How To Install WordPress
If you’re used to how WordPress works, then using it as a CMS (Content Management System) to power a standard website is an excellent idea.
It’s lightweight and easy to use, has fantastic support from the WordPress community and is easily extendable with the various CMS style plugins available.
If you also want a news or continual archive style section for information (eg. news, announcements, events etc) then you can still utilise the blogging system that we know and love.
WordPress can manage a 5 static page site, a 5 page site with a news section, or a 500 page site, all very easily. You can have pages, sub pages, a gallery, and more. You can even turn WordPress into an ecommerce site!
So where do you start? Well first off you need to install WordPress. Then on the default install go in to edit pages and change the default About page to have a title of Home, change the content to your home page / welcome content, and save it.
Then if you want to still have a news section or a blog, create a new page called News (for example). Don’t worry about content for this page.
You then need to go to Settings and Reading. At the top of this page there is a section ‘Front Page Displays’. Select to show a static page and select your Home page for the front page. For the posts page, select the other page you’ve created eg. News.
Your site is now set up as a CMS. You can add as many more pages as you want to, although I would advise to keep a good page structure and use sub pages as well as parent pages. Also use the page order system under the Page Attributes to control the order of your pages in the wp_list_pages() template tag.
Recommended Plugins
If you’re intending to use or already using WordPress as a CMS then a few recommended plugins are below:
- All in One SEO PackThis makes it easier to set your page title and meta description for each page. You could also achieve this with custom fields.
- Page Link ManagerNot every page you create will want to be displayed in the menu (eg. a thank you page for a contact form), so this plugin allows you to easily exclude certain pages.
- Page Menu EditorAllows you to set the anchor text and title attribute text of your page links to be different from the page header.Sitemap GeneratorThis allows you to easily generate a sitemap of your site.
- XML Sitemap GeneratorThis will generate and XML sitemap and keep it up to date when you add new pages and posts. it will also notify Google, Yahoo and MSN when you make updates.
- WP e-CommerceAdds a shopping cart system to WordPress, allows you to add physical or digital products and accept payments via PayPal or other payment systems
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