We (illuminea) are so excited that we could be part of the creation of a shiny new plugin: Official Mad Mimi Sign Up Forms! for Mad Mimi, the email marketing service. Mad Mimi is all about making their users life simple. With WordPress being the winner in terms of market share for CMSs, they wanted to serve that market. When Mad Mimi asked us to work with them to develop their official WordPress plugin, we were super excited, since we love WordPress and urge all our clients to offer newsletters!  This plugin does what many of our clients will need, which is to easily integrate Mad Mimi sign up forms ...

Calvin Sun at Tech Republic wrote a very thought-provoking post about project management lessons he learns from the Titanic disaster. I agree with almost everything Calvin wrote but there are yet more lessons I learn from the stories Calvin brings. Here is what I learned: 1. Based on the standards of the time there actually were enough lifeboats on the Titanic. [caption id="attachment_4654" align="alignright" width="163"] Do we at least look smart? (photo by Keith Williamson on flickr)[/caption] At the time, the amount of lifeboats necessary per ship was based on the ship's weight. In retrospect, that is obviously a terrible way to calculate how many lifeboats are needed per ship. ...

There are two questions we are periodically asked: What are the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?  How do I choose which one to use? First let me tell you in general the main benefits of each. WordPress.com WordPress.com is really, really easy to use. Yes, you need to learn how to use it but it's so user-friendly that with almost no technological background, you could have a wp.com blog up and running within minutes. And then you could spend the next couple of days playing around with the functionality and themes it offers and you're basically done. WordPress.org Unless you're really comfortable with technology, you probably won't be able to get a WordPress.org site up and running by yourself. Although it is relatively easy - a ...

On July 31, 2012 Miriam Schwab, friendly CEO of illuminea, gave an informative 9-step webinar on making your WordPress site more social. Here is some of the material written out and you're welcome to watch the full webinar as well. In brackets throughout this post are the times from the video so you can hear Miriam's explanation of each step. Add Google Authorship to your content (00:40) When you associate certain pages/users on your site to your Google+ profile, Google pulls in your picture when those pages appear in search results. Like so: [caption id="attachment_4324" align="aligncenter" width="466"] Why, hello, Friendly CEO![/caption] This is beneficial because: Seeing a picture of someone increases ...

About a year ago, WordPress added a feature that made it ridiculously easy to embed content from various sites (like YouTube, Slideshare, Vimeo) into WordPress sites. How to embed media in WordPress in a second If you want to embed, for example, a YouTube video in a post, all you do is paste the URL of the video into the editor, unlink it and save/publish. See our ultimate guide to embedding HTML and iframes in WordPress on WPGarage for more info on how this works. The problem is that it doesn't seem to work 100% of the time. Luckily, there's ...

illuminea college is offering an amazing course through which you'll learn all the basics you need to know in order to get a website up and running using WordPress. Why Wordpress? WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS). Basically this means that regular people like you and me can, relatively very easily, build and tweak websites that are cool, clear, professional and unique. What is the course exactly? When: Starts Feb. 15, 2011. 9:30am-1:30pm Tuesdays for 8 weeks. Where: Our office in Jerusalem What: Here is the course outline: HTML CSS How do websites and internet work? (And how to get mine to work) Familiarizing yourself with WordPress part 1 Familiarizing yourself with ...

Automattic, the company behind WordPress and WordPress.com has taken a new direction in its activity with the announcement of a new website called FoodPress.com. FoodPress features blog posts aggregated from food blogs sitting on WordPress.com, and that's what makes it so interesting. It's a new venture into the world of verticals, sites that concentrate on a certain topic, with posts sucked in from other sources. The potential for these sites is huge and almost limitless: sites could be about fashion, dating, parenthood, startups, web development, etc. etc. But one of the things that makes this source interesting is that it's not machine-made: ...

It's a month since WordCamp Jerusalem which is basically how long it took us to organize the whole thing. And it's taken about a month to regroup, between the aftermath and all the holidays. But all the hard work was worth it since we've gotten great feedback on the event which took place on September 5, 2010. Thanks so much guys - you motivate me to think about the next event......

After a two year break, WordCamp is coming back to Israel, this time as WordCamp Jerusalem. And we’ve got an awesome lineup of speakers and topics in three tracks: Beginning WordPress Developers, Advanced WordPress Developers, and WordPress Tips and Ideas. What is WordCamp? WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. WordCamps are open to WordPress.com and WordPress.org users alike. Tell me more about WordCamp Jerusalem ...