Your website should be the cornerstone of your online presence; however, the whole life cycle of a website can be frustrating and expensive. The life cycle of a site typically goes something like: design -> implementation -> launch -> content maintenance. A good content management system (CMS) can simplify these steps. Now that WordPress 3 has gone to release candidate status, it is getting very close to being an option for that CMS.
Design
WordPress sites are built around themes. These themes give your designer a sandbox to play in and create the unique look of your site from near scratch (or even from scratch if your designer knows how to build them). If your business is just getting started and you don’t have the means to hire a designer, you can simply roll with a a full-featured theme. If you prefer to have your designer deliver mock-ups to someone else that creates the website, then WordPress can help you too; it reinforces best practices of separating various page sections.
Implementation
Once you’ve defined a basic theme, WordPress helps you add the functionality that a modern, socially-aware, site needs. Want to pull in your recent tweets? Want to show fans of your Facebook Page? Want to show info about who’s checked in to your physical store on Foursquare? WordPress and its plugin architecture make it simple to do all of these things in just a few clicks. The development community around WordPress and its plug-ins is extremely active, so even the most niche community or brand new social tool probably has a WordPress plug-in that makes integration a simple process.
Launch
This can be done one of two ways: developing your site at its permanent location and blocking access, or running a separate instance of WordPress and its back end. WordPress is portable, so it’s easy to move from the development to production stage with each site revision. If you’re just wanting to play with some style sheets to tweak your site once it’s live, there are plug-ins that allow a logged-in user see a theme different than the general public.
Content Maintenance
The real benefits to using a CMS is the ease with which you can update site content without having to know how the rest of the site works. Your designer and developer can truly hand over the keys, and your site won’t just become a static page on the web. Adding new information is as simple as composing an email. The best part about WordPress is the ease of use for non-technical users.
Highlights of 3.0
WordPress turned seven years old last week—years during which its community has been making suggestions and developing plug-ins. As it has matured, many features that were once offered in plug-ins, or at least the general idea of them, have been absorbed into the main product.
Custom post types is one feature that’s improved in 3.0,which allows you to set up different content streams within the blog functionality and easily segregate each post type to its respective section. For example, say you have dynamic product content on its own page, but you don’t want new product posts to leak into your front page. Setting up a “product” post type addresses is now made simple; whereas, before you were limited to category-based filtering.
With 3.0 and WordPress MU merged, it’s quite simple to set up multiple sites within your single WordPress install. If sales.mysite.com wants a completely different site than service.mysite.com, you just add in a line of code and walk through the setup process. After that you can manage both sites from one dashboard. In addition you can set up users from each department, and let them manage their own content without being able to touch the main site’s, or each other’s, content.
There’s no reason not to use a CMS anymore. Choosing the right one can really make creating and maintaining a living, breathing, website that draws traffic and grows with your business painlessly. There are many options out there for good CMSes, but WordPress is one of the best in many cases, and with 3.0, the list of cases where it’s not the best is getting smaller.
Are you a WordPress user or developer? What are your thoughts on 3.0 or WordPress as a CMS in general?
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Well, you make it sound much easier than it is for most of us. That said, I have used Wordpress for over a year for the Blog and I love it. I know just enough about code to make me dangerous, but that doesn’t matter with Wordpress as I don’t have to code that much. The user interface is very easy to work with and I can assign roles to others to load content into the CMS and update the Blog as they wish. Overall, it is a great platform and one that I enjoy using.
The best part of a good CMS is that you can have someone else do all the technical and design stuff and then you can just manage your content.
What 3.0 really does, in my opinion, is take Wordpress one more step away from just being a blogging too, and makes it a great full featured CMS.
I’m very impressed by Wordpress 3. I’ve been using Drupal for work and for outside clients but after playing with the custom post types, taxonomies, and menus, I’ll be using Wordpress 3 for most of my clients.