Wednesday, July 27, 2011

WordPress for self administered web content

Recently I joind the board of directors for the Berks County Association for the Blind. This is a great organization and I'm still learning about all the great services they offer the blind, visually impared and other challenged people in Berks County. More about the BCAB later.

I wanted to talk today about my experience with WordPress during my effort to help the Blind association with their web presence. I had experimented with WordPress a couple years ago and I was impressed with it's potential but never implemented anything live. For the BCAB I wanted to keep cost down (WordPress is open source and cost nothing beyond normal web hosting costs) and I wanted to be able to hand all the administration of content over to the organization.

To make a short story long we bought a Domain and web hosting from Go Daddy. I installed WordPress right through the Go Daddy's interface, choose a basic theme (WordPress lingo for template), spent some time teaching myself how to use the many plugins available (open source for free) and was able to hand them a web site that they have total control over through a GUI dashboard (no coding needed). They can add pages, change content, add pictures etc... very cool. All in about 8 hours of my time including and mostly learning curve.

To see the sight click here:
www.berksblind.org

To learn more about WordPress click here:
http://wordpress.org/about/