On Thursday of this past week one of our company websites “broke.” That’s my non-geek analysis. It wasn’t the first time and we knew it wouldn’t be the last, so –with the support and encouragement of our IT department– we decided to just flush it and start over.
At noon on Friday I installed a new WordPress theme ($59.95 from StudioPress) and started copying and pasting content. By four o’clock, I was pretty much done. Here’s a screen shot of the work-in-progress:
Learfield Communications is comprised of two operating divisions: Sports and News. We have a corporate website; a website for the sports division; one for the news division; and one for each of the networks that make up the news division.
The news division site was a challenge because we really didn’t have any dynamic content for the site and I hated putting up a “brochure” that never changed.
The WordPress site we tossed together in a few hours on Friday afternoon won’t win any awards but it will allow us to do things we couldn’t before. Like video. It’s becoming much easier to shoot, edit and host (yea YouTube and Vimeo!) video, so it makes sense to include it. WordPress has endless plug-ins for this task.
And WordPress is just a very good content management system, at least for our needs. I’ll be able to show folks in our marketing department how to create and update pages which makes it possible to keep the site fresh and current.
WordPress is very social-network friendly. Flickr, YouTube, Twitter… wherever you have content, you can quickly incorporate it.
The effectiveness of this –or any– website will be measured by the quantity and quality of the content and ease of interaction with the people who visit it. WordPress delivers.
It would have been easy to spend a couple of months a few thousand dollars getting a simple site like this developed. I can now take that money and time and go improve some more of our sites. [END OF COMMERCIAL]
With rare exceptions, IT guys like to keep the web toys for themselves. They like to pat you on the head and tell you something can’t be done and when you ask, “Why?” they tell you you wouldn’t understand because it’s so technical.
If I were you, I might just set up a simple WordPress.com site, or something at Typepad, and just make the company website the way YOU think it should be. When it’s far enough along, show it to the Grown-ups. They’ll love it and start asking why the old website sucks so bad.
Good luck.
OMG, I work for a company that has a “stale” website and I was thinking to myself, I would like to do some things, but our IT guys say “oh no, it’s a big job to do that” This is such big news to me can’t wait to ask them what about “wordpress”. I betcha I get burned on the first attempt but I will not give up. Heck I even signed up for twitter, don’t get it yet, but I’m trying. Love you Steve
Impressive work; my company is looking to do that same thing for our Chinese site (we have an office in Beijing) and WordPress would be just the ticket. We want our China office be able to update it on their own and WordPress’ back-end is very easy to manage in my experience. I’ve been using WordPress on my blog for years. I really like the template you worked from. I’ll check out StudioPress and give our art department a break!
You know viewers, there’s no end to this little fez wearer’s talents.
I like it !
For my money Word Press is the best CMS out there. I’m even going to *attempt* to teach my self some basic PHP so I can mess around with the layouts.