How To Turn Your WordPress Blog Into A CMS

CMS or Content Management Site are sites that provides contents that are long serving or needs minimum updating once the contents are up and running. Unlike a blog where contents are updated regularly, a CMS is almost static. In layman terms, most of the web sites you see, unless it is a blog, can be describe as a Content Management Site, though for reasons unknown, many prefer to call it Content Management System. Most companies and corporations uses this kind of sites to promote their company and their products. Today, many of these sites incorporates a blog within their site to enhance their SEO and site visibility.

Content Management Sites uses site pages rather extensively as apposed to a blog where emphasis is placed on the posts that are updated frequently. For example a company dealing in cameras will use a CMS to introduce their company in the Home Page. Then there will be links to other pages in their sites to showcase their history, their personnel, their company portfolio, their products, so on and so forth. If it is a very diversified company, the site may run into many pages. The beauty is, once the site’s pages has been set up, there won’t be much need to be updated unless there is a major overhaul within the Company Structure.

To make a reasonably good Content Management Site may cost a few thousand dollars, depending on the size of the site and the design needed. It is almost out of reach for small, one man company to have a decent site unless he or she can build one for themselves without employing professional web site designers and programmers.

Not many realize it, but you can actually set up your own Content Management Site using WordPress and this process can be accomplish with 2 changes to your WordPress Settings, but first you have to add in the 2 minimum required pages, which is the Home Page and a Blog Page (if you want a blog within your site, which is strongly recommended that you do)

The Home Page is of course your site’s landing page where you pitch whatever you want to sell. The Blog Page is to be left empty as this will be the page that acts like your normal WordPress Blog’s front page.

In your new WordPress Blog that you intend to use as a CMS, go to Dashborad – Settings – Reading

Under Front Page Display, check the “A static page (select below)”

For Front page, select “Home”. You should see the page when you click on the drop down menu.

For Posts page, select “Blog”

Save changes and you are almost done. Except now your site will show 2 “Home” pages in the navigation. This because most if not all WordPress Themes includes the “Home” permalink as default in the header. We just simply have to delete the link so we can use the page we have created instead.

Go Appearance – Editor. Open your header php and look for this line of codes.

<a href="<?php bloginfo('url');?>" rel="nofollow">Home</a>

Delete it and the default Home Page link will be removed, leaving you with the one you have created.

Now you can start adding whatever pages you want and as many as you want. You can also add as many post as you want and whenever anyone clicks on the “Blog” page, they will see the posts there. Your blog will behave just like a normal WordPress blog adhering to all your normal settings and plugins.

What you have now is a Content management Site with lots of static pages just like the big company sites you see. Within your site, you too have a blog. There is no need to add a sub-domain or whatever to specially host the blog.