Green Media Design & Hosting routinely uses Wordpress when we build each of our web sites.  What does that mean?  We’re glad you asked…

What is Wordpress?

Wordpress is a flexible open-source content management system that makes the task of changing content, adding new pages and complex functionality rather simple, enabling a wide range of users and operators to effectively use it.  Due to its’ incredible flexibility and ease of use, companies of all sizes utilize Wordpress for a portion or all of their web publishing needs, including big names like CNN.com, Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Rolling Stone, and Ford Motor Company.  Read our Wordpress FAQ for more info.

Why Use Wordpress?

While we do occasionally develop web sites on alternate platforms like Expression Engine, Drupal or Joomla, we genuinely believe that Wordpress is the most flexible and simple content management available today bar none.  Wordpress makes it quick and easy for administrative users to add blog content and manage every aspect of their web site, making in-house web site management a realistic option for small businesses.  Combining the core features of Wordpress with additional functionalities that we introduce through the plugins system, Wordpress provides for a web site that doesn’t have to be completely revamped anytime you want to add as something as large as a major new feature to your site, or a small as an additional page.   In addition to these reasons, here are a few more reasons we recommend our clients build on Wordpress:

• Wordpress lets you build an unlimited amount of pages that you can position throughout the site as you wish.
• Wordpress gives you the ability to blog either in the traditional blogging format that we all know and love.  However, because Wordpress organizes information in a way that lets you add pieces of content to a category, you can present information in almost an unlimited number of ways.  Put differently, a “post” can be a social commentary as we often think of blogging, but it can also be an image that is integrated into a gallery, a recipe that is organized by types of food, or an event with extensive information that is organized into a larger calendar… the possibilities are endless.
• Wordpress is an extremely powerful platform due to the flexibility it provides through the plugin system, which allows the addition things like image galleries and slideshows, Google Analytics tools, XML sitemap tools, events management and calendaring programs, or almost any other functionality you might think of.
• Countless social media sites and services like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter can easily be configured and integrated in Wordpress.
• Wordpress can easily integrate video that can be sourced either from social video services like YouTube, Viddler and Vimeo, streamed in from Amazon 3S, or self-hosted and delivered via progressive download.
• Wordpress utilizes themes to create the user interface that your visitors see.  Put another way, Wordpress themes are graphic skins that are applied to your web site to change the appearance of the site.  This separation of the web site programming from its’ appearance is very powerful, and makes it possible to both easily add sophisticated functionality to your web site as well as significantly alter the outward appearance of the site at the drop of a hat.  Green Media Design offers Wordpress theming services, and suggests several commercial themes for you to use depending on your requirements.
• Wordpress includes a permalinking function that incorporates a power URL rewriting tool that is crucial for on-site SEO.  By utilizing it properly, web site URLS become semantic and both human and bot legible, conveying an actual idea of what is content is actually on the web page.
• One of the best things about Wordpress is that it is not a proprietary package… rather it’s a standard program that you can feasibly purchase a book on at your local book store (we recommend “Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read“).  Because it’s standard, there are lots of programmers out there that work with it, larger commercial web services and applications integrate with it, and often employees or web site administrators may even have previous experience with it.
• Wordpress uses the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor, which let’s both visually see your content as you edit it, as well as letting you work directly on the source code if you need to.  This makes adding, changing and styling content very easy for web site administrators.
• Wordpress can be worked with and managed directly through many different types of phone, and there is a iPhone application that integrates into your Wordpress web site for remote management.
• RSS feeds are automatically integrated into every Wordpress installation, with hooks to add your RSS feed to Feedburner.
• It kind of goes without saying, but free is good.  And since Wordpress is open-source, you can use it for whatever purpose you want to, plain and simple.  And it’s rare of nice when you get to use really, really good stuff and don’t have to pay licensing for it.
• Wordpress is under constant development and redevelopment, and unlike several other content management systems available commonly attempt to integrate new features to be backwards compatible.  In this way, Wordpress is always being improved upon.  In fact, one-click automatic upgrades are built into Wordpress core as of the 2.7 release, so now you are able to upgrade Wordpress at the touch of a button.

How we support Wordpress

There are a wide variety of resources readily available both online and offline that provide education as to how to use Wordpress, but here are a few that we suggest and make available to you.

1. Green Media provides free Wordpress Video Tutorials that are available for anybody to view and use.  These videos are a combination of tutorials that we created and recorded as well as some that we have culled from other locations.  Regardless, we feel that these tutorials cover the very basic aspects of managing your Wordpress web site.  If you feel that there is a topic that you would like to see covered that is not currently available, drop us a line and we may record it for you!
2. We are Wordpress experts at Green Media, and provide Wordpress support and assistance on-demand on an hourly basis.  When you have Wordpress questions or issues, we can help.
3. Green Media does provide customized “Need To Know” Video Tutorials as a service.  Whether or not we are the developers on your web site, we can create a video for you that runs through the process of completing certain tasks on your web site that you can then keep and store, returning to them as a working, illustrated manual on an as needed basis.  Click here for more information about our NTK Videos.
4. We do very much recommend “Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read” as a sort of manual that lays out everything you need to know about your Wordpress web site, right from installation and configuration through editing and managing the web site.