Here at Waukesha Web Designer I will always attempt to cover the basics first and since you will find me talking about WordPress quite a bit I figured that I may as well get that one out of the way immediately. So on to the question, what is WordPress? IFrom the WordPress website it is defined as:

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

Ok so that is a bit of a fancy way of saying things so here goes my version. I am imagine that many of you are familiar with the term blogging, not all of you may know how it works, but chances are that most of you have seen one at one time or another. A blog can be as simply as creating a journal that you will share with your friends and relatives or it may be as complex as a full fledged online news source. Thus the reason for calling it a publishing platform. To draw a similarity, lets for a minute say that you publish a monthly newsletter for your small business. Every month you spend a little time in Microsoft word pouring out your best writing hoping to captivate your potential customers. You click spell check, reread for punctuation and send it of to the printer for publication. Eventually the final newsletter is sent off to your extensive mailing list. Well WordPress works in a similar fashion, it allows you to publish content by using a type of word processing system, only in this case your content is published directly online opening it up to a whole new base of potential customers.

What do you need to get started with WordPress? Well if you hope to use this functionality as part of your own website then you would need to start with something like www.yourbusiness.com. From there you would download the free software from the wordpress site and follow along according to their famous 5 minute install. Choose one of the few included themes and get writing. A theme determines how the website will be presented to your visitors. Ok so that might seem like it is a bit more technical than you are willing to get and that’s not a problem, them are plenty of people out there, like me for instance, that would be more than happy to get you on your merry way to blogging.

So what does WordPress mean to the small business owner or organization? Wordpress allows you the business owner to maintain a website where content can be added and updated as often as you deem necessary. This is not only good for the customer who is searching out the latest news and product information but also good when it comes to securing your position in the search engines. With the right amount of technical savvy and a good deal of design skill WordPress can be custom tailored to integrate with your existing website or function as your entire site all on its own. The possibilities of what exactly WP can do are near endless. A site can be rather simple similar to what you are viewing here or become as complex as one I recently created here, that has fully integrated news feeds, video and photo galleries much like a big name site such as CNN.com. Even more exciting is that fact that you can now choose to allow interactivity with your potential customers by encouraging discussion and commenting throughout your website.

What are some of the potential uses? Well like I said the possibilities are extensive and I will cover many of the more advanced options in future posts but to get you thinking, here is a short list.

Update customers with news on new products, services and the general state of business on a regular basis.
Publish a newsletter regularly, one that can not get thrown in junk mail bin.
Announce sales and in store promotions.
Encourage feedback and discussion, find out what your customers are saying.
Let people know a bit more about you and your employees, people enjoy that personal touch.

Ok that’s a short list and a brief introduction to WordPress. If you are interested and would like to read more you can head on over to this handy page on the WP site www.wordpress.org. Stay tuned there is a lot more to come!

Tags: CMS, customer interactivity, publishing platform, waukesha web designer, Wordpress