Those of you who know Alice well know that she really loves her FrontPage. So I was a little surprised yet exhilarated when she said she wanted to move the whole Internet Marketing Sweetie site over to WordPress. When I asked her why, she said, “Because WordPress is my favorite CMS I’ve used and I was already using it for the blog. I like the scheduling feature, comments, guest authors and all that good stuff“. I couldn’t agree more.

Well, I won’t bore you with the nitty gritty technical details but will say, this is among the more challenging WordPress as a CMS tasks I’ve been given – Love it! Alice of course made a very good decision to start off with a solid theme. But if you take a peek behind this theme it’s almost nothing like it was originally.

There are tons of things we did in the back ground. Many are way too technical to be brought out here. But I thought it’ll be good to point out the possibilities when it comes to using WordPress, in case you’ve been wanting to do something similar too.

Page Template

Inside WordPress Pages (not posts) there is an option called ‘Page Templates’. This allows you to specify a different template for each page. If you do not set it, WordPress uses the default template from your theme. What this means: You can make each Page a little different – including having different sidebars, or no sidebars at all – see the Internet Marketing Sweetie course as an example.

Here’s another thing nice about Page templates. By default, most themes will use the Title as the name of the URL and links too. Sometimes your title is pretty long and descriptive which is not good when that Page is also to appear in your navigation. Using Page templates, we circumvent that.

Example, see the Coaching page (or the screen shot here). The link on the navigation is “Coaching” but the Title on the Page is “Hands-On Coaching Programs”.

Categories

WordPress’ category feature is pretty developed. Categories are really flexible when organizing frequently updating content. On this site, the blog isn’t really a blog but rather a category with child categories under it. Guest articles and other areas are also organized with categories. Using categories this way gives the reader the illusion that the blog and articles are different sections, and yet carry the uniform look and feel.

Also, you can make each category have different sidebars. This allows you to customize messages, sign up boxes, navigation, product and affiliate promotions for each category. Categories also allowed us to create author specific sidebars and tweak the post pages slightly for each author.

The bottom line: Categories, strategic use of Pages and Page templates are the bulk of what made this possible. There is very little that’s not possible when it comes to WordPress. There’s always some way to work around it or some plugin to fill your needs. When you are doing up your site using WordPress as a CMS, find a designer who can fully grasp Categories and Pages and you’ll get great results.

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