10 things you can build with WordPress

WordPress is a content management system used by millions of websites all over the world. But what exactly can you build with it? Is WordPress just about publishing blogs, or are there other applications too?

It turns out that you can do a lot more with WordPress than publish blogs. Yes, WordPress is a content management platform, but the universe of possibilities that it offers far exceeds what most people expect. In truth, it’s a kind of operating system for the internet, providing hundreds, if not thousands, of features through its network of helpful plugins.

So what esoteric things can you build with this wonder platform? Let’s take a look.

E-Commerce Websites

Although Shopify would have you believe that it is the only game in town when it comes to e-commerce websites, WordPress provides a fabulously rich resource for newbie entrepreneurs to flog their wares over the internet. No, it’s not as intuitive as Shopify by any stretch of the imagination, but what WordPress lacks in user-friendliness it more than makes up for in features. With WordPress, you can create a bespoke e-commerce shopping site, integrate payment, manage inventory, and do practically everything that you can do on off-the-shelf solutions, like Shopify. What’s more, it’s relatively cheap to run too. 

Podcasts

Despite the plethora of videocasts out there on the internet, there’s still a role for podcasts in the modern world thanks to the fact that people like to move around and do other things as they listen. WordPress provides a platform that helps to manage and arrange podcasts, as well as giving users search tools to browse through them.

Contact Books

If you run a small enterprise or a consulting business, managing all your clients can soon become a difficult task. But with the help of WordPress contacts plugin, you can quickly view which of your contacts are currently on your site, allowing you to manage them more effectively and deploy better marketing.

Web Soapboxes

Web soapboxes are a little bit like the internet’s version of talk radio. They’re an opportunity for every Tom, Dick and Harry out there to share their opinions with others. WordPress provides tools that allow you to create websites that make it easy for people to voice their views, whether that’s through forum plugins, comments plugins, or the ability to upload video.

Review Sites

Review sites have jumped enormously in popularity over recent years. People view review sites to try to find genuine information about products that they want to buy. There are, in general, two ways to build a review website, both facilitated by WordPress. The first is to write the reviews yourself – a bit like an editorial column at a magazine. WordPress provides you with facilities to periodically publish reports in a highly structured and formatted way.

The second is to get customers to write reviews themselves. If you’re an e-commerce company, this could come in handy. As the vendor, you can verify that a customer has made the purchase and that their review is authentic. Customer reviews are becoming increasingly popular and are being driven by people’s desire to find out what peers think about the goods that they are considering buying online.

Resume Sites

While most people will be satisfied uploading their CVs to LinkedIn and Indeed, for some, that just isn’t enough. WordPress allows you to build resume sites where you can include much more information about who you are, what you do, and where you’ve come from than any CV ever could.

Photo Galleries

Let’s say you’ve just taken your business to an event and you want to show customers and record of what you did. