WordPress as digital signage

We’ve recently done a project for a solicitor’s office where they used tiny Raspberry Pi computers attached to monitors in their office, displaying various stats and info for their staff so they can see how each department is doing and also the results of their marketing efforts. We can’t show actual images for privacy reasons, so have rebranded the mockups for this article.

WordPress Setup

We installed another copy of WordPress to their hosting package, so it’s completely separate to their main website. The client has had a WordPress site for many years now so they are familiar with the control panel.

It’s a fairly simple WordPress install, with Advanced Custom Fields plugin to allow various types of data to be entered in the control panel. The site is blocked from search engines. This data is then shown on a sequence of pages, with the Raspberry Pi changing the page every few minutes. This gives a slideshow type effect, but improves on a slideshow by allowing the data to be manipulated or live updated on each page.

Types of page

The solicitors wanted to show the following data:

• Numbers of social media followers the business has
• Fee income per department
• Billable hours per department
• Google reviews – number and overall score per branch
• Staff news
• Upcoming birthdays
• Google Analytics data with live graph
• Number of complaints

The social media page gets the number of likes and followers automatically, as well as showing the latest update from each network. The other pages allow easy entry of the latest data and create the graphs or show the latest items. The Google Analytics is authorised with their details to get the number of visitors and a traffic graph from their Google account.

The ‘staff news’ section works like a normal blog, but contains internal news and info rather than content aimed at customers.

Could Digital Signage help your business?

If you need to communicate a lot of info to your workforce, a WordPress based digital signage solution is an easy way to enter and display all kinds of data from Analytics to internal news and departmental targets.

We only scratched the surface of what’s possible with this project, so call or email us to get your project started.