WordPress is a great blogging platform. However, it can also be used as a content management system to power a content rich website. If you are serious about building a very large scale content rich website (i.e.with thousands of pages), you have to use a full blown CMS software that makes managing the content easy and at the same time doesn’t compromise the speed of the website. If on the other hand you wish to create a small website with 20 or so pages and want to update the site regularly, WordPress is the best option. There are many advantages in using WordPress over other scripts like Drupal, Mambo, etc as a content management system.

Some of them are:

• Ease of use: Drupal, Mambo, etc have steep learning curves. They are full blown and offer lots of more features which are not needed if your are intending to start a small informational website.
• There are plenty of themes available for WordPress. In fact, there are so many themes that choosing one may be difficult. Other CMS software do not have these many themes.
• Highly flexible. There are many free plugins available that add to the functionality of WordPress. Using these plugins, you can apply tags to your webpages, add meta tags, make your website more search engine friendly, etc.

To add to all these benefits, WordPress is extremely easy to install. Today, almost all web hosting accounts come with one or another automatic script installer like Fantastico, Elephannte, InstallApp, etc. It is as easy as a few clicks of the mouse to install WordPress with these installers. You can also install WordPress manually. The procedure can be found at www.wordpress.org. WordPress is very small in size. It occupies about 4 MB or so. Full blown content management systems are much larger (about 30 MB).

WordPress has support for static pages. This feature is very useful in organizing pages in a hierarchy. It is also possible to set any static page or blog post as the home page. Add content and create the pages first and then update blog posts regularly. This way your site will fare much better in search engines. Your site will also get visitors from blog search engines like Technorati.

I would also suggest using a desktop blog client like Qumana or BlogDesk or something similar to update your blog regularly. Though, it is not possible to edit the static pages with these software, it makes writing blog posts much easier by simplifying formatting, image insertion and other issues.

Tags: content management system, cms, wordpress, website