As more and more people use the Internet and the social tools that are available, they’re going to want to share information with their friends and family. One great way to do this is by starting your own blog. Many users will simply join a service that offers them a subdomain address such as myblog.blogspot.com, but that can be difficult to remember and seems unprofessional if you’re trying to promote your personal brand or business.

We’re really big fans of WordPress and we think it’s the best blogging and CMS platform out there. We also consider ourselves to be WordPress experts and always recommend that users install this script as the basis for their web site. In fact, the blog you are reading right now is running off WordPress.

With millions of users running this platform, the community has developed thousands of plugins that extend its functionality. Over the next few months, we’ll profile some of those plugins and tell you how they can extend the functionality of your web site. In less than 15 minutes you could have a professional running web site to compete with some of the bigger players out there.

When you’re ready to get started, check out our blog hosting special plan. We’ll even throw in a free domain name.

As we begin a new decade and the year 2010 (twenty-ten), we wanted to wish our clients a happy new year. We hope that 2010 is filled with happiness and success.

We’ll be continuing with more of our educational posts in the coming weeks.

We wanted to update our customers on how our migration to the new billing system is progressing.

As you know, in October we moved all USD billing clients to a new web site and a new billing system. The move has been extremely successful and we haven’t run into a single issue. This is very encouraging for us as we move towards a more unified system so that we can continue to scale our business and better support our customers.

Two of the new features that our customers will experience on a regular basis is the support system and customer portal. Our support system no longer requires customers to login via the web. This feature was very important to us because we know that a lot of our users don’t always have access to a web browser and prefer to just send in an email to our support team.

The second feature is our brand new customer portal. We’ve made it even easier to manage your personal information and web hosting accounts under a single, unified system. We’ve even built the portal directly into our brand new design.

In late December, we plan to complete phase 2 of our upgrades and move over our CAD billing customers to the new design and billing system.

We’ll announce more changes once we have completed that as well as continue to update you on our progress.

Many of you have hopefully by now heard of Twitter. Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows you to push out updates about what you are currently up to from anywhere in the world.

Earlier this year, Twitter became more mainstream as celebrities around the world embraced the idea and found Twitter to be a unique way to engage with their fans.

By this time next year, it will become a necessity to have a Twitter account under your business name as the world moves towards a fixation on realtime news and events.

To setup an account, simply visit Twitter.com and click join. Complete the signup form and secure your business name. Even if you have no intention of using it at this moment, securing your company name will be as important as securing a unique domain name.

To figure out how to really use the service and not seem like you are spamming customers, you’ll want to follow other businesses to get an idea of what they are doing. Some great examples are @dell and @jetblue. Both of these companies have successfully turned Twitter into a medium that earns them millions of extra dollars each year. Just click the follow button next to their name and their updates will begin displaying in your timeline.

Our next post will cover additional details on how to access and manage Twitter.

We wanted to provide a more modern billing and support solution to our customers and we felt that wasn’t possible with our current version of ModernBill.

So earlier this month, we completed the migration for our US and international customers to the new system.

Some of the new features include:
- multiple contacts support
- email based support solution (no need to visit our site to submit or update a support request)
- client portal (brings all support and billing functionality to a single page)
- searchable knowledgebase to find quick support answers

These are just some of the new benefits our clients will experience.

We plan to migrate our Canadian customers to the new platform early next year.

We’re happy to announce that our new website has finally launched for our US and international customers.

We’re calling this a soft launch because we still have some tweaks to make.

You’ll notice that we’ve moved away from the traditional style design of throwing everything we have to offer on the front page to making it simpler and easier to understand.

We continually find that both our current and prospective clients are often confused by all these hosting terms, features and acronyms. So we hope that by simplifying our marketing message you’ll have an easier time understanding what we are offering.

I’ll be posting more detailed information about our move to a new billing & support system and our plan moving forward to merge both our US and Canadian systems and sites together.

Please leave us your feedback. We will read and respond to all messages.