How far can you go with wordpress
Things that make wordpress so powerful are: plugins and themes. If you find the right themes and you install the right plugins you can turn your wordpress site in a great website.
A great debate among web developers is either to use wordpress, other CMS or to make something custom. Few years ago i was reticent about wordpress and it’s capabilities. I didn’t trusted the power of a blog. I was afraid that good content will go to the bottom of the post list and they will be never seen again. My thinking was more focused on the organisation of information, and not just publishing.
At that time i didn’t know that i can do all these with wordpress, but i was more familiar with things that i’ve done. Now, if someone asks me i will definitely go for wordpress.
Many people associate wordpress with blogs: “Nah, I don’t want a blog”. It is not true, wordpress is more a content management system than a blog. And they are missing another point: Every website needs a blog.
With a single plugin or theme you can turn your wordpress into: e-commerce website, community website or presentation website.
Why re-invent the wheel ?
So many CMS systems have been build in the paste years. I’m not talking here about the other top CMS systems like Joomla, Drupal or PHP Nuke. I’m talking about developers who decide to build their own CMS for their websites or their clients.
Why to make again something that is already done, and it is awesome ? For almost anything you want to do, there is something already done, in most cases free.
I know that the main problem is that don’t want website to look the same as other website. This is customization, you can arrange things differently. Add you custom approach to websites. Instead of doing the whole thing by yourself, use something that others done better and you build only the things that you want to be different.
With wordpress, using the right plugins you need to do only small programming tweaks to get whatever you want.
Let others do what they know best and you do what you need.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission
March 24th, 2010 at 8:54 pm
I’m not sure how I got here, but I’ve enjoyed reading a few of your articles. I used to think that blogs were too restrictive to be used as the heart of a website. But then I learned how to tweak the look and feel and find the plugins that give the features I need. Now, people are surprised when I tell them that my site is a wordpress site. Other than my “journal” page it is clean and non-blog-like in appearance. It looks more like a simple hand-coded HTML page.
The possibilities are endless with WordPress, and I too recommend it.
April 14th, 2010 at 11:00 pm
interesting reading, i had the same experience. Some years ago , WordPress wasn’t so powerful, but now with all the plugins and this nice dashboard … i could do what i want (wit a bit of tweak, that’s right).
April 16th, 2010 at 11:34 pm
I agree with you that few years ago WordPress was not so good. The previous admin panel had a bad usability, and the community was not so strong at that time.