The Business of Broadband

Blogging has become increasingly popular for businesses, and no blogging platform is more customizable than WordPress. WordPress is an open source platform with a large community behind it, making the implementation of a blog not only easy, but fully customizable. You can customize your own theme or choose from thousands of free or premium themes available on the Internet. Designing your own theme is beyond the scope of this article, but if you’re interested, a good place to start is WordPress’s Codex.

To begin, you must install WordPress on your server. Information on installing WordPress can be found on WordPress’s home page. Once installed, you can either begin blogging from the WordPress Dashboard using the default theme, or you can install a custom theme, which can be found everywhere on the Internet. If you don’t believe me, just do a Google search on “Wordpress themes.” One of my favorite places to find custom WordPress themes is Smashing Magazine. Smashing Magazine is a web design and development blog that has a wonderful collection of links to free and premium WordPress custom themes.

WordPress is attractive because it’s not just for blogging. It can also serve as a Content Management System. A great place to start learning about WordPress’s CMS capability is Graphic Design Blog. The WordPress user interface, or Dashboard, is easy to use, making updating your CMS quick and painless.

WordPress also comes with many plug-ins and widgets built in, and there are a multitude of widgets and plug-ins available on the Internet to give your blog that extra bit of functionality. The main difference between Widgets and plug-ins is that a plug-in affects a post while widgets affect the WordPress sidebar. Plug-ins include the popular “Share This,” an individual post rating system, an author bio for individual posts, etc. Widgets include a sidebar calendar, search, recent posts, etc.

In short, WordPress is free, easy to use, mult-functional, and fun. It is fully customizable and can be used in a variety of applications, in addition to blogging, including e-commerce and as CMS.

For even more information on WordPress, visit the following:

Solostream

WordPress hacks

Web Designer Wall