As autumn approaches and the kids head back to school, we take a look back at some of the accomplishments and opportunities we’ve been fortunate enough to have this past month.

August was a busy month at 4word systems. Here are some of the highlights:

New Team Members

To meet increasing demand for our WordPress and Magento development practice, we’ve beefed up our Colorado office with 2 new seasoned professionals to take our capabilities to the next level. We’re pleased to welcome Morgan and Steve W to the team and look 4word to their contributions in the coming months.

To help manage product turnover and assist with product management for our ecommerce operations, we are pleased to welcome Melissa to our Michigan office. She brings several years of experience managing ecommerce catalogs for national accounts, and we’re thrilled to have her.

A New Blog for CQK

We wrapped up another WordPress project in August for Creative Quilt Kits. The project migrated their 3 year old blog from the Blogger platform (and blogspot URL) to a self-hosted WordPress installation under their own domain name. All posts, images and comments were moved over intact so the rich history of content was not lost. Post-specific redirects were also installed on the old blog so that during the transition, all visitors are directed to the exact content they were looking for on the new blog. This is all part of a comprehensive strategy to create deeper engagement with our audience of avid quilters.

While the project is never quite “done”, we’re happy to have launched the first revision on WordPress and will be adding more features to the platform over the next several months. You can check it out at http://blog.creativequiltkits.com

2 Biggest Sales Days Ever

As a company focused on business results, it’s always a pleasure to announce ecommerce sales records for our clients. One of our most active websites smashed through their all-time record for most sales in a day twice in the month of August. We’re proud of the part we play to keep their business growing.

Jessica Northey and #CMChat

This month, we had the opportunity to help out a bona-fide Twitter superstar, social media master and all-around nice person Jessica Northey. Jessica reached out on Google Plus (you know, that “ghost town“) for some help with her new website. She had spent a pile of money and 3 months working with a “friend of a friend”, only to be disappointed and frustrated. We are happy to be partnering with her to shape the new site that will support her wildly popular #CMChat event. CMChat is a weekly live chat, and probably one of the biggest community events on Twitter. Stay tuned for exciting new things from Jessica that we can’t talk about yet.

Infrastructure & Tuning

If you follow our “Tech Talk” series, you probably know that we are well skilled when it comes to web hosting and server performance. This month we’ve had the opportunity to put our skills to the test on 2 important projects.

The first project was to help an international franchise-based moving and storage company to support their franchise-specific advertising. We created a mechanism whereby new franchisees can be brought online with their own “site” quickly and easily on the corporate hosting platform, in compliance with corporate standards. In the process, we identified and fixed some key performance issues facing the corporate website by optimizing and re-designing the deployment infrastructure.

The second project was quick and easy for us, but extremely valuable for our client. Our customer had been struggling with the performance of their internal and customer-facing CMS system for tracking support requests and other customer communications. We were able to go in and improve the performance of their database by a factor of 10 in less than an hour. Talk about bang-for-the-buck.

The Move to Mobile and Responsive Design

With the explosion of mobile devices as a means for accessing web content, 2 projects kicked off this month to create mobile-optimized versions of existing websites. Of course, we announced the mobile version of our site back on August 11 via Twitter and Facebook. Watch for an announcement in the first half of September when we launch the other one.

That’s a Wrap

It’s been a big month, but we’re just getting started. Look for more updates as many of our in-progress work hits the web in the coming weeks. Be sure to drop us a line or reach out to us any time. We’d love to hear from you!