WordPress has made life a lot easier for website owners who want to manage their own website content.
Where you’d traditionally need to learn HTML, CSS and at least one server-side coding language to develop a decent small business website, you can now deploy a new, professional looking website in hours without writing even 1 line of code.
Granted, there have been numerous excellent Content Management systems released in the past (Joomla and Drupal spring to mind), but WordPress makes it all simpler.
Where WordPress shines
Some of the things WordPress does really well include:
- Content creation. The WYSIWYG editor is good enough that you don’t need to know HTML. Of course it’s that much better if you do.
- Community. Your website visitors can comment on your posts, if you let them. They can easily subscribe to your RSS feeds. And they can spread the word using trackbacks and any number of social media tools WordPress works with.
- Flexibility. I’ve seen WordPress used for almost every type of website. Personally I’ve used it to build simple brochure-type sites, blogs, online directories and e-commerce solutions. But it will also function well as a forum, a job board, a knowledgebase, an Intranet, a membership site and a community portal.
- Database driven. When I first started designing websites I didn’t understand why people favoured database-driven sites. Until I started doing repetetive work or a client asked for a re-design. WordPress’ mySQL database structure makes it easy to perform mundane activities over and over or change the look and feel of a site without having to change/edit/move any content. This saves you, the website owner a fortune over the life of your website.
Where it doesn’t
To be fair and objective, there are also a couple of things WordPress doesn’t do well, but thankfully these can usually be sorted out using a 3rd party plugin. For example:
- Page ordering. Before moving to WordPress I used Joomla as a CMS. Joomla had a simple interface to allow you to move pages around your site quickly and easily. WordPress doesn’t have this as standard but there are a couple of plugins, which we’ll get to, that can fix the problem.
- Inter-linking pages. Linking pages together in a website is a useful way to help visitors find what they want. Sadly, WordPress doesn’t make this easy out of the box. You either need to know what your linking post URL was called or go and find it, wasting time and causing a bit of frustration. Once again, plugins can fix this.
OK, I can’t really think of any issues that can’t be bypassed using someone else’s plugin solution. So all in all, WordPress is pretty-much perfect for most small business website solutions.
In the next post we’re going to dive into the WordPress admin panel for the first time and make a few quick tweaks to the default installation.
Hello, I’m Dave. I work with web design agencies, freelancers and bloggers to develop standards-compliant WordPress and Thesis themes.
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The built in search is pretty bad but that can be resolved with plugins. I just don’t think it should have to be fixed with plugins – I think by default the results should be sorted by relevance rather than chronological.
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