It’s Open Source and hence well supported
WordPress is absolutely free and allows you to see the code and make changes and enhancements yourself. If you are an adroit coder and want to play around with code, WordPress is just for you. It is in fact the best source to play around with and learn the basics of PHP. There is a vast collection of documentation to help you with the WordPress framework. It also gives you a great insight and experience of working with advanced PHP and other API’s & frameworks. You will also get immediate help on any issues since there are large number of developers out there to help you in case you are stuck or have found some bug in code.

It Is Easy To Install and Use
WordPress takes just five minute for complete installation which has been its best feature. You can simply login once installation is completed and start posting your blog posts or articles or pages for your site. You can add functionality or enhance design too by simply adding widgets or plugins to the site. There are plugins available to make your site SEO friendly which is what you may want to work on once your site is up and ready.

Its a complete CMS
Some may think its used for blogging, but WordPress is a very Powerful CMS and can be used to create fully functional websites for business. You can create you own themes to choose your own layout and design for the site. You can integrate shopping carts, payment modules and also use other plugins to have your own functionalities.

By default, WordPress Search feature displays published posts and published pages in search results. Often when users are looking for something in a blog, it is most likely a post rather than a page. In this article, we will show you how to make your search more relevant and less crowded by excluding pages from WordPress search results.

First open your theme’s functions.php file and paste this code:

function SearchFilter($query) {
           if ($query->is_search) {
                  $query->set('post_type', 'post');
          }
         return $query;
 }

add_filter('pre_get_posts','SearchFilter');

Explanation: This code just searches for posts through setting the post_type. You can also make it do the opposite by setting the post_type to pages, so it only return pages in the search result.

Well, No problem! You can now set up new installations of WordPress quicker than ever.

These days many use an autoinstaller provided by hosting companies. One of which is commonly used is Fantastico. It is an automated code which gets you the WordPress code, uploads on the server and unzips too. But many complain that it does not always install the latest versions.

So what you can do is, download the WordPress code. Unzip it on your machine and then upload it to the server. Depending on the network connection this may take around 20 mintues to 30 minutes. This can get frustrating especially if you have many wordpress sites to create.

Well, now there is better way to do it. Its really simple! WordPress Loader a single file created by Alister Cameron takes care of your installation.

Here is how you can use it:

Step 1: Download the file from Alister’s site.

Step 2: Upload wordpress_loader.php to the directory where you want to install WordPress.

Step 3: View the file on your web browser. You will find the file on your server @ http://yourdomain.com/my-wordpress/wordpress_uploader.php

Step 3: Click the button you’ll find there.

The script will automatically place all of the WordPress files on your server in about five seconds.

Note: You’ll still need to create your database and edit your wp-config file as you usually would, but you won’t have to spend time uploading all the files.

Use WordPress Loader and save some bit of your time!

* Create social media-friendly content on a regular basis: This content should be used across corporate communications. Make sure the content is not leftover or recycled content. To work effectively, it must be useful information that consumers want and find interesting, effective and useful. Examples include additional ways to use your product or showing step-by-step how to install your product. Ask visitors what type of information they want.

* Cross-promote social media marketing in online and offline marketing: Mention social media marketing efforts in online advertising, Web site, e-mail, mobile, packaging, direct mail, television, print, out-of-home, and other advertising/marketing efforts.

* Extend customer service reach and responsiveness: Use social media to respond to customer questions, comments, and appropriate conversations. A relevant, personalized response is recommended. Avoid giving an automated answer.

* Extend the reach of company events online: Extend by using a variety of social media tools such as Twitter, slide sharing, and video sharing. This includes live demonstrations and/or live blogging and/or tweeting of meetings, shows, and conferences.

* Extend PR efforts through social media use: This includes social media press releases, blogs, video, photographs, Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter, slide sharing, and other social media options to get the word out quickly and broadly.

* Provide faster, more effective crisis management for public issues through the use of social media tools: Have on-going social media monitoring, provide social media training to appropriately engage consumers, and have a process to raise potential issues that you may face. Use social media to respond quickly and appropriately.

* Gather customer input and feedback for market research purposes: This is good for gaining useful insights about your products through forums, in-person meetups, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and reviews. Consumers may provide suggestions that wouldn’t have surfaced within the organization.

* Expand human resources’ reach and effectiveness: New talent can be acquired more quickly and cost-effectively through social networking. Managers can preview job seekers’ work online. Additionally, good work by existing employees can be showcased through a variety of social media formats and environments like, the month might be highlighted on a Facebook Fan Page.

* Enhance investor relations through the use of social media: Use videos, slides, podcasts, and Webinars. Create and share content that gives investors a feel for your business such as new business performance and promoting your investor day.

* Facilitate cross-organizational relationships: This can be done through corporate networking presence such as LinkedIn or private social networks.

You can read his article here.  In short, this is what he says,

Maintenance

Once your website is launched you may presume that nothing needs to be changed and that all your requirements are taken care of by your developer. But, this he says, is never true. You will agree too. As your site matures, there may be many changes you now want to incorporate. You may want to enhance your site for better accessibility and usability.

Using a custom made CMS means you are usually locked in, with the web company. You will have to contact the company and pay for the service for anything that needs to be changed. However small the change or update may be, like updating a home page image or content.

The value of an open-source content management system means that you can usually complete the changes yourself, and if not, there are hundreds of support forums and people available to help you along your way.

