As a student at Iowa State University in the early 2000′s I used a Craigslist-esque classifieds site to buy and sell many things from computer monitors to textbooks. Also a student at ISU at the time, Aayush Phumbhra saw a national market for this platform to sell textbooks.

He bought in and took the company from a basement in Ames, IA to a venture backed $100 million textbook rental company. Geoff and I got the chance to talk to him about his story in episode 18 of Prairiecast.

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In the latest PrairieCast Geoff and I got the chance to interview Annie Sorenson who quit her job to follow her passion – which is interestingly similar to how I got started on 48Web…

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Over the last few weeks we had the fantastic opportunity to work with the crew over at Palisade Systems – a data loss prevention company here in Des Moines, IA – on a blog for their new product called ComplianceSafe.

ComplianceSafe is an innovative product for small businesses to protect information and data leaks via email.

We had a few goals for their WordPress blog …

1. Launch Quick
2. Skin WordPress like their product site
3. Simple, Clean, and Neat

A couple weeks ago on PrairieCast, Geoff and I got the chance to visit with Andy Stoll before he departed on The World Tri with Des Moines’ adventurer and lawyer Charlie Wittmack.

Social Entrepreneurship With Guest Andy Stoll

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Here is how Josh Braaten and I used Google Wave to collaborate on a blog post (WordPress vs Squarespace).

We got word today that we’ve been accepted into Microsoft BizSpark.

You must have wished us good luck

So what? why? how? huh? Microsoft?

What is BizSpark?

BizSpark is Microsoft’s way of helping startups. Essentially, they provide “Software, Support, and Visibility” to startups using Microsoft technologies to build their products. Check it out.

Microsoft? Really?

Yep – among other things I’m an ASP.Net web developer and I don’t care if you make fun of me for not using the “cool” web frameworks like Rails or Django. ASP.Net, MVC, C#, and Visual Studio are awesome tools for building web applications.

We’re going to be doing some cool things with HTML 5, ASP.Net MVC, jQuery, and AJAX while testing some new technologies like MongoDB.

Wait – I thought you loved WordPress

Yes – we very much do love WordPress. And yes, we’ll still be developing websites for clients with WordPress since there really is no better way. We will continue building awesome things with it and contributing to the community. That won’t change at all

Questions?  Let us know in the comments!

It’s been a couple years since we refreshed the dmTweetup.org site. We built it in the same style as the DsmStartupDrinks.com and CentralIowaBloggers.com WordPress sites.

Questions? Let us know in the comments!

Want one? Get in touch!

This is our latest WordPress development for CollectorMentor.com. We went for a magazine style layout and heavily customized the Hello theme from Templatic. We used our standard plugin library for SEO, Analytics, and more. Also – due to it’s heavy use of images and potential traffic load we went with the WP-Super Cache plugin (see last screenshot below) which dramatically increased our page load time.

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Do you have any questions about this site? Let us know in the comments!

Want one for yourself? Get in touch!

Our colleague from up north Josh Braaten asked me to collaborate on a blog post for a Content Management System showdown: WordPress vs. Squarespace.

Topics covered include…

• Cost
• Search Engine Friendliness (SEO)
• Security
• Features
• Customization
• Ease Of Use
• Hosting
• Support and Maintenance

Conclusion?

Ultimately, both Squarespace and WordPress are great web publishing tools and can most likely meet the needs of your blog or website. Andy and I hope this post has given you the perspective you need to make your choice based on your own personal goals, skills and resources.

Read our comparison. What do you think?

For last week’s Prairiecast (our podcast about midwest entrepreneurs) we got the opportunity to interview serial entrepreneur Brian Kaldenberg about several profitable niche businesses that he’s started over the years. We cover his NCAA Football video game rosters business, his proofreading service business, and his consulting company – among other things.

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