When I was first told that one could use WordPress as a CMS I was thinking inside a very small confining box and thought, “why in the world would anyone ever want to do that?” The basis for this thought was totally from a narrow minded security point of view, “here we go, yet another web application that will allow sites to be hacked, servers to be owned and more sites taken over by spammers and hackers.”

Luckily I don’t live in that box, so I quickly stepped outside of it and started looking at the benefits of using WordPress as both a CMS and a blog. I also wanted to see if we could use WordPress as a CMS for a new site we wanted to launch that was just for our Linux Virtual Private Servers. As with everything there are tradeoffs and risks as well as benefits so let’s start with the 10 benefits of using WordPress as a CMS.

10 Benefits of using WordPress as a CMS

• It’s free – unlike some CMS platforms it is free and well supported by a large group of developers and users.
• It is easy to install and setup.
• It is easy to learn – you can edit pages without knowing HTML. Easier to learn than some CMS systems.
• It runs on both Apache (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) and Windows IIS.
• The cost of the actual site design can be controlled by using free or low cost templates.
• It is fairly easy to take an existing design and move it to WordPress as the template system is well designed.
• Many plug-ins are available allowing you to do things like SEO, generate sitemap files, include multimedia like Flash, Videos and music.
• Captchas can be used to prevent spamming of the blog.
• No need to use FTP or other tools to update your site.
• The WordPress team is interested in security and not only makes regular updates to WordPress but they also make it easy to update both the base platform and plug-ins.

Why not to use WordPress as a CMS

There are good reasons not to use WordPress as a CMS system, here are a few that you might want to consider, before you read my conclusion below.

Five Reasons to avoid using WordPress as a CMS

• WordPress was designed to be a blogging platform, so some hard core developers feel that adding CMS capabilities to WordPress is like turbo charging an Edsel.  It’s still an Edsel when you are done. This does not mean that doing this is bad it just limits the capabilities as WordPress is designed for use in a  single user/blogger environment. If you need multiple authors, extremely flexible categorization of content or a complex site WordPress might not be the best solution for your needs.
• Simple Page/Post/User configuration. In software designed to be CMS systems from the start allow more posting options and the ability to setup multiple users with different levels of access.
• Simplified permalink options which force you to a set link structure.
• WordPress lacks editorial process and workflow controls.
• WordPress may be overkill. If you only need to edit the content on one page there are scripts that will do that with a lot less overhead than WordPress or any other CMS.

When I was in high school the guys in auto shop always seemed to get into a debate as to what was the better car, a Ford or a Chevy. As both sides wore blinders they couldn’t see the other side’s viewpoint and refused to be swayed to the other side. The bottom line is that you are running a business you want to survive so you cannot afford to wear blinders. You have to make decisions that affect your bottom line, your employee’s livelihood and your customers. You also cannot make decisions to embrace a new technology just based on its “coolness” factor. You need to evaluate the features available in WordPress and decide if they meet your needs for near future. If it does, then use it, if not find a better tool that does the job you need done.

Related posts:

1. Word Press as a CMS (Part 2)
2. WordPress as a CMS? Maybe, maybe not. (Intro)

Sitting on a Fence

Overview – Many web designers are looking at or currently using WordPress as a Content Management system for their clients. As with any technology there are trade-offs that must be considered. In order to explore this more fully we decided to implement a new site devoted to our Linux Virtual Servers in WordPress. This gave us an opportunity to look at this technology from a different point of view and evaluate it with regards to the following areas:

• Investigating using WordPress as both a CMS and blog.
• WordPress Setup.
• Ease of initial website design and implementation.
• User generated content.
• SEO
• Site performance.
• Daily Maintenance
• Security

In part 1 I’ll cover using our investigations into using WordPress as a CMS and what is required to use WordPress and our design constraints.

Related posts:

1. Word Press as a CMS (Part 1)
2. Word Press as a CMS (Part 2)
3. WordPress as a CMS (Part 3)

SEO Optimizations
The ZenCart storefront with a two SEO related modifications:

We installed the Ultimate SEO URLs plugin to convert non-search engine friendly URLS like:

http://www.spicymama.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=24

to search engine friendly URLS like this:

http://www.spicymama.com/arizona-gunslinger-smokin-hot-jalapeno-pepper-sauce-p-117.html

We created an xml sitemap of products which could be read by Google and let Google know about it.

Product information and images were entered into ZenCart giving as much information as was felt necessary about each item.

The final step we took was to add the site to Google Base and Google Product Search. Google Base is a free Google service that allows you to publish your information for inclusion in Google search results. Google Product Search uses Google Base to get listings of products, making it easy to get listed there as well.

Tracking Visitors
In order to see how effective your marketing is you need to have a baseline to measure things by. We used Google Analytics to track the visitors to the site and came up with a baseline of zero hits which is just like a new website.

Tracking Sales
Just getting visitors who don’t buy anything does nothing more than eat up bandwidth. One needs to also be able to track conversions or sales. In order to do this we selected the page which is displayed when the sale is completed as our Goal. We then added this into Google Analytics as the last step in the order process.

Don’t Expect Instant Results
Once a site is added into Google it takes time for Google to actually index the site and to display the site as one of many possibilities when someone searches Google. We don’t expect instantaneous results and the actual results will vary based on key words searched for and where the site is positioned in the Google search results list. By doing the above we set the very basic foundation for marketing our site on the Internet. The following graph shows relative sales over a 6 month period after we did just the simple changes outlined above.

As you can see the site went from zero sales to a lot more than zero sales after 4 months.

Related posts:

1. Marketing your site for fun and profit

We are going to use a real live customer site, Spicy Mama, as an example to let you know how it works in the real world for a real site.

As we market Spicy Mama we will post followups here to let others know how it works and about how much time it takes to do this. We have already done some of the work and will fill in the details a little later. Our next step is to setup wordpress and to get the theme match the main site. Once that is done we will be adding in adding in necessary plugins, the first ones being Akismet, the feedburner plugin and the All in one SEO plugin.

Related posts:

1. Marketing your site for fun and profit – getting started