New work: Wordpress MU for Specialized

Getting deeper into this WordPress thing, I’ve been working with Specialized on my first WordPress MU development project: the Stumpjumper Trail Crew. The campaign features eight “ambassadors” who’ve been fully kitted out and asked to blog, tweet, lead rides, and generally promote the latest version of the Stumpjumper (which is a great bike).

As for the site, we opted for WordPress MU in order to maintain some separation between the blogs. For instance, we could give riders admin-level control over their blogs while ensuring that no could can edit anyone else’s content. Down the road, the site would even accommodate completely different looks and features for each rider’s blog. Craziness!

The challenge was that WPMU is really intended for sites like WordPress.com where blogs are completely walled-off from each other. So it required lots of modifications to get the right level of site-wide coordination that we needed for the Crew.

On the social media side of things, the site is designed to integrate riders’ Twitter feeds, photos from Flickr, and videos from YouTube. Hosting content on these sites increases the reach of the campaign and keeps everything under the Stumpjumper Trail Crew banner. Flickr in particular is a little more complicated from the author’s standpoint, but Specialized has picked riders who know their way around a website - like Bikehugger’s David Schloss.

Now that the site is live, it’s time to switch gears from coding to copywriting.