Many clients that have approached the Virtual CMS team have asked us to develop modules and platforms to support the nonprofit community. vOfficeware, Inc in partnership with Nonprofit Management Solutions has launched NonprofitCMS.org. Bundled are essential modules such as fund raising management, event planning management, and donations to support the mission and outreach of nonprofit organizations. Check it out!

Happy Thanksgiving from the Virtual CMS team!
 

December will be an exciting month for all Virtual CMS customers. We have added additional capacity to our servers to ensure Virtual CMS e-commerce customers will have plenty of speed and bandwidth for the black Friday shoppers. We have also implemented image-caching for select content heavy sites. This has been done as a thank you for choosing us as your WordPress host. We aim to go above and beyond the budget hosts and amateur service providers and we appreciate your business.

Soon to be launched MDAdmit.com showcases just how easy it is to embed YouTube videos in a WordPress site.

The open source Smart YouTube plugin powers VirtualCMS’s video module. Smart YouTube also supports playback of high quality videos, works on iPhone, produces xHTML valid code, allows you to display videos in fullscreen and most recently supports YouTube playlists.

Using the WordPress Video Plugin, VirtualCMS also supports embedding videos from a ton of other popular video sharing sites including:
* MyVideo
* Youtube
* Youtube Playlist
* google video
* Brightcove
* Aniboom
* 123video.nl
* MyspaceTV
* Yahoo! Video
* Veoh
* Wandeo
* Glumbert
* Gametrailers
* Gamevideos
* LiveLeak
* sevenload
* clipfish
* break.com
* Metacafe
* dailymotion
* Vimeo
* videotube
* blip.tv
* revver
* IFILM
* Tu.tv
* grouper
* Cellfish.com
* Sumo.tv
* Last.fm
* Vsocial
* teachertube
* slideshare
* reason.tv
* ComedyCentral
* Jumpcut
* MSN
* hamburg1
* mncast
* Collegehumor
* Megavideo
* d1g.com
* ReelzChannel
* Trilulilu
* Funny or die
* Generic Flash
* Youreporter.it
* Clipsyndicate
* Mojvideo
* GoalVideoz
* Guba
* wat.tv
* OnSMASH
* dotSUB
* current
* screen-o-matic
* Facebook

Search Engine Optimization continues to be a popular topic among web developers and businesses alike. There are various techniques you can use to ensure you are providing data in a clean and useful format to search engine spiders to ensure maximum recognition.
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With SEO getting all of the buzz it is important not to let Sitemaps go the way side. The Sitemap protocol (available here) allows you to specific all of the content on your website to guide search engine spiders as they parse your site.
 

VirtualCMS automatically supports both of these tedious tasks by leveraging open source plugins. For those WordPress users not running VirtualCMS we recommend installing the XML Sitemaps Plugin as well as the All-in-one SEO Pack.

So you’ve bought into the research that shows how blogs are becoming a revenue boosting form of communication between you and your clients as well as prospects. You may also be aware of some of the added benefits that blogging provides such as search engine optimization (getting yourself higher up on search engine results pages for certain keywords). Great! Now what? Here are a few tips and strategies to keep you motivated and to ensure your belong becomes a true asset.

1. Integrate a blog with your website
Of course this is one of the flagship features of Virtual CMS, however other popular blogging platforms such as Google’s Blogger and WordPress.com allow you to craft a blog all within the framework of your existing website. The added value here is the quick and unified look and feel between your blog and the rest of your site. Customer who find your site through your blog may be interested in the other products and services you offer. You have a much higher chance of an upsell.
 

2. Make it part of your business routine
About 80% blogs become abandoned after just one post, another 14% are left hanging dry after five posts. The only thing worse than not having a blog on your website is having an abandoned blog. If you cannot commit the time of 1-2 hours a week to blogging then do not blog. Perhaps it may be a good idea to hire a freelancer to write content for the ideas you come up with. After all your time is best focused running your business.
 

3. Write to your audience even before it exists
Realize that your website and blog are not just for lead generation. Your website is posted in your email signature and on your business cards. People will want to see what your firm is all about and your blog is a great way of showing people. Having 150 articles spanning over three years will give the prospect an impression that you have been around a long time. You are investing in your image and this is one investment that should not be delayed.

Just two days ago several highly targeted attacks started wrecking carnage on WordPress powered sites. The WordPress team released version 2.8.5 to combat these security flaws and within a few hours all VirtualCMS customers sites had been upgraded.
 

As a reminder, at VirtualCMS we take a thorough approach to your site’s security. We constantly monitor the WordPress forums to learn of upcoming threats. We deploy firewalls between our web servers and database servers to limit a hacker’s ability to cause harm. Each VirtualCMS client is isolated from all others and in the unlikely event that one is hacked, we can recover from our off-site snapshots within less than an hour.

