July 15th, 2011

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7 Reasons to Use WordPress as Your CMS

I was doing a Dallas Mexican Restaurant Review on thegrubhound, for the Mexican Restaurant Mattito’s. Upon doing a ctrl+U shortcut to check out the code of their site, I discovered that the vibrant Mattitos Mexican restaurant site is using WordPress as its CMS.

Mattito's Mexican Restaurant Screen Shot

Mattito's Screen Shot - Doesn't that Margarita Look tasty!

The Amazing WordPress CMS

I have been seeing more and more sites that are using WordPress for their Content Management System(CMS). At our SEO Company, Baldydog.com, we don’t normally build websites, but we refer potential clients to our select group of Web Designers like Newconceptsonline.com who designed the current Baldydog.com site or Liquid Interactive, a company that specializes in B to B sites for fortune 500 types of clients.

However, as a service to the local business community and many friends, I do occasionally build a site using WordPress as the CMS. These are usually small Mom and Pop types of sites that don’t have a huge budget, for a designer or a premium website. A few of these are the Limerick Barber.com, Cdsplace.com, Dierolfsupply.com, and EasyDesigns.
Several of these have static home pages, which are homepages that are not blogs.

How Do You Make a Static Home Page

Depending upon the Theme, you are using, you might be able to make a static(permanent) home page differently like EasyDesigns, which was made with a premium theme(not giving a link because I would not recommend or use the theme again). WordPress does however give you an easy way to make any page you chose to be a static home page.

Visit the previous link to get detailed directions on setting any page to be a static home page.

How Do I Design a Home Page

To let you know, I am not a designer. Baldydog.com does have an in-house graphic designer, who does our basic work, and as I mentioned before, we have partnered with web designers who we refer to for more elaborate designs. Unless you are a programer, and would like to slowly define your website design like Wayne, my suggestions as a non-designer, is to start with a good theme, and go from there. For many of the sites I have been building lately, I have been using the free Mystique Theme by DigitalNature that was recommended to me by my wife, the owner of Fatladysingz.com.

Mystique is an easy to use theme that allows for a multitude of adjustments that can be made, some easy, and some a little more tricky, which involve adding some code to the template such as these 40+ Mystque Theme modifications. Using any of these modifications as well as the many options available on the Mystique user panel, the web designs you can make with Mystique are unlimited. Mystique can be found in the WordPress themes directory.

I probably will not be creating any sites that look half way as nice as Mattito’s since my design abilities are so limited. But using WordPress as your CMS, allows you to create sites that can compete with large company websites .

7 Reasons to Use WordPress As Your CMS

Its open source, so there are tons of pluggins that can enable it to do just about anything you could want a site to do, such as have a video or photo portfolio, do a fundraiser such as my Guatemala Trip Fundraiser and show how much you have earned.
Its customizable. You don’t like the look of your site, its not difficult to change. Often times it can be done with one click, and a new theme.
WordPress is SEO friendly. Search engines, especially Google love fresh, original content. Using WordPress, you will be able to make updates as easy as writing an email. Additionally, there are pluggins such as the TheAllinOneSEO Pack.
In my opinion and many others, it is the best blogging platform on the web. This will enable you to make your website social, so you can make it the hub for all of your Social Media profiles.
Easily integrates with Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.
WordPress is inexpensive to use as a CMS. Compared to some other CMS platforms, WordPress is relatively inexpensive to use for a business website.
As I have discussed, its easy to make a static home page so your business site, does not look like a blog, yet it can easily incorporates a blog as well.( I highly recommend having a blog if you are using WP as your CMS).