Why use WordPress as a CMS?

WordPress has become my development platform of choice & I felt that it was time to spread the love by letting you know about the 10 greatest reasons to use it as a CMS.

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1. It’s FREE.

Using WordPress as the platform upon which to develop your website means it’s inexpensive & often free. WordPress itself is free & there are thousands of free templates to choose from. If you need a more pimping design, a kick butt commercial or premium theme can be sourced for under $100. Save the money & treat yourself to something nice!

Learn more about the WordPress Foundation & Open Source

2. It plays well with others.

Even if you’ve only just computer savvy, WordPress is user friendly. If you can send an e-mail, set up a Facebook account or use Microsoft Word, then you can use WordPress. Creating your content is child’s play & you don’t run the risk of trashing the design. It’s a publishing platform for non-techies.

Learn more about WordPress Features

3. You can roll your own.

With WordPress you can Do-It-Yourself. Save time & money by minimizing your reliance on expensive programmers & designers.

Learn more about Getting Started with WordPress

4. It’s a global party.

WordPress is online & offers access to a truly helpful global community who can help you fix something when you’ve broken it & you can access it from anywhere. If you’ve got internet access in Bora Bora, you could work from there.

Join the global WordPress Community

5. It makes SEO simple.

WordPress also makes it easier to optimise your site for improved search engine exposure. A few basic tweaks & plugins are all that’s required to ensure that your content is crawlable by search engine spiders for indexation & inclusion in the SERP’s.

Learn more about WordPress SEO

6. It’s extendable.

WordPress also supports plugins & extensions which allow extra functionality to be built into your website. Most plugins are freely available and can be easily installed & configured from within the WordPress Administration Dashboard, removing the need for time consuming transfer sessions & manual editing of tricky configuration files.

Learn more about WordPress Plugins

7. It can be downright sexy.

With WordPress, cheap doesn’t have to be nasty. Some of the world’s biggest, best, busiest & most beautiful websites are built on the WordPress platform.

Explore the WordPress Showcase

8. It can pay the rent.

If you hone your skills, WordPress can help you generate a tidy sum of extra cash from freelancing jobs or even enable you to launch your own online business.

Learn more about WordPress Jobs

9. It’s fun.

The fun never sets with WordPress community. New themes, extensions, plugins & features are being developed & made freely available every day – you’ll be amazed at some of the funky stuff that can be done using the WordPress platform and a few plugins. There are even global meetup events for WordPress fans to get together to listen, share, learn & network.

Learn more about WordPress Events

10. It’ll make you a chick magnet.

Ok, I don’t know so much about that last one guys, but here are some ideas on How to get a Girl to Flash You if you’re a struggling Romeo.

Well, that’s all from me for now, enjoy the rest of your day & happy blogging.

PS: Do you have other reasons for using WordPress as a CMS? If so, please do share.

Community building can be cold.

This evening I was researching information related to planning, building and sustaining social networks or online communities when I found a great post by CommunitySpark Community Manager Martin Reed entitled “How to build an online community” which helped me with the two most important aspects .

In the first part, Martin identifies 5 questions to ask yourself when planning an online community.

Questions you should be asking yourself include:

1. Why do you want an online community?
2. Where do you build the new online community?
3. Where are your members?
4. What makes your community unique?
5. How will you attract members and manage the community?

The second part of the article deals with 5 factors to consider when building an online community.

Factors you should consider include:

1. Keep it simple.
2. Respect your community.
3. Keep it private (at first).
4. Have guidelines and processes from day one.
5. Highlight members and their content.

He concludes the article by saying that you should be realistic and adventurous and commit yourself to managing, measuring and refining your community over the long term because you’re not just building a site to woo potential buyers, you’re building relationships.

I found it a great read, very informative and helpful. There’s just so much new stuff to consider with community building that you have to plan ahead and put yourself in the users shoes to make sure that your venture stands any chance of success. I agree with Martin’s view that community building is about providing and sustaining value for your members in order to create a successful venture in the long term.

I’ll take a turn to answer those questions and review those factors in later posts, but for now I have added Community Spark to my Feedly RSS reader. I’ll also add it to the aggregator when I get that up and running on Cape Town Social using the OneNews WordPress Theme I plan on purchasing as soon as I find my PayPal details.

Wow, that was the first post I have written in ages, I hope you enjoyed it, please share your opinion or let me know what you look for in a social network.

With the new WP Quote Tweets plugin by Tanin Ehrami you can! The WordPress WP Quote Tweets Plugin by Tanin Ehrami makes it possible to embed specific twitter status updates in your WordPress blog via shortcodes. Like this:

oysterfestival

(Knysna Oyster Fest)

2009 Knysna Oyster Festival opens tonight! See you in Knysna...www.oysterfestival.co.za

On 1-7-2009 07:57:40 from web

Nice, huh?

The official line from the plugin author is:

Allows authors to quote Twitter updates in posts or pages using a simple shortcode. {quotetweet tweetid=123456789}. The tweetid can be found in the URL of the tweet that is to be quoted.

Why would you embed Tweets in your blog posts?

Embedding specific Twitter quotes in your blog posts could be a great way to socialize content and really integrate it with the social web. Right off the top of my head I can think of a few uses, some of which I hope to highlight in successive blog posts.

The WP Quote Tweets plugin is available for download at WP Codex or you can Visit the plugin site.

Update: The new version of the WP Quote Tweets plugin and it now supports templates. PLease visit the plugin site for more info.

I’ll share another cool Twitter plugin for WordPress with you soon, it’s something called TweetSuite by Dan Zarrella and it puts major foot to ass in the WordPress Twitter plugins department.

Stay Tuned.