Since you are visiting VirtualCMS.net, you must already appreciate how important it is for your organization to have a web presence. Our web site solution helps give you a professional look on the web with minimal effort on your part. Our DIY “What you see is what you get” system allows you to make all the updates and content additions without any technical knowledge.
 

Well thanks to the folks at TinyImpact, we can now offer a clean and crisp web site formatted to your mobile visitors. Their MobilePress plugin automatically takes WordPress content, detects the viewing device (iPhone, Android, Opera Mini, or Windows Mobile) and renders the site to maximize usability. Because VirtualCMS.net is 100% compatible with WordPress any existing customer can request to have MobilePress installed at no additional charge!
 

MobilePress is best catered to those websites that disseminate a wealth of information to their customer. For example if you run a restaurant, you may wish to have a mobile format of your menu. If you are a bike shop, perhaps an easy to view inventory would be appropriate. Content heavy sites however, such as that of a law firm or of a doctor may not wish to use MobilePress to disseminate anything other than hours of operation and contact information.

VirtualCMS.net is not the only popular platform running on WordPress technology. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harvard University, and numerous other institutions leverage the power of WordPress as they disseminate content.
 
As often seen on these sites is an embedded document or embedded slide show that looks and feels like a PDF, however is actually a rich document powered by ScribD’s iPaper. iPaper is free to use and quickly extends the audience of your content while presenting it in a clean and professional format. iPaper automatically scrapes your rich documents for text and applies techniques to allow search engines to index your data.
 
To use iPaper technology you will need to follow four steps:
1. Sign up for an account at ScribD.com – it is free
2. Download and install the iPaper Plugin from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/zd-scribd-ipaper.zip – VirtualCMS.net customers can simply put in a support request to have the module installed
3. Publish your content to ScribD
4. In your WordPress post simply type in {scribd id=DOCUMENTIDHERE key=ACCESSKEYHERE height=500 width=640 /} (replace the { and } with [ and ])
 
 
For content producers such as authors, researchers, and journalists who base their livelihood on royalties, ScribD can host your content securely and resell copies of it. There is no up front costs and they simply take a percentage of each sale.
 
Here is an example of a recent presentation we developed to demonstrate vOfficeware’s (VirtualCMS.net’s parent company) capabilities:
 

We’re about 15 years into the Internet revolution and for sure we have a lot to show for it. With the upcoming release of HTML5, embedded videos, music, games, and mobile access it is hard to argue against the immense progress the technical community has made on changing people’s lives.

Most businesses and organizations have websites today. Even if you are not marketing yourself through tactics such as “search engine optimization” and online advertising, you can be sure customers are going to visit the website you put on your business card or office sign. A website is an extended relationship with your customer – it is a way for you to engage them in your offerings when you are not face to face.

There are many low cost providers out there offering web site hosting for under $20 a month and generally they do work as promised. The issue we have with these low cost providers is they hide the true cost of what it means to have a website. At VirtualCMS, we urge you to consider your true cost of maintaining your website over its lifetime.

*$500 for a website is on the very low side of estimates.
**Assumes 2 hours of updates per month

The estimates above are very conservative – meaning you would have to find the cream of the crop web developer and we host to stay within that price range. I encourage you to check out our prices and our design templates to see how we compare. For a buck less than what you would pay to get a mediocre quality website we assure you a professional look and feel. Our DIY system means future updates can be me made by even the least technically capable users. We know you are probably swamped with work and we’ve made our system easy enough for you to assign anyone (such as your administrative assistant) to make updates on your behalf.

As a quick comparison to how our prices compare:
Total Year One Cost: $859
Total Year Two Cost: $360

Less than 36-hours ago, a security vulnerability was discovered on the WordPress platform. While the Internet brings about progress and expanded reach to all that have access, it sadly is also a very dangerous playground for malicious users ranging from curious teenage kids to mob-like groups of expert hackers.


When vulnerabilities are discovered it often takes only a few hours until automated exploit tools are wrecking havoc over the web. The impact of a compromised website can be a nuisance such as downtime or a catastrophe such as replacement of your content with defaming or otherwise inappropriate information.


Many website companies offer WordPress hosting at a bargain price in hopes of winning over clients. With a minimal operating budget these firms often neglect issues such as security. For them, losing a small number of customers due to hacked websites is cheaper than following proper security precautions.


At NonprofitCMS we instill security procedures into our daily routine. We were aware of the security vulnerability within 1 hour of its published discovery and had all of our clients patched within the next few hours. According to common security trends, more than 80% of WordPress powered websites will remain unpatched even three months from now. Our clients are our livelihood, and for our livelihood we are committed to proactively going the extra mile.