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WordPress Enterprise : Company and brand solution for $500 a month

December 15, 2012

Automattic, founded by WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt), and the company behind blogging platform, WordPress.com, launched its WordPress.com Enterprise solution last Thursday. Enterprise enables brands and businesses to rapidly produce custom blogs and websites that can manage high traffic, are mobile and tablet prepared, and can host rich media including videos, photos, and more. Enterprise brings together the top features of both WordPress.com, the cloud version of WordPress that is hosted and supported by Automattic, and WordPress.com VIP, Automattic’s service built for larger companies. At $500 per month, Enterprise is Automattic WordPress.com’s least expensive business enterprise offering. WordPress.com VIP costs $3,750 per month for up to 5 sites. Raanan Bar-Cohen (@raanan), who runs business development at Automattic believes Enterprise marks a new era for high-profile websites on WordPress.

In a world of social networks and flash the compromises of legacy hosting aren’t good enough anymore. You need to be able to create a bespoke site in a day, have it work great on desktop and touch devices, be bullet-proof secure, and scale to the occasion when the world shows up at your door. As the saying used to go: fast, cheap, good — pick two.

WordPress.com Enterprise features include:

  • Can be made mobile and tablet ready with a single click.
  • Linked to popular social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and LinkedIn through the publicize feature.
  • 200 plus themes which may then be customized.
  • WordPress.com VIP features such as 70+ vetted plugins which include integrations with top partners such as Flipboard, Chartbeat, and Facebook.
  • New WordPress Javascript customization service that gives you the flexibility to customize your site without needing to touch underlying PHP code. You can tweak and personalize all you want.
  • You can launch your site within minutes and scale your traffic on their cloud, which delivers 100’s of millions of page views per day.
  • Run and manage any advertising campaign you like.

Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Chef and ESPN’s Digital and Print Products are nice examples of what one can do with Enterprise. From Ferriss, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body,

When we created The 4-Hour Chef we wanted a custom, mobile-ready design that would be able to handle a lot of traffic. With WordPress.com Enterprise and the support of the team at Automattic, we got the site up and running quickly with all of the features we were looking for.

What’s the impact of Enterprise in the law and professional space? At $6,000 per year, many law firms will balk. I am saying that from experience with LexBlog’s current offering at half that price with strategic consulting, on-going training, social media support, and broad network exposure. However, I am seeing a growing trend among law firms and other professionals in their seeing true value in blogging and other social media. They’re also beginning to understand that blogging and social media doesn’t amount to a tinkers dam, unless you know what you’re doing. Law firms and lawyers now see value in learning how to develop a social media strategy and learning how to network through the net via blogging and social media. They see this as a sound business development strategy – one that will keep existing clients and grow their book of business. As the value of social media and digital publishing increases to law firms and other professional services firms, the underlying technology they’re going to demand will need to be rock solid. Tech professionals unfamiliar with WordPress (software and hosting environments) and who don’t have time to stay abreast of fast moving developments won’t cut it for good firms. Rather than bringing WordPress publishing solutions in-house, $6,000 a year for the technology alone may look pretty good to smart executives. For companies like LexBlog, better and better technology is only a plus. It’s the baseline from where we can really help professionals network through the net so as to grow their business.