Using WordPress as a CMS

Hopefully this post will be the first of many new posts to my blog, as I hope to develop it further and become a regular freelance design blogger. By now most people familiar with website design and development will have heard of WordPress. Chances are that even if you’re not familiar with web design you will have come across a WordPress blog.

WordPress has become the leading blogging platform on the web, but still relatively few people know of the capabilities the system has for content managed websites. For example this very site, GregFindley.com is running on WordPress, I have the blog section as the main WordPress functionality and then a category setup for the portfolio page, and various other static content pages.

I’ve personally seen an increasing number of inquiries and projects working on the WordPress platform as a result of using WP as the CMS for my own site. Services I have provided have included fully powered WP sites, theme designs and custom theme coding (for other designers and developers).

So what are some of the advantages of using WordPress as a CMS?

  • The most obvious is the date ordered blog feature, allowing you to integrate a company blog, personal blog, or company news section into your site with relative ease.
  • Simple, easy to use backend setup, allowing the administrator of the site to add, edit and delete content across all areas of the site. There is also the ability to manage multiple level user access, so you can have a number of users helping with the website content.
  • Help & Support of a massive community of WordPress users.
  • Comment fields on blog entries allowing a greater level of interaction between visitors to the site and the author of the site content.
  • Wide selection of plugins available to provide extra features to your site, everything from Search Engine Optimisation to media plugins allowing you to embed YouTube videos.

Whilst only a very short post covering a few of the advantages to WordPress as a CMS I hope this gives you an idea on why it is becoming so popular! I’m hoping to follow this post up with various posts about the WordPress platform, plugins, theme coding, etc, in the coming months.

Posted on Monday September 1st, 2008

6 Comments

  1. Panix February 18, 2009 at 3:48 pm

    Agreed! WordPress is no longer just about blogging.

    The site looks great, it’s hard to spot the wordpress elements.

  2. Greg February 18, 2009 at 3:55 pm

    Thanks Richard, and yes that just goes to show how far WordPress can be customised. Thanks for stopping by!

  3. Ethan February 22, 2009 at 1:41 am

    Wordpress is great by itself as a CMS. But other plugins can make it awesome, sometimes even better than Drupal and Joomla.

  4. Gareth Coxon - Dot Design August 12, 2009 at 7:41 am

    Its a great platform Greg, I’m currently in the process of redesigning and adding elements to my wordpress site that I think would be alot harder to add to a traditionally built website. Nice site by the way!

  5. John Devlin October 5, 2009 at 1:38 pm

    So true Greg – and you did a superb job on my True Colours website. Still going strong!

  6. Greg October 6, 2009 at 9:38 am

    Thanks for the comments Ethan & Gareth.

    Good to hear from you John, I check your site every few weeks, great to see it’s doing well! Hope you’re well.