WordPress Content Management Features

Link Management | Tracking Site Visitors | Upgrading, Maintenance and Updates | Administration Control | Moderate comments | Role Management | Creating Advertisement | Building Lists | Difference Between Posts Or Pages | Customize Homepage | Multiple Category Styles | Feature Archive Files | Conclusion

With the recent release of WordPress more and more business owners and webmasters are asking the question; why not use WordPress to control my entire web site? The purpose of this blog post is to help provide more information and clarity on that question.

What Can you Manage with Wordpress

Link Management

With the standard content management system offered by WordPress; adding, deleting, or changing links is a standard feature of the WordPress interface. If you want to take it to a new level there are countless With WordPress plugins you can keep a close eye on your incoming and outgoing links.

Tracking Site Visitors

Once again there are countless plugins made for gaining greater insights into your visitor’s actions on your website. My personal favorite is the Google analytics plug in. One way of judging your visitor engagement is by the comments made on your blog. Unfortunately those comments do not always tell you what they like and don’t like on your website. That’s why installing Google Analytics is a wise choice for constantly improving your website.

Upgrading, Maintenance and Updates

If you are running >WordPress version 2.8 performing maintenance and upgrading is completely automated and trouble free. Upgrading WordPress in older versions can be a little tricky at times. There are great WordPress plug-ins designed for making the upgrading process straightforward.

Administration Control

Moderate comments

In the world of blogging freedom of speech is golden. Like anything on the internet it is open to malicious activity. If your WordPress blog is left unguarded with no anti spam protection you’re almost sure to be attacked by comment spammers. By adding a simple little plug-in like Akismet http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/ you can eliminate more than 90% of spam comments.

Role Management

There are several levels of user groups that can join your blog. The WordPress content management platform is ideal for allowing multiple users to administer to your blog simultaneously. At the same time you want to be careful with permission that each user has. Most new users begin as subscribers and eventually are upgraded to authors.

Creating Advertisement

Most advertising that you want on your blog is inserted by copying and pasting the code into place. But you may want to take it to new levels such as pay per click, pay per sale, pay per action, pay per lead, or other custom created ad revenue models. Adding ads to your WordPress blog can be done in a naturally appealing way.

Building Lists

Every WordPress installation has the ability to offer mailing lists for sending out newsletters, bulletins, announcements or any other communication you want to have with the people that subscribe to your blog. All information is stored in a MySQL database.

Difference Between Posts Or Pages

You can make pages or posts when publishing your content. There are certain pages you will want to be more permanent than others. This is one of the main distinguishing factors between posts and pages in WordPress. Pages like the about US page, contact us page, schedules or events are good examples of documents that will employ the pages feature in WordPress. Pages are published outside of the WordPress loop and are intended for mainly static documents.

So what is the difference between a post and a page? One of the big differences is a single post (page) as opposed to a post which can be displayed in many categories by simply checking the categories before publishing. When pages are made they are not any part of the categories that you store your blog posts in. They are single, standalone pages. For conversation sake, posts and pages are identical, the biggest difference is a blog post can be modified or administered to in many different ways.

Customize Homepage

By default blogs will display the content in chronological order on the homepage. It is possible to control the content you want to appear on the homepage. This can be done by changing the code within the loop or an easier way is to use common home page plug-ins designed for this purpose.

Multiple Category Styles

For WordPress users it’s easy to understand that you can change the entire look to your website by changing the theme. But what if you want different themes or styles for different categories or pages? You can create customized category templates that will assume a style for certain categories.

Feature Archive Files

As content moves through your blog it is stored in archives. There may be certain archives that have higher value and you may want to feature them. This can be controlled using the WordPress interface.

Conclusion

I have experienced other content management systems such as Expression Engine and Joomla. Without doubt WordPress is top of the food chain, in my opinion. Its programming simplicity and intuitive interface make it a perfect solution for the savvy webmaster and non-techies.