Scalability

With static websites, one of the most common problem is when you want to add more content to your site, you need to code the html pages. Even for a simple form that you may want to have on your site, it may be tedious to add functionality of sending mails or accepting forms etc. Hence, we see scaling a static site is challenging.

With custom-made CMS, it may allow adding pages very easily, but you need not go back to your web design company for small changes. Again, you will need to pay for the service and get it done.

All this can be done easily in house, if you have open source CMS set up.

Contracts

Most web companies that develop using custom content management systems often try to get you involved in ongoing maintenance contracts, or simply don’t provide the client with the neccasary details to pass on to another company to use (such as FTP and CMS login details).

This is definitely bad for two reasons,
1. You are tied to the original web-design company for any updates you want to make on your site.
2. If for some reason, you are not in good terms with that company and do not want to give the contract to them in future, you won’t be able to get any changes made at all in the future as you do not have any login details shared.

Further Kieron  says, a large aspect of running a succesful business is being efficent with money, so you shouldn’t want to be paying ongoing contracts or one-off charges where they are simply not neccasary. If the worst comes to worst and you can’t count on the original company to make changes (or you don’t want to go back to them), this is potentially going to cost you a lot more money as the simplest solution for a new company would be to rebuild the website entirely (using an open-source content management system, I would hope).

In the end he summerizes:

Not all custom CMS are bad – as they may be needed in some cases where an open-source solution doesn’t do the job in hand. But for 5 or 10 page websites for a standard business, or websites without the need for bespoke solutions, there is simply no need to restrict somebody or cause potential issues in the future.

Wisdmlabs also develop search engine friendly websites with WordPress, which is open-source content management systems. It also has a whole heap of support online.

The intelligence feature could now alert you if there was a high growth in the number of visits from Twitter referrals during last 24 hours or let you know that bounce rates of visitors from a certain geo since a particular period. Now, instead of you having to monitor reports and comb through all the data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your online business.

Take a look at the video below to learn more about the new feature:

It does not end here. Now you can also setup custom alerts to tell Google Analytics what to watch for. You can set triggers on pretty much any dimension & metric such as conversion or orders, and be notified by email  when the changes actually occur.

This is indeed a great addition and will really help one operate thier online store with more intelligence and insights that would otherwise have taken significant amount of time to analyze.

Here are some specific examples of how online retailers can use these intelligence features effectively:

1. Understanding seasonality of the products – Setup alerts for changes in conversion rates for specific products or categories over a time dimension so that you can be notified when it is time to review your product assortment from seasonality and relevance perspective.
2. Understanding changes in zero search results – You can setup alerts that would inform you if the % of zero search results spikes above normal. This is usually an indicator that more customers are not able to find the products they are looking for. You can then evaluate the top searched keywords to find assortment gaps.
3. Understanding the effectiveness of PPC campaigns – Lets say you setup a PPC campaign that results in a drop in the conversion rate. This is typically an indicator that the PPC campaign is not driving productive traffic to your website. Setting up an alert in these cases would allow you to aggressively manage your Adwords and other marketing campaigns so that you can avoid throwing money on campaigns that are not very effective.
4. Impact of social media – You posted a new story on Digg which went hot last night. It would be nice to get an alert if the traffic pattern on your site changes due to your social marketing efforts.
5. Drop in conversion rate – Lets say your server receives a huge surge of traffic and the users are not able to complete checkout due to performance problems. Wouldn’t you want to be notified immediately so that you can take corrective action? You can setup an alert that notifies you whenever the conversion rate or the order volume on the site deviates from the expected range.

This is one of the best features now in Google Analytics that will provide you access to more real time data that will allow you to make better decisions and also inform you about the problems on your website on a realtime basis.

Source: Google Analytics: Web Intelligence tips for Online Retailers

http://www.commercewiki.com/customer-experience/web-analytics-intelligence/

As a WordPress consultant, our focus has been to push the limits of WordPress beyond a CMS. Most of our projects use WordPress as an underlying framework / platform and our projects are a good blend of custom PHP code and API based data XML or JSON data feeds into WordPress. We have done projects like news portal, shopping affiliate site, coupon sites, payment gateway integration etc using WordPress as a platform.

We are looking for experienced and talented PHP/MySQL developers who have experience in developing WordPress plugins and themes meeting the following criteria:

1. 1.5 to 2 years experience in PHP and MySQL
2. 0.5 to 1.5 years experience in WordPress
3. Extremely familiar with WordPress theme architecture and template tags
4. Experience in developing cross browser XHTML and CSS front-ends based on mock-ups. Exposure to libraries like jQuery is an add-on.
5. Basic Photoshop (or any other similar software) skills for tasks related to image manipulation and optimization.
6. Fair knowledge of WordPress plugin API, functions and architecture (Admin pages, widgets, custom taxonomies, loop manipulation, hooks, filters and actions)
7. Experience of parsing XML or JSON feeds in PHP (optional but desired)

We would be engaging the applicants on a per-hour fixed fee based on your overall expertise and past work. Drop us a mail at info[at]wisdmlabs[dot]com to discuss this further.

The fact that we use WordPress as a CMS for clients doesn’t mean that the other options out there are poor choices. Just that WordPress is extremely easy to use (as opposed to, say, Joomla) for not so familiar clients and this comes very handy if the client intends to manage the CMS all by himself without an elaborate team. WordPress adds a solid support for “static” content, being the WordPress Pages, and more newsy update flows controlled by the Posts, and you’ve got your needs pretty much covered for most websites online today.