Creating a WordPress CMS Content management system

The Wordpress Blogging platform just keeps getting better and better as far as I am concerned. I would hardly consider using anything else to build a website now. With a little CSS knowledge, you can make it look almost any way you wish, and with some pretty minimal website building knowledge you can create a full-on content management system. Love it !

The basis of all wordpress blogs is a free wordpress.com blog. Simple, easy to use and free. But it does have limitations. You must pay money to configure and use some of the facilities, you will get un-wanted advertisements appear on your pages, and you will be using a subdomain of wordpress. This is an example of a free wordpress blog:

International Luxury Real Estate

Didn’t cost me a penny. But - the web address is http://marcus1234.wordpress.com

Unless you pay extra and do some work, all free wordpress blogs are something.wordpress.com - not the best solution, but if you want to learn how to use a wordpress blog - awesome and free. If you want to try it out - this is a link to Wordpress.

Next step up the food chain is a self-hosted wordpress blog. The software is still free, but you must set up and pay for hosting space. Far more flexible and almost as easy to use. The more complicated you want it to be, that harder it becomes to manage and control. But you can do almost anything you want with it. This blog is a self-hosted wordpress blog. I choose to use bluehost for my hosting and they are excellent. Very little down time and above average customer service if you screw it up - as I have done on occasion :D  Pay them a visit and see what they offer:

The big bad daddy of wordpress blogs and aptly described as “wordpress on steroids” is a semiologic wordpress set up. Denis de Bernady has written a much more sophisticated wordpress blog system that basically turns wordpress into a content management system. This is what I use on all my blogs now (including this one - but I do not need most of the functionality.)

A good example of just how sophisticated you can make this is here:

Vodik - Video Solution Specialists

Now, you will need some CSS and flash knowledge to create something like this. If you just want to keep is simple, SEO-friendly and easy to use, this is another example of a semiologic wordpress blog - Luxury Real Estate Blog.

I do the setup, maintenance and management of this one. Take it from me - If I can do it, so can you

My advice - spend the $295 and never look back.

Some of the massively clever stuff it allows me to do is:

• Make it look the way I want
• One-click plugin upgrades
• One-click wordpress upgrades
• Add video
• Add photos, tagged, titled and managed
• Add almost any type of text in any font
• Check the stats in real-time
• Not spend my life pissing around with programming

Visit Semiologic and see what it is all about:

Semiologic - Wordpress on steroids

One criticism I will make - although you get free upgrades for a year - do not expect a lot of support. Wordpress is evolving so rapidly, the writer spends all his time keeping it up to date.

And I wrote this specifically for Guidebaba