Sponsor Spotlight: LightSpeed

LightSpeed WordPress Development is a Cape Town based WordPress Web development studio. Specialists in WordPress, BuddyPress, WooCommerce and Mobile Development, we build WordPress websites and scalable social networks focused on User Experience, Functionality and Aesthetics.LightSpeed’s latest product offering is The Publisher Suite – A bundled solution of themes and plugins that incorporates social sharing tools and on-site social networks to meet the specific demands of online publishers and magazines. Notable brands that have used our Publisher Suite include: MTN/PayD, Sports Illustrated, Clickatell, Bicycling Magazine, Fairlady Test House and Runner’s World

Website

LightSpeed is a WordPress development business. Can you tell us a bit more about your business? How do you use WordPress?

We develop a variety of web solutions for our clients, using WordPress, BuddyPress and WooCommerce.

We have extensive experience working with traditional publishing companies such as Media24, AMH and M&G, and we’ve put this knowledge to use in creating our ‘Publisher Suite’. The Publisher Suite is a bundle of WordPress themes and plugins for magazines that enable their online presence to have full advertising, social media sharing, online shopping and social network components. This makes it easier for publishers to generate revenue from their website and build a community around it from their readership.

Why WordPress?

From our experience WordPress is simply the best Open Source CMS out there. WordPress is easy to use for clients (and ourselves), and it has a huge community of active developers that are guaranteed to continue pushing boundaries and keep WordPress ahead of the pack. We also believe strongly in the WordPress ethos of clean, usable software within a truly open source framework.

Can you name projects where you’ve used WordPress in an interesting way?

For the new Clickatell website we developed a variety of flexible WordPress templates, enabling them to add pages and have full control over the layout when adding content. This project also entailed custom integration with the client’s APIs, which comprised a lot of complex coding. This experience has served us well, and we are now doing something similar for PayD.

For our publishing clients, Bicycling Magazine or Runners World, we used BuddyPress to build a community website that integrates with the main magazine website. These community sites, My Runner’s World and MyBicycling add additional value to the magazine and enables the readership to interact with each other around the main brand.

Why did you decide to sponsor WordCamp Cape Town 2012?

There is a thriving community of WordPress professionals in Cape Town. I felt that we should have a yearly event to bring WordPress users and developers together and strengthen the bonds between individuals, creating room for new business relationships and an interchange of knowledge.

LightSpeed is built on WordPress, and anything that helps WordPress helps us.

Hosting and sponsoring WordCamp is a unique opportunity to organise an event that will help change the WordPress landscape in South Africa. We want to encourage collaboration, openness of brands and of course business opportunities.

What are your thoughts on the WordPress community as a whole? And the South African WP community?

The community that has converged around WordPress internationally is astounding. Seeing so many different people from different countries and with different goals and objectives come together around a project and build it into the world’s most popular CMS is amazing. The openness is also striking, with so many people sharing their skills and knowledge, making WordPress an easily accessible platform.

Being involved with WordCamp has allowed us to connect with lots of WordPress professionals from around the world and has created the opportunity for LightSpeed to benefit from these introductions.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Cape Town?

Seeing everyone come together and share their stories. This year’s event will be bigger than the last and there is a lot of satisfaction in putting together a successful event and seeing it grow year on year. Organizing WordCamp is a lot of work and to see the results of that effort is priceless.

Please share one WP tip

The less plugins, the better. They are the root of all evil.

Tell us more about how you became interested in WordPress, what about it drives your continued interest?

Community and open source ethos. Take a look at their make blogs and you will see what I mean – http://make.wordpress.org/

Do you make money from wordpress?

Yes, WordPress is the core of our business. We use WordPress and related technologies such as BuddyPress and WooCommerce to deliver web solutions to our clients.