WordPress Website Secrets

You might be fooled into believing that WordPress is only good for one thing… creating blogs. But you’d be dead wrong!

WordPress is essentially a content management system (CSM) which basically means it will manage any content you publish no matter what it is.

WordPress was originally developed as a blogging platform 7 years ago because bloggers generated a lot of content on a regular basis, but now it’s time to think beyond this into other areas of the ever changing world wide web.

I’ve already written on how the new BuddyPress plugin can turn your website into a massively powerful social networking platform (better than SocialGo or Ning in my opinion).

But what else is possible? When you ask this kind of questions it’s best to  answer it with another question… what do you want to achieve with your website? It’s so easy to get swept up in the technology and all the gadgets and widgets out there, remember this… form follows function. So look at the function first then decide on the form.

For example if you’re a company selling different kinds of alloys for medical applications to an ultra small group of people you’re not going to want to create a WordPress blog or even a social networking website. There just aren’t enough people who are going to be interested in commenting on your blog or networking with others. Blog style websites aren’t always the answer.

Instead in this example you need to be thinking about creating an online brochure style of website. This kind of website would be the place you send people to after you’ve met them face to face or talked with them over the phone. (I’m using a bit of an extreme example here because most people can get all the traffic they need from the search engines.)

Here’s a website I designed recently for this very same market so you can see exactly how I designed and structured it…

As you can see the layout is very simple, there’s a rotating image to grab people’s attention. The call to action (contact us) is also very clear and easy to read. All the links on the front page you see above take people deeper and deeper into the site where they can get more details information about whatever is the most interest to them.

The best platform for creating this kind of site is still WordPress, it gives you the flexibility to create a site that can easily grow into something bigger or just stay small. To people who know nothing about HTML or even the basic kind of website editing WordPress is a powerful solution because of the way WordPress makes it easy to add new content to you website. The way I look at it is if you can use Microsoft Word you can control the content of your site using WordPress.

That’s an extreme example of using WordPress as a way of creating and managing a brochure style website for a small and highly specialized target audience.

Hopefully by now you can see why it’s so important to start with function of your site first, then look at it’s form. If you want to build a website that showcases you as an expert in your niche market place then create a blog. If you want a place for people to come and chat and network with each other about your chosen niche then take it one step further and include BuddyPress.