Wordpress as a CMS

You can do quite a bit with a website powered by WordPress. So let’s do it.

WordPress can manage several types of content for you, including Posts, Pages and Links.

• Posts are your basic time-driven content and are used for standard blog entries.
• Pages are basically posts that aren’t time-driven—they’re added to the menu and serve as the basic meat of your site.
• Links are just that—links. This can be handy for a list of recommended services or helpful sites.

Make the Big Decisions

Before diving in you need to sit down and make some big decisions. If you don’t think things through now, you may end up regretting it later. The biggest thing to figure out is what you actually need your website to do. What kind of content do you need to manage?

• Do you need posts? (Maybe you don’t need one of those fancy blogs, but do you need a news section?)
• How many pages do you need?
• Will those pages have a hierarchy? (Do you just have five pages, or do you have a dozen pages where some will be filed under others?)
• What do you want to feature on the homepage? (This could be basic intro text that doesn’t change or it could be your latest news or it could be highlights from within your site)

These are the kinds of questions you need to answer. Basically you’re trying to figure out what you need from your website. Once you have that sorted out, it’s easier to find a theme that offers what you need.

Pick a Theme (Or Have One Designed for You)

Once you know what you need it’s time to pick a theme that can meet those needs. While it’d be ideal to find a theme that works perfectly, keep in mind that it’s pretty easy to switch themes. So don’t stress out over finding the perfect theme. It’s OK to try out a few different themes and see which one fits better.

Here are a few things to consider as you pick a theme:

• How is the menu handled? Will it easily display the number of pages you need or handle the hierarchy your site will require? If you’ve got a fair amount of hierarchy a drop down menu might be a must.
• Is what’s front and center on the theme’s homepage what you want front and center on your homepage?
• Is your theme widget ready? If so, you can pop sidebar items in and out with ease. If not, it gets trickier. Be sure to test a theme to make sure it’s actually widget ready—some themes, especially free ones, say they’re widget ready when they’re not (very annoying).

Install WordPress

Next you need to download and install WordPress. Don’t worry, it’s a pretty straight-forward process. But it can be intimidating, so we’ve got a few tutorials that can make it easy.

Put Your Site Together

Once you’ve picked and installed a theme, it’s time to build your site.

• Basic details like your site’s name and tagline can be added under Settings.
• Go to Write: Page (or Write a New Page from the Dashboard) to start adding pages to your site. While editing a page look under Advanced Options for Page Parent and Page Order to change the hierarchy and order of your pages.
• If you’re using a blog (or a news section) go to Write: Post (or Write a New Post from the Dashboard) to start populating your site with content.
• Under Design: Widgets you can customize the sidebar or feature areas of your theme.

Keep it Maintained

Once your site is up and running you just have to keep it going. Update your news or blog frequently, change out features or highlights and keep your static content up to date.

Updates are a breeze, thanks to WordPress, which means you can spend more time on your content and less time pretending to be a techie.

5 Steps to Choose the Correct Content Management System (CMS)

How to look for the correct content management system (CMS) for you?

To ensure successful implementation and adoption, the content management system (CMS) solution must be implemented like any other large enterprise application, with clear objectives and systematic planning mechanisms. So let’s look at some best practices that should be on everyone’s checklist before deploying any CMS within your organization.

Step 1: Evaluate Your Content Information

Rather than looking only at the type of the the CMS platform, you should look at how processes, business rules, and the content are defined. The free ASP CMS or other ASP CMS purchased should also easily integrate with multiple systems that affect this landscape as well as are necessary to help meet your defined business goals – such as your company / business content management process or even building a customer relationship management system. It is advisable not to buy a CMS without any plan to it as this will waste your time and resources.

Step 2: Choose the tight CMS for Your Business Needs

This can be evaluated by following these few points:
1 – Speed of installation and deployment
There is a direct correlation between CMS implementation/configuration time and costs incurred. Avoid using the CMS that requires excessive programming coding efforts. Hence, a user friendly CMS will only be effective if it can be easily install, configured and deployed to the hosting server, and even can be used by non- IT professionals.

2 – Ease of users and administration process
Like any other business application, the success of a CMS depends on adoption by the end user community. A user friendly content management system will be able to manage by all users with within the easy to use graphical interface. As for the IT professional / webmasters, they are also expecting seamless effort to integrate multiple company websites using a single console, and integrate the CMS effortlessly into the organization’s IT landscape. Eventually, a great CMS can meet different users roles and demands.

Step 3:Make sure the CMS involves all users in the company

As we know, the purpose of using the CMS is to able to create a easy to use portal for every person involved in the company / business. Hence, they are all leveraged to build and customize the system. Involving non-technical SMEs in the design of the new CMS will also help minimize reluctance to use the system.

Step 4: Now we talk about the maintenance aspects of CMS

On top of ongoing support and management, you also need basic application and infrastructure support of the installed software. This requires the efforts of a dedicated team, responsible for managing hardware, software, and the network.
Change is a must with most Web sites and your CMS needs to be as flexible as your organization, whether this is a simple template change or an entire site redesign. You need to factor in and expect that you will need to have some level of service be it from your internal IT department.

Final Step: Plan ahead for more in the future

You must make sure that the chosen CMS has the technological bandwidth and capability to quickly capitalize on emerging communication media. It is also related to the hosting plan you choose to host your content management system, make sure it will be able to upgrade or add on extra features to handle to growing size of your CMS, it will be a great advantage if the hosting companies provide support for any issue arise in the long run.

Suggested CMS system and Hosting Provider

ASP.NET CMS
1 – DotNetNuke - Compare DotNetNuke hosting plan here.
2 – Kentico CMS – Compare Kentico CMS hosting plan here.
3 – Sitefinity CMS – Compare Sitefinity hosting plan here.
4 – mojoPortal - Compare mojoPortal hosting plan here.
5 – Umbraco - Compare Umbraco hosting plan here.

Php CMS
1 – Drupal - Compare Drupal hosting plan here.
2 – Joomla - Compare Joomla hosting plan here.
3 – Mambo - Compare Mambo hosting plan here.
4 – Exponent - Compare Exponent hosting plan here.
5 – Nucleus CMS – Compare Nucleus hosting plan here.
6 – Xoops - Compare Xoops hosting plan here.