporate and enterprise clients that are integrating WordPress as the CMS component within a larger digital marketing platform programme.

“They are asking serious questions about the value they really bring to organisations for whom digital is increasingly not only a core competency, but a bottom-line asset and critical competitive advantage,” said David Lockie, Founder, Pragmatic Web.

These adoptions of huge brands means that 2019 is likely to see the WordPress bandwagon carry merrily along.

Why Build Your Website In WordPress?

WordPress is a state-of-the-art web development and publishing platform. It is comprehensive, extensible and free. WordPress adheres to all major web standards and is compatible with all modern browsers. It is cloud based (online) system so is independent of operating systems. So whether you use a Mac, Windows or Linux, WordPress is the solution for you.

The World’s #1 Content Driven Web Publishing Tool

WordPress and other OpenSource technologies are giving non technical and technical people alike incredible tools to communicate and interact with the rest of the world as never before. And if people tell you that WordPress is just for blogging, think again!

WordPress is one of the most important technologies on the web today!

So what is WordPress?

A WordPress web/blog site is a full development platform for your online presence. WordPress gives you the tool to maintain and update your site without having to hire expensive web developers, graphic designers and consultants. It just takes a little imagination and some computer know-how.

Your WordPress site can reside anywhere, just like a regular website. Many people are now using WordPress as their primary website. WordPress can also be used to complement and enhance an existing site with blogging technology.

Very often the WordPress sites are installed in sub domains such as www.blog.yourdomain.com. The bottom line is – Every business whether large or small should be incorporating WordPress into their online strategy!

The thing about WordPress (and other open source products) is that we’re still just scratching the surface of a wave that is changing the world. Open source software and the whole ‘cloud computing’ paradigm are having a profound effect on the industry.

Open source software is now more than just a credible alternative to mainstream software; it is rapidly becoming ‘the’ mainstream. Budgets have taken a massive beating and for many, developing a website, hiring a graphic designer, buying Adobe Creative Suite or investing in any other commercially available technology has become just too expensive and too darned complicated. But open source software answers all of these issues because it’s powerful, intuitive and ‘free’… and how can you compete with free?

WordPress is at the forefront of the ‘open source’ revolution because it epitomizes all that ‘open source’ stands for. It empowers anyone to become a true part of the social media phenomenon. With WordPress, you can develop a fantastic website and blog; you can maintain it yourself, you can accommodate many contributors and vast quantities of materials; you can incorporate or share with an amazing assortment of social media sites such as Facebook, Biznik, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and more. You become part of a global community that is expanding every day.

By utilizing WordPress, and 3 additional open source products, anyone with a little training and a lot of enthusiasm can get online with a site that they couldn’t have dreamed of just a few short years ago. The combination of WordPress, NVU (for HTML), Gimp (for graphics) and Filezilla (for transferring files) is a one stop shop to building professional, multi-user, multimedia websites and blog without any develop costs. And for many, WordPress and a well chosen theme is all they need.

You have to understand that WordPress is not just a ‘free’ alternative to the commercial products. It may be free but it is way better than just about anything available; which is why it is so widely used by major corporations and government bodies alike. ‘Paradigm shift’ is an overused term nowadays but it is completely apt for what’s happening in the whole ‘cloud computing’ / ‘WordPress’ development culture.

The individual is empowered like never before because he or she has access to exactly the same tools as the richest of companies. And when the penny truly drops, books, training, consulting and ancillary services will sell by the bucket load because the only cost in getting online (for websites, blogs, databases, eCommerce systems and much more) will be the cost of learning.

From my experience, many total novices learn enough in just a few hours to appreciate that by using WordPress, they can be empowered to do something that they would have previous thought of as ‘extra-ordinary’.

The acceptance and integration of Open Source software and WordPress into mainstream business is becoming more significant every day. Hundreds of millions, if not billions of instances will find their way onto people’s browsers. Cloud computing (viewing and processing through a browser) opens the door to everyone. It doesn’t matter whether they are using a Windows laptop in a coffee shop in Seattle, a MacBook in a glass office block in San Francisco or a Linux netbook in Nigeria. They all access the web, have equal access to WordPress and can benefit from all that free ‘open source’ software offers them. All they need is a way to learn how to use it.

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