Today I have a guest post from one of my readers. Joel Ohman runs the premium domain tools membership site DomainSuperstar.com along with John G. and is currently working to release domain development tutorial videos and custom website development services for their premium members.

Ask almost any webmaster, “Who is the undisputed king of blogging software?” and they will most likely reply that WordPress is, without a doubt, the preeminent choice for blogging software. However, if you ask the question, “What is the best piece of software to use as a CMS (Content Management System) for running a website?” then you will undoubtedly get a plethora of different responses that range from Joomla to Drupal to custom coding to hundreds of other different answers.

Many webmasters sing high praises for the fact that WordPress is stable, open source (read: FREE), easy to use, supports multiple users, supports bulk site management, has a wide variety of themes and plugins available to use, and is a snap to install and upgrade. This being said, many people are not clued into the power of WordPress as a platform or CMS for a full scale website.

Here is what you need to know about using WordPress as a robust solution for creating and managing your websites.

Choose the Right Host for WordPress

While you can certainly download and install WordPress onto any domain hosted on any hosting package you like it will make things a lot easier for you if you choose a host that offers cPanel. cPanel is a website control panel software application that comes free with many hosts (Chef Patrick’s favorites, HostGator). The beauty of cPanel is that you can install WordPress on your domain with just a couple of clicks.

Choose the Right Theme for Wordpress

Ok, so you have chosen the right host and you have installed WordPress onto your domain. Now you are probably thinking, “Wow, my site definitely looks like a blog and not like a website”. You will think this at first because the way that WordPress manages the appearance of your site is by uploading and activating different templates called WordPress themes.

The default WordPress theme looks very much like a standard blog. You can view the default WordPress theme that comes standard with every installation of WordPress by visiting the WordPress Widgets blog. While this theme may be fine for a very plain looking blog, if you want to use WordPress and make it look like a professional website then you will need to upload and activate a new theme.

There are many different WordPress themes that you can download for free but if you really want to have a nice looking site then you will probably want to buy a premium theme that is designed specifically to look like a regular website from a place like Studio Press, WooThemes, WP Remix, or any number of other WordPress theme designers. In fact, the domain name tools website that I run uses a Studio Press WordPress theme and looks very much like a real e commerce website rather than a blog.

Choose the Right Plugins for WordPress

As I mentioned earlier one of the huge advantages to creating a site based on the WordPress platform is that there is an absolutely enormous selection of plugins (addons) that you can incorporate into WordPress with no real knowledge of HTML, PHP, or any other type of coding language. You can literally think of almost anything that you want WordPress to be capable of doing for your website and chances are someone has already created a plugin (probably for free) that will do just what you want.

Do you want to have a sitemap that automatically creates itself? Do you want to have an easy to use and easy to set up contact form? Do you want to make it easy to incorporate solid SEO practices on your site? Do you want to incorporate an auto-responder onto your site easily? You can do all of these things and a thousand more just by downloading and activating the right WordPress plugin.

If you can dream it up then you can most likely find it already created for you simply by entering in a phrase describing what you want followed by “WordPress plugin” into Google.

Michael Fortin has a good list of WordPress plugins that he uses on his high traffic internet marketing/copyrighting blog.

Popular Websites Using Wordpress as a CMS

Still aren’t convinced of the power of WordPress for creating and managing your websites? Rubiqube.com has 2 different lists of 10 great website designs using WordPress as a CMS that you can view here and here.

Managing Multiple Websites with WordPress

It is a cinch to manage multiple websites with WordPress both using WordPress MU (Multi User) and by taking advantage of the numerous plugins that have been created for just this purpose. I cover some of the more popular plugins and software applications that can be used in the the scaling your web development efforts of the post, “Do You Make These 7 Mistakes When You Develop Your Domains?“.

Build a Professional Website with WordPress Today and See for Yourself!

You can quite literally have a very professional looking website online and live for the world to see in under an hour with WordPress. Whether you own one domain or thousands of domains; give WordPress a try when you set out to develop your next full scale professional website!