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An Introduction To WordPress As A CMS

Whilst WordPress’ primary use is to be a blogging platform, WordPress can and is now used for much more than a traditional blogging system by many users. WordPress is now being used as a fully functional content management system (Yes, some might say “OLD NEWS!”), however many people still don’t look at WordPress in this way.

Pages

A standard feature to WordPress is it’s paging system. You can manage, edit and delete pages from the admin. Pages are able to be set in a hierarchy so that you can have a parent page and then sub pages to that parent page which is pretty useful for situations such as having an about us page and then having a location page, privacy policy page, TOS page etc.
Page Templates

WordPress allows you to create static web pages using page templates. It supports the use of multiple templates which enables you to style each page individually.
Front Page

By default, posts are displayed on the front page however, the front page can display a static page instead. You can then set up a new directory to display the posts. This allows you to use WordPress’s blogging features as a sub part to the site instead of it being the main feature.

Permalinks

Permalinks allows you to create URL friendly versions of URL’s generated by WordPress, you can have the page/post name as the URL instead of the ugly and SEO and user unfriendly standard way.
I recommend you use /%category%/%postname%/ for the structure.

Post Settings

You can password protect specific pages to hide posts from certain users and you can also disable comments, trackbacks and pingbacks. Custom fields are a great way to display content such as images and the alike.

Plugins

There are thousands of free plugins for WordPress which enable you to expand WordPress’s features even further such as:
Sitemap

Google XML Sitemaps allows you to generate a Google XML sitemap which is updated everytime you create a new page or post etc. Google XML Sitemaps isn’t the only plugin that allows you to do this although it is the most popular.
Custom Code

You can use php, javascript, xhtml and css in WordPress posts and pages using a plugin such as Exec-PHP.
All in one SEO pack

The All in one SEO pack is one of the most used Plugins for WordPress. It allows you to insert meta data and many other SEO related features, in posts and pages. You can set the meta to be specific to specific pages. It really does do what it says.

Examples of WordPress CMS sites

Here’s three examples of WordPress CMS sites, if you want to view more, WordPress has a whole section in their showcase for CMS Sites (http://wordpress.org/showcase/tag/cms/):
• http://www.racing.ups.com/
• http://www.streamys.org/
• http://www.irrationalgames.com/

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Posted in Wordpress For SEO on April 8th, 2010 by Peter | 4 Comments »

WordPress Snippets on the Homepage

Congratulations, you have decided to install a WordPress blog onto your site. Now you can let people know about yourself and your company, information about your products and services, and any promotions or competitions you may be running. You don’t need to post seven times a day, but one post a week is a little on the light side as search engines LOVE regularly updated content, which is what makes blogs so beneficial in your seo campaign.

But you do not want your blog to be the star of your site, you want the attention to be on the homepage. The purpose of this post is to show you how to get the most recent posts from your WordPress blog and put snippets (usually the first 30 words) onto the homepage.

The first thing we need to do is include the WordPress functions so that we can use them to pull the blogs we want. Place this code near the top of the page and definitely before the next section of code.
<?php
define("WP_USE_THEMES", false);
include("blog/wp-blog-header.php");
query_posts("showposts=3");
?>

What this block of code says is “we will format the blogs ourselves (do not include the WordPress themes), fetch all the functions that I’ll need to use WordPress here, and I want to have the 3 most recent posts”.

Now comes to fun part. We are going to do a mini-version of WordPress’s The Loop.

“The Loop is used by WordPress to display each of your posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each of the posts to be displayed on the current page and formats them according to how they match specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code placed in the Loop will be repeated on each post.” – WordPress Codex
 <div class="blog">
  <ul class="blogposts">
   <?php while (have_posts()): the_post(); ?>
    <li >
     <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
     <p><?php the_content_rss('', false, '', 30); ?></p>
     <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">Read more…</a>
    </li>
   <?php endwhile; ?>
  </ul>
 </div>

In our loop, we are creating an unordered list containing the title of the post as a link, the first 30 words and a ‘read more’ link.

Obviously you style the snippets to fit into your website’s design. You can see how we have incorporated our most recent blog and news posts on our homepage.

Just like search engines, people will get bored of stale content. So by keeping fresh content on your homepage, people (as well as search engines) will be interested in visiting your site more often, and possible convert from potential customer, to paying customer.

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Posted in Wordpress For SEO on February 9th, 2010 by Richard | No Comments »

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