Most people consider WordPress to be simply blogging software. This is understandable as it is the best software I’ve found for this purpose. But it is not limited to the realm of blogging alone. With a little bit of time and know-how, as well as the right plug-ins and theme, WordPress can be used as a Content Management System with great effect. In fact, the PatchMonkeys.com web site that you are reading is a good example. We’ve set up a number of pages presenting our services and capabilities, as well as using the blogging capabilities of WordPress to provide new content and help in Search Engine Optimization ranking.

When starting out with a CMS-style WordPress installation, you should carefully consider the content that you want to present. This should be done whether you’re using WordPress or any other CMS software. Organize your important content into a few pages, usually no more than five or six pages are required for this but be sure to use as little duplicate wording between the pages as possible. At a minimum, you would want 1) a Home page that viewers would go to when they first come to the site. 2) a Products or Services page, 3) an About Us page introducing your company and why you are the best to satisfy your customers’ needs. 4) a Contact Us page to invite your new customers to get in touch and ask more specific questions about your products and services. If you have a large number of products with distinct categories, you may consider using separate pages for each — but again be very careful about duplicated content, as that can harm your SEO ranking.

Once you have your pages set up the way you want them, start blogging. Blogging can be an important part of your site’s strategy and content for a few reasons. First and foremost, constantly posting new content to your web sites causes the search engines to notice. The more often you create new content on your site, the more often the search engines will come and crawl it. If they’re crawling your site often that means that your new content is getting into their index faster. And the faster it gets into the indexes, the faster it will be available to your viewers when they search for it. Secondly is the human factor. Blog posts have the effect of creating a more natural interaction between your company and your viewers. Rather than having a bunch of “marketing speak” on your pages, you can create more casual content which many viewers today find more appealing. And thirdly, blog posts invite customer interaction. When you post something about a new product or a recent event that your company participated in, your viewers can comment on it. Viewer comments not only add to your site’s ever changing content, but make them feel like they’re important to your company’s success.

Which Plug-ins to Use

WordPress has several features and plug-ins that can help in setting it up as a CMS. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but just a few of the more useful plug-ins that can help in creating your site.

Out-of-the-box, WordPress is pretty good with Search Engine Optimization. For many users no additional plug-ins are required. But if you’d like to enhance the SEO benefits of WordPress, a couple of plug-ins are very helpful. First is the All in One SEO Pack. This plug-in gives you near complete control over SEO specific items like meta tags, canonical URLs, titles, etc. and it automatically avoids duplicating content, which is sometimes a problem when you have your blog posts as well as archived copies of your blog posts.

Along the same SEO topic, another very useful plug-in that we’ve talked about before is the Google XML Sitemap Generator. This plug-in automatically updates the sitemap.xml file each time you add a page or make a post to your blog. Even better than that, it notifies the search engines that there is new content, inviting them to come crawl your site and index it. This is a fantastic feature for any web site and the plug-in is very easy to use.

If your site includes an online store, there are a couple of solutions available to help in that area as well. One is the WP e-Commerce plug-in. This puts a store right into your page, allowing you to add products to a database and have users make their purchases using PayPal and other online payment services. If your previous site’s store was using osCommerce, a very popular e-commerce solution, there is the WP-osCommerce plug-in which integrates your existing osCommerce store and database into your WordPress pages.

Lastly, once you have your new web site set up and configured – what do you do about all of your old content that is already indexed by Google? Did any of your pages change? If you do a Google search with “site:yourdomain.com” Google shows you all of the pages that it currently has indexed. If your new pages are using different names, anyone clicking on these links will go to your site, but be presented with a “404 Not Found” page once they get there. To remedy this, a small plug-in named Redirection will solve this problem for you. Using it, you can set up 301 redirects, which the search engines will find and eventually your old content will drop out of the indexes and the new content will take over. Just as important, users clicking on those old links will be taken to your new page and they won’t even know that things have been moved around. No more embarrassing “not found” pages.

WordPress is a powerful system. With a little know-how and the right plug-ins, this power can be extended to the use of driving your entire web site with a professional look and ease of use for your customers. And with WordPress being free along with so many of these useful plug-ins, why spend thousands of dollars having a custom web site developed when WordPress can do the job just as well? And with some of the web sites I’ve seen, do it even better.