Turning WordPress into the ultimate CMS!

Posted by David | Filed under Web Design Tips

The great thing about WordPress is its ease of use and ease of setting up, within 5 minutes anyone with a bit of web know-how can have a WordPress blog going, but the software alone is limited a bit to blogging, but with such an easy interface it is something I want my clients who aren’t as tech-savvy as myself to be able to use to edit their websites. Other actual CMSes such as Drupal and Joomla are very complicated, even taking myself a little while to get myself orientated.

It’s pretty easy to turn WordPress into a CMS though, a few bits here and there are its done. Most of these are mentioned in my top 5 wordpress plugins. There are a few more however since writing that article I have come across that are of great benefit to any website. These add to previous plugins which included Galleries, Contact Forms, Polls and Statistics.

ShareThis

ShareThis and other similar plugins allow users to submit your site to social networking sites, as well as to their friends easily by email. It’s a great way to get your content around the web, more efficiently and rapidly! Social networking is a great new way for advertising parts of your website, often without you having to do much! If you website is good why should you have to try so hard to get people to visit it after all? Let Digg and other sites give you the publicity.

Related Posts

It’s important that once we’ve attracted visitors to a website we keep them there for a while! Related posts are a great way of doing this, by automatically suggesting related content to the user to read next. Currently I am using Yet Another Related Post Plugin, which puts related posts in my Widget bar to the right and below each posts. It’s important to ensure people can see the related posts, so I’ve put it at the top of the page pushing the calendar down, something a user should notice happening when they go from our homepage to our post pages.

Forums

These are not appropriate for every site, especially newer sites where they can give the picture that your site is a ghost town if no one starts commenting on things, but they are great way to guage user opinion and start up discussions about your content and even creating more content without you having to try. Although I haven’t yet set up a forum on this site (considering vBulletin if popularity builds!). There are free forums such as phpBB and the integrated Simple Press Plugin for WordPress available for usage.

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Permalink | Comments (0) | Friday, 22nd Aug 2008

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