Unless you’re an Aussie, the name may sound a little odd, but GoodBarry is quite the neat innovation by Business Catalyst.

Now Barry’s real name is actually Bardia Housman, Business Catalyst’s CEO, who in 1997 co-founded Start, a site that quickly grew to become the most trafficked website and largest online community in Australia (Hitwise). Start was eventually acquired in 1999 by a NASDAQ listed company, and in 2001 it was time for something new.

GoodBarry has been on the market since 2004 and currently serves 1,000s of businesses, providing them with Online Businesses, Not Websites™. A neat slogan indeed.

Good Barry is an integrated system that runs a user’s website, email marketing, online shop and analytic tools while automatically growing their customer database. This is all done via one central console that has everything they need to run their business.

The package is available for only $39/month without any locked in contracts. In our opinion, it looks like a bargain. Good on ya, Barry.

Be sure to check out the video summary at the GoodBarry’s start page.

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Here at Iluminari, we’re all about promoting simple yet effective solutions for all of our clients. With the surge of blogs in recent years, managing a blog has become a widely adopted skill, much like writing an email or posting a comment on a friend’s facebook wall.

Perhaps this is one of the many good reasons why Wordpress, a platform originally designed for blog publishing, is becoming a popular choice as a Content Management System (CMS) - not unlike Drupal, XOOPS, Joomla and others.

The beauty of Wordpress is that, in addition to being extremely user friendly, there are vast amounts of documentation, plugins, themes, widgets and more available online, giving a web developer’s client greater ownership to modify and develop their site at a later date. It’s sort of like future proofing a website, because you know the Wordpress community will continually contribute new plugins, themes or widgets whenever new medias or technologies arise.

There are a number of quality bloggers out there who offer creative ways and suggest useful plugins to transform a wordpress install into a fully functional CMS. Here are a couple to get you started:

Help Blogger offers a series of posts on the subject matter, covering fundamental theory, reasons for and against, how to set it up as a portfolio site and more.

Web Designer Wall writes about a series of CMS enabling hacks that are easy to implement, even if you’re no expert.

Blueprint Design Studio list the top ten CMS enabling wordpress plugins.

And, although this may be bad for business, here’s a list of the 20 best wordpress CMS themes for small businesses, by Best Wordpress Themes.

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