I’ve always been a big fan of Content Management Systems. The thought of being able to control appearance of a presentation through a set of back end controls always made me enthusiastic. Years back, when a CMS was a new concept, only businesses with big budgets could afford and they were usually built up out of a core base and / or custom coded parts. Aside from this, implementing a CMS and teaching business employees how to use them a difficult process because concept of system usability was still in it’s baby shoes.

Thankfully, things have changed, as nowadays, thanks to open source, content management systems are widely and easily available at merely the click of a download link.

The good news is also that CMS systems such as Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress are all free to use,  for both NPO’s (non profit organizations) and commercial businesses.

Wordpress  is originally a blogging platform. This means that the software was primarily focused around the functionality which are necessary to publish a blog. A blog is a chronologically organized collection of content rich pages (articles, video’s and so on).

The idea behind blogs was that it a simple to handle CMS should make it possible for anybody without technical knowledge to publish content on the internet without any effort.  This is the main reason that blogs have become so popular.

Wordpress can be more than just a Blogging Platform

While blogging itself is an activity that’s meant to be simple, the shear number of blogs (more than 50 million) have developed into a powerful force that cannot be denied. Truth is that many businesses really don’t understand the power of blogs, the importance they have nowadays and what advantages wordpress can give their business activities.

With a few easily to install additions, called extensions or plugins a wordpress blog can be turned into practically anything you want it to be. The usability provided by the original blogging concept is maintained while the expanded functionality turns wordpress into an extremely valuable business tool.

This means that after familiarizing yourself with wordpress, you can easily use wordpress for :

• exposure
  Search engines such as Google love wordpress and with some effort, you can turn a blog into a traffic magnet.
• online marketing
  Blogs easily link to one another and information is  distributed through the blogosphere. When this aspect is handled professionally it can turn a wordpress blog  into a valuable marketing instrument. Again, read understanding the power of blogs if you want to know more about how this works.
• e-commerce
  Wordpress can be easily hooked up to payment services such as paypal. Plugins can provide extra content management functionality geared towards product maintenance and before long,  businesses can turn wordpress into a secure and attractive online shop.
• direct communication
  Direct communication with customers or potential customers provides valuable information about what you are doing as a business. Testing reactions to a certain article or starting a discussion on how to provide better product service are only two examples of what value feedback is all about.

Can Wordpress fit into your Business Model ?

As someone who’s been been involved in most aspects of the internet on a professional level,  such as SEO, Internet Marketing, Development, Design & Consultancy) for over 8 years,  I can only be positive about the future of wordpress for business use.

If your business is planning to use the web for any kind of activity at all, be it just exposure, or selling your product, wordpress can most likely be adapted to fit right into your way of working.

When this level of functionality, extendability and ease of use all come with no price tag, except learning how to use it, ignoring wordpress as a business tool becomes almost impossible …