WordPress: It Is Not Just For Blogging Anymore



Posted: Sunday, October 03, 2010

by Marina Marsh
Web Loft Designs

We all still remember the old days (that means the 1990s, when referring to the web) when building a web site meant writing code for every page by hand. Needless to say it was slow and there was a lot of room for error. On top of that, if you ever wanted to change the way your website looked, you had to go back and change each page, so it took forever, probably as long as building the site the first time.

The content of the site (text and images, and later audio and video) was all jumbled up with the design of the site (font choices, color choices, layout) and the function of the site (all the geeky back-end stuff that makes links connect or retrieves information when you search). It was inefficient, and it meant only people who knew HTML (and later Java and CSS) could edit web pages.

That made you not only totally dependent on your web designer and developer, but it also meant you every time you wanted to change so much as a comma, you had to pay more money.

Now we have content management systems (CMSes for short). The purpose of a CMS is to separate design, function, and content, so that people who don't have HTML skills can edit the content without worrying about messing up the design or breaking the function.

No one knows how many content management systems are out there, but there are a lot. Commercial, proprietary, and expensive, that are designed for large enterprises. There are also quite a few that are open source and free. Out of those that are open source, WordPress , Drupal and Joomla! are the most popular ones. Of these three, Drupal is the most complex, and while it is great for building very large enterprise sites, it is the least user-friendly.

WordPress , on the other hand, is very easy to use, and it's also quite flexible thanks to more than 10,000 plugins that add functions. It's an ideal solution for building small and medium business websites quickly. Not only can the site grow easily with the client, but the client can easily update and add to the site's content . No more calls to the web designer every time you see a typo.

Many of those who have heard the word WordPress think of it in association with blogs. Well, using WordPress just for blogging would be the same as buying a Swiss Army knife and using only one blade. In fact, you don't even have to have a blog on your WordPress website though there are good marketing reasons to have it.

Marina Marsh

www.webloftdesigns.com
This Article has been viewed 199 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)
» left by Cherie Hawkins 1 year 224 days ago.
3 fans.
Wordpress websites are great to work with and it is so easy to load pages, posts etc so for us non techy people wanting to be in control of our own websites it is great!
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.