Using Wordpress as a CMS.

CMS - it’s the buzz word of the modern day webmaster - simply meaning “Content Management System”.  What a CMS does - is separate the structure of a website from the content.

You want to create a website?  Tell everyone your opinion?  Pass along the latest family gossip to other family members?  Hype your business?  Have a marketing tool for your martial arts’ club?

In times past - you’d have to learn HTML coding, or have an Internet geek do the work for you. This can run into a nice sum of money - since a fully developed custom website can start at $1,000 or more.

But now, if you can learn simple things such as how to FTP - you can have a website up and running in less than a day.  The cost?  All you need is a web host - which you can get for as little as $3/mo or so… (I pay $4.95 for a webhost that allows unlimited domains…), and a domain name - which is currently costing less than $10/year.  The website software?  Totally free!

Just to give an example - head over to Holmes Mobile Screen, and take a look around.  I put that site together for my brother in just a couple of hours.  Now - to be honest - I already had the domain name, and I already had the content.  All I did was upload the ‘Wordpress‘ software, set a few file permissions, set my ‘Mysql’ database, then just ‘cut & paste’ the content.  Also, to be honest, I’ve done several of these sites - so I have a wee bit of experience about what to do.

But even an absolute beginner could probably have a basic website up and running in just a few days… with the ease of locating answers to problems that Google allows - anyone can be an “instant expert” on website design!

Are there disadvantages to using Wordpress?  Not really - at least in my opinion.  One of the huge advantages is the speed with which Internet search engines will index your site.  Since ‘blogging’ sites are generally time sensitive (the latest breaking news type of thing), search engines are very quick.  For example, when I click on “publish” for this article that I’m now typing - I will see Google & Yahoo at my site, indexing this article, within mere minutes!  Wordpress software automatically ‘pings’ (or notifies) many search engines as soon as an article is posted.

Another huge advantage is when you need to update or add to your website.  Using Wordpress - I simply ‘log-in’… and create new pages from the admin menu.  It’s incredibly easy!

Now, Wordpress isn’t the only free blogging software - it’s one of the oldest, however; with a continuous record of being updated and improved.  And the community of Wordpress users is so large that it’s going to be difficult to run across a problem that someone else has not already had and solved - which makes it easy to solve your own problems - someone else already has a webpage on how they solved the problem!  I did quite a bit of research before I settled on Wordpress, and I’ve never regretted that decision.

So if you’ve ever wanted to put up your own website - the time has come, it’s easy to do nowadays - and your only excuse must be laziness!