News, Articles and Case Studies

23 Nov 2007

Do you worship WordPress?

Blogging has become a very popular way to communicate with your audience and to keep content fresh on a website. WordPress would be many people’s choice of platform for a blog, as it is well designed and certainly very flexible. It has been said that blog websites can ‘all look the same’, but it is very easy to make them look different with the hundreds of wordpress themes available and a bit of personalisation. In fact a lot of people now have turned their website into their blog and combined the two. We are in the process of doing this with our site and hope to gain many benefits.

Although WordPress was launched originally as a blogging tool, many people are now using it to build non blog websites. Because of its lean code, expandability through a multitude of available plugins and great backend administration area, it has become a versatile platform from which to build a fully content managed site. Unlike other CMS systems which are bloated and maybe too full featured (Joomla is good, but guilty of this), the simple nature of WordPress allows designers to expand from an uncluttered base and go as far as you want with features and design.

Here is a great example of a WordPress site: David Airey.

Do you use wordpress? What limitations have you found with using it to build non blog websites? Are there other systems you prefer to use? It would be great to hear others thoughts on this.

Ollie

  • http://paulenderson.com Paul Enderson

    Despite reading otherwise on a daily basis, I’m still not convinced that WP is up to being used as a proper CMS. It’s an awesome blogging platform, but if you want truly flexible/expandable content management then you should check out Joomla.

  • ollie

    Hi Paul

    Thank you for your comment. We have used Joomla and found it to be very full featured. Our issues with it are that it almost has too many features and the admin interface is cluttered so we spend a load of time stripping out things we don’t need. I also find it a bit clunky (technical terminology there!).

    The beauty of WP is that its very simple and you can easily add or develop the plugins you need to expand it. Its also very solid.

    I think ultimately WP and Joomla have their own merits, but the more I use WP for CMS purposes, the more I like it.

  • http://paulenderson.com Paul Enderson

    It does have rather a steep learning curve I guess – it can be a bit daunting if you haven’t used it before! I guess it’s a question of “what works for you”.

    It’d be great if there was a product that offered the best of both applications… ExpressionEngine would seem to do this, but I refuse to pay hundreds of dollars for a commercial product when I can do the same thing with either WP or Joomla!

  • http://www.davidairey.co.uk David Airey

    Thanks for the mention, Toni, and I’m honoured you like my blog.

    As for Paul’s recommendation, I’m not very clued up on Joomla at all, but I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about.

    Ciao for now, and I hope you enjoy the festive break!

  • toni

    Hi David
    Thanks for stopping by, great to have you back with us again!
    I too trust that Paul knows his stuff. I didn’t write this post though, Probably not made very clear…but Ollie my collegue is the author of this one.
    We are about to do a redsign of our blog as it looks pretty dull I know and perhaps one of the things we should do is make it more obvious which Deckchair person has written each post.
    So watch this space :)
    cheers

    Toni

  • http://www.davidairey.com David Airey

    Hi Toni,

    Looking forward to the redesign, and Ollie, thank you for the mention!