It seems like no matter what our clients ask of us, WordPress has the answer. Want a survey? WordPress has a plugin. Want a shopping cart? WordPress has a plugin? How about a calanedar? Yep. What bout a newsletter? You guessed it. There’s a plugin.
We just had one of our clients ask if we could create a newsletter for them in just a few days so we turned to WordPress. Sure, we could have invested in a Constant Contact account but that can become costly over time. Or we could have custom-coded something, but when you’re in a hurry, why reinvent the wheel? WordPress has plugins for nearly everything imaginable. There are already more than 13,000 plugins available and the number is growing all the time. If you want to take a look at what’s available, check out the WordPress plugin gallery.
This newsletter came together in a hurry, thanks to the plugins that are available. We started with the basic WordPress installation, added the header image and changed the categories in the side bar to “issues.” Now when we create a new post, we just assign it to a category that’s something like “February.” All of the articles in each month’s issue are all neatly pulled together into one category.
To blast the newsletter out to a group, we used the newsletter plugin which makes it easy to edit the content in a great visual editor. After ensuring that everything looks good, you can click on your recipients right in the subscriber list and send the HTML newsletter to the entire group. What a breeze. A few years ago, programming a blog, creating an HTML newsletter and blasting it out would have cost thousands of dollars but thanks to WordPress, the client saved a ton of money and was able to get their newsletter out on time.