Who I am.
Cofounder of dynamIt, a web agency in Columbus.
We plan, implement, and support usable web sites and
web applications.
WordPress in the We specialize in helping clients develop a web strategy.
Corporate World. Why I’m here.
Bobby Whitman To share a recent case study of leveraging WordPress for a
Cofounder, dynamIt Fortune 500 company.
It’s about good web.
WordPress was the best solution given the project goals.

Online presence.
McGraw-Hill’s printed text-books are often supple-
mented with online tools and information
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The old site.
1. The Situation At the end of 2008, Glencoe made the decision to
retire the old Current Events micro site.
Technical sta was required to make any updates
to the old Current Events site.
Time and budget constraints limited them to two
updates per year.

A new site.
McGraw-Hill/Glencoe sought a vendor to provide
them with a new site to display Current Events.
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Project parameters.
2. What They Needed + A way for the editorial sta to easily update content.
+ The ability to include audio, video, images along with
current events articles.
+ A way to attach a wide variety of metadata to each
article.
+ The site to work like an online magazine displaying
newest stories rst and archiving old ones.
+ The site to include di erent skins for di erent grade
levels.
+ The site to be housed on McGraw-Hill servers.

Our recommendation.
Based on the project parameters, we recommended
WordPress.
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Their concerns.
Not surprisingly so, there were some concerns to
3. What We Did work around with using an open source solution.
WordPress.
We installed WordPress and implemented a custom
theme for the site.
Launch and training.
After launch, we o ered training on using Word-
Press along with the custom theme we built.

Success criteria met.
+ Higher frequency of updates.
+ Updates handled by editorial sta .
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+ Lower cost of updates.
Overall cost savings.
4. The Result Working with an established code base, we were
able to provide savings in both time and budget.
Earned recognition.
In a March 21, 2009 article, The New York Times
talked about the site and its regular updates.