This allows us to use WordPress almost like a Content Management System with any custom arrangement of pages, categories, sub-categories and even our own custom static pages. In some cases we have stripped out what we don’t need and used it as a simple and effective feedback or latest news system.

But WordPress is just as useful ‘out of the box’ it contains everything you need to set up and manage a successful blog and can be a great asset to your website, giving it an up-to-date feeling, while increasing repeat visits and improving SEO. There are thousands of plug-ins available for WordPress which do a range of things from running automatic backups and basic security, to automatically updating your Twitter account and turning your blog into a photo gallery.

Some examples:

Breaks night in York
Blog to promote a monthly DJ night, a simple yet funky design complete with Soundcloud snippets, Flickr Gallery Feeds and Twitter Syndication.

Thrifty Living website
Highly customized blog with different templates for each category, although no plug-ins have been used a large amount of custom coding was required, the blog sits alongside static pages including an online book shop.

Tui Na UK
A simple, cheap feedback system was required that would let users post feedback on particular pages, WordPress was chosen to do the job and integrated on a number of pages, all other ‘blog like’ features have been taken out of the front end so all we see is the feedback form and the comments. A gallery was then required, so we installed a gallery plug-in and again, stripped out all but the standard blog stuff.

Web Analytics Consultancy
Features: Twitter Syndication, RSS feeds by Feedburner, email subscription to feeds and comments, social bookmark links, print this post, all in one SEO and vipers video quick-tags.

This one!
You may have noticed you are reading a WordPress blog, this one is fairly ‘out of the box’ but uses the following plug ins: all in one SEO pack, Add lightbox, Google Analytics for WordPress, Lightbox 2, Limit login attempts, WP-Syntax and WPBook.

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The blog is making use of many social networking and bookmarking tools – a toolbar below each blog entry offers buttons which will add the article to any of a variety of bookmarking sites, such as Digg, StumbleUpon or Technorati.

As well as these tools, it offers RSS feeds of blog posts and also blog post comments, with optional buttons which automatically subscribe in the viewer’s chosen reader – for example Bloglines or Newsgator. Alternatively there’s the option to subscribe via email.

It also features syndication with Twitter, so that when a blog entry is posted, a connected Twitter account is also updated, and vice versa.

The blog’s entire functionality and structure is being built before any design or styling, as opposed to after the initial design, as is more usual. It’s not yet live – but I’ll post an update when it’s ready.

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