As I delve in deeper to Wordpress, I am learning so much
about the way content is handled and organized. And one of the best resources that I found that helps to
build and better blog and/or website is to research other websites and see how
they use a content management system. Though what I’ve learned is that there
are wrong and right ways to use a CMS but there are also many different ways to
organize information as well, not necessarily wrong, but different.
The site that I researched for this post is the band site
for The Rolling Stones. I must say I am a little bit of a Stones fan, but I am
even a bigger fan since they are using a CMS to do their web stuff.
One important element of Wordpress that all builders, new
and experienced should always take into consideration is the difference between
posts and pages, when to use each one. This is a great feature of Wordpress and
if done correctly cannot only make your site/blog more organized but it can
also improve the visual aesthetic as well. The eye can definitely pick up when
something is designed well, even if you can’t pick out what it is about the
site that sets it off. The Rolling Stones site manages their posts and pages in
this way. The pages function statically and hold the appropriate content, while
the posts show up on each page. Some of the posts, you can tell are set to be
sticky (holds them in place and ignores the reverse chronoglogical function of
posts on pages) which actually works with the other content that they have. I
think this display of posts is most functional on the home page.
They also use Wordpress plugins very well. Wordpress
is really just very basic without the thousands of plugins that are used to
tailor so many different aspects of a site. From incorporating Javascripts to multimedia,
plugins are definitely one of the most important features that Wordpress
offers. ( Which sadly I found out the hard way by using a free Wordpress.com
site for Capstone) There was actually a pretty good example of the Stones incorporating a Lightbox-like photo gallery that I know was made possible via Java.
I think navigation is what really sets Wordpress apart from
other types of CMSs and
webbuilders, because you can almost guess that a site was
created by Wordpress just by looking at the navigation. I like the Rolling Stones site because it uses custom menus and parent/child pages to help navigate content. Everything that I could possibly want to find on the Stones' site is easily accessible without having to search and sift through information.
If I would give any cons to the site, I would definitely say that the text sections (scroll down once you click the link) have too much information for a user to digest at any moment, and that I would hope that they might go through and shorten/ condense some of the info to make it more user digestible.
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