A favourite with bloggers worldwide, the platform provides all the interactive features that make blogs social, and it's as easy to use as word processing software, so just about anyone can us it, regardless of technical know how.

Earlier this year we decided to redesign our blog (or change skins as they say in the blogging world) and it was a fairly simple task. We just selected a new template and all the content assembled over the previous 24 months was easily transferred.

So when we decided to redesign our corporate website, recently, Wordpress was the obvious choice of platform.

WordPress just makes sense for simple web sites, even if you don't plan to have a blog. It provides a good infrastructure and all the tools you could ever need.

There is no need to be able to write html code or to have much experience in website design.

WordPress supports two basic types of content – pages for static information and posts for changing or dynamic information.

We used pages for our website, posts for our blog. We don't foresee having to update the content on the website too often, and when we do, pages lets us overwrite.

We use the blog for news and update it often so posts are archived and are always available.

We set one of our pages as the homepage and chose a template with classic corporate design overtones.

Then we create several pages, each one with a different focus, our team, our services, our locations, etc.

I chose photographs of kittens and puppies to illustrate the various pages. When I get bored of pets, I can easily change to another theme.

And Wordpress provides feeds on both posts and pages which we offer to blog readers so they can get our content delivered to their desktops.
We don't use them, but feeds are also available for pages, and would be a great way for some companies to keep customers up to date with sales or special offers, etc.

Feeds can also be converted to emails should your readers and customers prefer that method of communication, and this function is effortless to both the user and the website owner.

But where Wordpress really comes into its own is with its templating system.

These highly customisable 'skins' give you freedom from HTML and style sheets and delivers a lot of flexibility to give your site a look that is unique to your company.

Of course you don't have to use a template; you can have web designer create your own if you like.

For me the best feature is the administration interface. Wordpress makes keeping your website updated a piece of ease.

With it you can write and manage content, as well as configure the website using any of more than 2,500 available plugins.

These cover just about anything you can dream of from spam filters to site maps to avatar creation to bookmarking.

The possibilities are almost endless.

With these you can extend the functionality of your site using a simple point and click system to install them. With so many inbuilt functions, WordPress saved us a lot of time and effort in developing our website.

The platform depends on a MySQL database and uses standard web scripting language, so it can be accommodated by most web hosts.

And WordPress is completely open source. It has a huge community of developers constantly innovating new plugins and themes. And it's completely free.


>>Sherrilynne Starkie is the managing partner of Strive Public Relations, a strategic communications consultancy serving the Isle of Man. Visit her business blog, Strive Notes for frequent updates www.strivepr.com/notes or follow her on twitter.com/sherrilynne