WordPress – Content Management Made Easy
Building a website used to be easy. It was just a series of files that were linked to one another. Not so much anymore. If you have a static website without things like a blog or news sections, an RSS feed, commenting, searching or some way for the user to get involved then you are very out of date. You are web 1.0.
Does this mean that everyone has to pay a large web team to develop an intricate content management system that does it all? Nope.
Since Open Source software became popular with Firefox (a browser I highly recommend), a slew of free to use Open Source content management systems (CMS) have come out.
Some of the most popular are:
My favorite? WordPress.
WordPress started off as a blogging software but has turned into much much more. In fact, it is the system that is running the site that you are looking at.
What makes WordPress so great?
First, it has a huge community. One of the down sides to Open Source is it’s lack of support. People love Microsoft and Apple because they have someone to call when something goes wrong, not so with Open Source. WordPress takes care of this with a large community of enthusiasts who want to help. I think they are much more accurate and knowledgeable then any paid ‘experts’.
Second, WordPress is incredibly flexible. Although the system is designed for a blog, adding a few of the literally hundreds of easy to install plugins can turn it into a robust CMS with all of the web 2.0 features you might want.
Third, WordPress gives you just enough. Do not get me wrong, if you are looking for a site complicated site like Facebook you are not going to get it with WordPress but if you need to replace a standard web 1.0 site WordPress is just what you need.
For a small business or nonprofit WordPress naturally has a blog (or news) section to keep your customers, members or donors up-to-date. It also has an easy to use what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editor that lets anyone, not just your tech savvy IT department add, delete or edit pages on the site.
With WordPress around, there is simply no excuse to be using static HTML (and certainly not HTM) pages anymore. Upgrade!
January 11th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
[...] runs off of WordPress, a flexible and easy to use content management. This allows the site to be easily updated by [...]