WordPress is a Lot More than Blogging Software
WordPress is not just a great blogging platform, it is far more than that; it is a free, functionally rich content management system that provides syndication of content.
In short, it is a solid platform for any business for their website, whether that site is a blog, a regular website, an online brochure, a small online shop or even a membership site.
Put Yourself in Control Using WordPress
With WordPress it is easy to write and publish articles. The editor allows you to run in visual or HTML mode so novices can get started easily in Visual mode and more experienced users can use the HTML editor where they can exercise more control over the layout of their articles.
Reach Out and Interact With Your Customers
WordPress allows you interact with your customers, prospects and suppliers in a number of ways. Firstly, your articles are made available through a RSS feed which means your content can be consumed on other web sites or by your readers in email or using a feed reader tool such as Google Reader. In other words WordPress publicizes your site every time you make an update without you having to do anything.
WordPress also gives visitors to your site the ability to make comments. You can than reply and this dialogue appears attached to your articles. Each comment and your response add further to your site’s publicity.
Styling Your Site To Give It A Distinctive Look
WordPress uses ‘themes’ to control the layout and colors of the site. A theme consists a stylesheet and a number of templates for different types of page. On the WordPress Themes site you can choose from over a 1000 different themes which are free. There are also several hundred themes available which are not free. Alternatively, you can have you own personal theme created however this usually costs up to $3000.
My favorite premium theme is Thesis. It does costs $87 but its main advantage it that it is easy to style and hence with a few hours work can be made to have a distinctive look. This compares very favorably to the few days work it takes to create a new theme. Thesis also has a number of useful features to make it easier to tune your site from a Search Engine Optimization standpoint.
Give Your Site Features using Plugins
WordPress allows you to extend its capabilities through add-in modules called plugins. At time of writing there are over 6700 free plugins available. They cover all the simple (and not so simple) features you want on a website; contact forms, navigation menus, image manipulation, slideshows, adverts, etc, plus a number of administration tools for spam protection, backups, monitoring site traffic, performance tuning, etc.
There are also a number of premium WordPress plugins which have more complex features such as running a membership site, running a online shop, etc.
Most of time with WordPress, you can find something that does the job that you just need to tweak a little, rather than having to build a new feature from scratch. This means you can do stuff fast and cheaply with WordPress.
