This makes WordPress a great, highly fexible content management system, take a look at our post on using WordPress as a content management system here.

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:

Button Bag
Blog for Button Bag, Craft Kits for Children e-commerce website, this was added to their current website with a slightly modified design, makes use of plugins WP-print and Sexy Bookmarks, as well as Breadcrumb trail and All in one SEO pack.

Get Cycling News
Wordpress was added to the Get Cycling website to handle their latest news. It is a simple, single category blog which feeds the latest 4 posts onto the home page.

Cyclorama
Get Cycling sister company, Cyclorama wanted a blog to run alongside their current website, the blog was designed to look like the rest of the site and has been made good use of, with plenty of articles, links to other blogs, a feed from their Twitter account and ‘share this’ social bookmarking links.

Web Analytics Consultancy
Facts and Figures is a feature rich blog, making good use of Twitter Syndication, RSS feeds by Feedburner, email subscription to feeds and comments, share this social bookmarking, print this post, all in one SEO pack and vipers video quick-tags. The theme was chosen by the client from the WordPress theme directory and modified to meet the blogs requirements.

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 and WP-Syntax.

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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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