Using Wordpress as a CMS
*** Update!!! *** I’ve written more about this subject. Brochure Site Design using Wordpress for Content Management.
Huge businesses have huge needs and resources. Small businesses have similar needs but more modest resources. I have found lately that by using a simple blogging tool I can give a Small Business or Non Profit Organization an amazing amount of versatility and functionality with their website, versatility that will allow the small business to compete at a higher level. That tool is WordPress.
Now not every business website owner is going to find WordPress to be robust enough. However, for the average Small Business user or Non-Profit Organization, who just wants to be able to update his or her own site without requiring a degree in how to use the application or a dictionary for the jargon, WordPress is definitely a great approach. Consider Circuit Search, Rainswater Fixed Asset Management, and The Delaware Valley Farm Study Center, three sites I completed recently. The first two have custom two column WordPress Themes that suit their businesses. The third is a custom three column wordpress theme. All use the WordPress Pages feature extensively. And two out of three have already been updated by their respective owners.
There’s much beauty in using WordPress as content management. You can use the Pages feature to create a site that mimics the static nature of the traditional website, but gives the bonus of an rss feed that will alert the ping services when the pages are updated. What an SEO bonus! If the small business owner is the type who can blog, then both Pages and Posts can be used to add the huge benefit blogs, with their rss capabilities, give to a site in terms of Search Engine Rankings. The beauty of the blogging feature becomes apparent when you consider it for use with time sensitive announcements, such as special sales, events, press releases, or news items of special or timely interest. Add the benefit of the extensibility of the WordPress script through the use of plug-ins and the designer’s imagination is the only limit to what can be done. Photo galleries, contact forms, shoutboxes, news aggregators, google adsense adders, and many more plug ins can extend the WordPress ap in myriad ways. Almost all of these are easily administered through the admin area of the site.
The WordPress Write Pages or Posts interface is pretty easy to use. I’ve found that a simple readme.txt file included in the package with the custom wordpress theme is enough to get the client rolling using his or her new application.
A WordPress Site with a custom theme is more affordable than most small businesses or nonprofits might think. And with the client’s ability to add/edit/delete content, present information in a timely way, post press releases, announce events, and much more, the functionality of a WordPress Site will allow a Small Business to compete in a much larger arena.
Oh, and did I mention that Google absolutely LOVES WordPress sites? If you want to see what I mean, use the Walidator here and check out pagerank on the Delaware Valley Farm Study Center and Circuit Search. Keep in mind these sites are less than six months old. Rainswater, unfortunately, was built after the recent update, so doesn’t yet show pagerank.
What are you waiting for? I’d be happy to talk with you about putting your business or nonprofit organization on the web using WordPress with a unique custom WordPress Theme. Contact Kickass for more info.
October 26th, 2005 at 3:30 am
I am in the process of moving our non-profit site over to Wordpress for exactly the reasons you describe. Page rank isn’t as important as a cost-effective way to communicate with parents and students and have a pubic presence. The migration to Wordpress from a static HTML site was relatively painless, although still a work in progress.
What would be helpful to me, however, is a simple way to communicate what RSS is to people who have no idea, so they can benefit from the feed.
Your sites are lovely!
December 12th, 2005 at 6:45 pm
And I quote…
“isn’t as important as a cost-effective way to communicate with parents and students and have a pubic presence…. ”
LMO!!!
Aren’t there laws out there to prevent this sort of thing???
December 12th, 2005 at 9:02 pm
Well, ya know, I COULD have edited that out, and didn’t . . . I thought about it . . . and thought about it . . . and didn’t.
December 12th, 2005 at 9:30 pm
I needed a good laugh today so I’m VERY glad you let it play the way it was written…
I’m going to test out phpLD and like the template you put together for it.
If it works out for me, hopefully sometime in the future I’ll be in po$ition where I can actually compensate you for it. Or better yet, be able to afford to have you design a custom template!!
Fingers are crossed….
THANKS
December 12th, 2005 at 9:40 pm
You might want to look at this-
A better directory script that WORKS.
I’ll skin either but I recommend you go with the one that is written in GOOD CLEAN code. Just read the forum. Compare it with phpLD forum . . . ’nuff said.
December 13th, 2005 at 7:26 pm
Thanks for the tip, BJ!
Will check out the free version and see how it goes..
February 3rd, 2006 at 12:54 am
I have been starting to set the same thing up for my clients as well. However, there are a few points which I haven’t quite solved yet:
Staging Area - if the client has an existing site, then you need to set up a staging area somewhere whilst building the site for the client, so they can review it.
URLS - If the client has an existing site, say on Windows/IIS, and you move them over to Wordpress on Apache/PHP, then the URL’s for pages on the new site are going to be different. How do you manage this using redirects etc? Example if the old site had a page contact.asp, how do you know setup on the server to redirect to/contact or /contact.php?
I would love to hear more about real life examples of using Wordpress as a CMS, and the issues and benefits.
February 3rd, 2006 at 9:43 pm
David, I have two “test blog” setups on this domain, a 1.5.x setup and a 2.0 setup where I test themes. That way the client can look and changes can be made and approved before code is shipped. I have testbeds for other scripts elsewhere.
Re the URL thing moving from Windows to Apache. I did a WordPress site recently where the guy was moving off an asp cms that created the most godawful ugly unspiderable urls imaginable. In that particular case we didn’t even worry about redirects, we simply had Spidermeister Shawn convert the whole mess to static html and included it on the new site as “the archive”. Urls were all different and there was some resulting 404 mess at first, which we cured within an hour or so by using .htaccess to refer 404s to a php script that simply redirected in the kindest way to the new index page of the site. The other thing we did was include real sitemaps in 4 formats so that the new hierarchichal structure would be picked up ASAP. Did the site suffer a bit in the SEs? Yes, but it also recovered VERY quickly and the spiders have been all over the newly structured site. I know what the approximate traffic was before the site was moved. It’s now increasing nicely off those numbers. More info on the asp to html conversion here.