How You Can Utilize WordPress As a CMS

Ever since WordPress was first conceived, it has been looked upon as being primarily a blog system with a great backend interface that allows for easy posting of information on a time sensitive basis. Although this is great, the real losers when it came to this platform were the normal folk who simply wanted to create a website. An old style information based website. As much as some would like to believe it, information based websites are still huge, and are a very serious opportunity for webmasters, so the real question here, how can you utilise WordPress as a CMS, lets answer that for you.

WordPress blogs publish content in two ways. Through posts and through pages. Posts being more of a time sensitive method of posting information, and pages being more of a consistent source of information. What this means is that if you are looking to create a information based website with a CMS backend, you can simply create pages on WordPress, and present information in an appropriate format.

Having said this, there is one problem. WordPress is a blog, so it will natively appear as a blog, so surely there isn’t a way to make it look like an information based website, right? Wrong. Simply set a static home page using the WordPress options, and modify the HTML code within the page, or use the built in WYSIWYG editor to make the home page presentable.

WordPress by default will never optimise page or post URL’s so that they are keyword rich, which can be a problem, especially if you want to heavily SEO the site, and see it ranking well for particular keywords. This can be a big problem, however, as WordPress is highly customisable, the platform will allow you to change the permalink structure. As most webmeisters who are SEO conscious will always include a title that is keyword optimised, this means that you will receive the benefit of having the main keyword in the URL. As you could imagine, the benefits of this from an SEO standpoint are massive.

Of course, there are many themes out there that will also boost the CMS functionality of a WordPress based website, for most people who are not looking to take their websites to a professional level, a standard free theme will in most cases suffice. However, it is worth noting that there are a handful of these themes that will always make your efforts more streamlined, and with clean coding, will have great SEO benefits.

To summarise, WordPress is a fantastic platform to use as a CMS for an information based website. The key is in understanding how to use the platform correctly, knowing the right theme to use, and understanding how to use that theme.