WordPress as a Content Management System

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Permalink Reply by Derek McClain on September 29, 2009 at 9:35am

We use for blogging as well as some Web sites.

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Permalink Reply by Sarah Wenger on September 29, 2009 at 9:40am

We use wordpress based websites for a number of different websites. This allows us to easily change items on the sites, without needing too much coding experience. Plus, there are so many outstanding plugins that make the websites run very smoothly.

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Permalink Reply by Kevin Hood on September 29, 2009 at 9:52am

I just mentioned this last night on my Wordpress blog, and mentioned your name, too. Wordpress is a great CSS and I'm glad the debate is finally over. I have over 30 websites and blogs running Wordpress, and use it for everything from landing pages to political blogs, and musician websites to business websites . . . and one e-commerce site so far. The improvements they've made over the years have been great.

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Permalink Reply by Kevin Hood on September 29, 2009 at 6:57pm

Ha, nice CSS typo Jerry.

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Permalink Reply by Rick Wilkerson on September 29, 2009 at 9:55am

I agree that Wordpress is a wonderful content management system. One of the best things about it is its portability. Buy a website from a developer with a proprietary CMS, and you are likely tethered to that developer for the duration of the site.

Use Wordpress, and you not only have full control of the site functionality and design, but you can easily move to a new domain, etc., without ever having to work with the developer again.

Plus, the universe of third party templates and plug-ins seems to be exploding geometrically, and WordPress itself is also increasing its user-friendliness at a remarkably fast rate.

For small websites with basic functionality, I can't imagine recommending or using anything else these days.

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Permalink Reply by Chad McCullough on September 29, 2009 at 7:33pm

I run my personal site on Wordpress, as well as, my consulting site. I have clients that are using Wordpress for small CMS sites, blogs, and more. I do have a few clients that wanted to use Drupal so I built their sites on that. I wasn't too excited about it, however. One of the best things about Wordpress is the update feature. When a new update or version of Wordpress is available, it's extremely easy to update/upgrade. Have you tried updating/upgrading a Drupal site, lately? It's extremely painful and I'm always crossing my fingers that the site will come back up when I'm finished. That's not the way to do things.

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Permalink Reply by Lisa Schwaberow on October 2, 2009 at 11:05pm

I am using wordpress for clients as CMS and they are absolutely loving it! I took a chance and used it for one of my bigger client and won a new client for a quite a few other projects, because he felt like I wasn't "trying to nickel and dime him to death". This is a perfect system for smaller companies that want to maintain control of their content but don't have the knowledge to set it up. I design the wordpress theme, upload it, set it all up and they manage the content. When they want the theme tweaked or changed, they call me. They seem to like the fact that I can change the design and their content won't be disturbed.
Here is my latest customer.... O'Daniels Jeep Jam we are still tweaking it a bit.
Here is are more:
Dan Surface
Jauneth Skinner
The site for Jauneth Skinner is an artist site and I had to create 8 different galleries. Before working in the wordpress CMS I would have spent a LONG time setting up those 8 galleries as it was, I spent about 2 hours! When I introduced this way of doing her website she said, "I don't want a blog, I don't have time", it took a bit of convincing that it wasn't a blog unless you wrote on it every day that it was just a software management system, but she agreed to try it and loves it! It has been a huge time saver and made me much more productive.

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Permalink Reply by Chad McCullough on October 13, 2009 at 7:20am

Nice work, Lisa. I'm hoping, someday, to be able to do more than just build the site for them. I would love to be able to design and build the theme, as well. I agree, it's a huge time saver and that is very attractive to clients, new and old, because it will cost them less, too.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Marsh on October 3, 2009 at 7:10am

I'm using it as a CMS too for my (recently re-launched) web-site. My blog itself still runs b2evolution (for the moment) but I'm using WP for the marketing part. Check it out.

At first I was worried--my first exposure to "Blogging" software was b2evolution, and it isn't as easy to customize as WordPress. I was pretty sure when I started I was going to end up needing something that was "written to be a CMS" like Joomla or Mambo or the like, but WP has really come through. It's really easy to make it do what you want, really easy to add plug-ins, and really easy to mangle existing templates to your own purposes, or just write one from scratch.

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Permalink Reply by Chad McCullough on October 13, 2009 at 7:22am

The site looks great, Tom. What theme are you using? I love simple themes that don't blast everything off the page at you.

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Permalink Reply by Tracey Rollison on December 28, 2009 at 4:58pm

I'm using it for running a menu subscription site for gluten-free and diabetic people (there is quite a bit of overlap in the dietary needs). One part of the site is free and explains the service, as well as giving some tips and links.

The other part is subscription-based and requires a paid subscription for clients to get the weekly post, which contains the menu, coded shopping list, and all the recipes (including a bonus or two each week for things like desserts or party recipes).

This was my first real attempt: http://goodlifemenus.com . I know from a strictly graphic design standpoint there was a lot I could have done differently; there may be a site redesign down the road. But right now it does what I need it to do: tells people about the service; allows people to subscribe and takes care of all that end of it automatically; lets people see only content from the date they subscribed and after; lets me bulk email everyone when I need to (like when I put the Christmas week menu up a few days early to give people a chance to grocery shop).

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