I attended a panel hosted by Randy Hoyt, a Dallas based web developer and University of Texas at Dallas professor, and the WordPress Developer and Technical User Group back in November 18 on how some of the panel members use WordPress as part of their profession and I must say that I was very impressed on how far it has become from being just a blogging platform.

Each member of the panel are web professionals that use WordPress for site building purposes and all of them agree on the same conclusion, that this is a content management system that is easy for the client to use after the initial project has been completed. After some client training and consulting, the site builder can move on to the next project confident that their client can do edits and customizations on their own without doing any coding. They also mentioned the quantity of plugins that are available to give WordPress more functionality in seo, images, categories, etc. as well as the support of forums with other WordPress developers that are online should you have technical problems that needs solving. It’s always been said that if you can’t solve it  someone else might have, it’s all a matter of Googling it.

Ever since I started using WordPress for my own personal blogs about 2 years ago I ‘ve been amazed how it continued to evolved as more functionalities were inserted after each upgrade. Now WordPress is so widely used that websites can be built using it. There are hundreds of sites on the Internet where you can use pre-developed themes or use special themes like Thesis, Headway, Genesis or Builder that will give you more customizing power.

After listening to the successes that the panels had with WordPress and how satisfied that the clients are with their sites, it’s safe to say that I’m on the right track in learning more about WordPress for blogging and web building purposes. In fact, WordPress won the 2010 Hall of Fame CMS award beating out both Drupal and Joomla. Of course, I’m not saying that other CMS platforms such as Drupal and Joomla are inefficient in anyway, each has their own strengths but for me WordPress is an effective CMS for start-up businesses to get their presence out there especially with social media integrated with it.

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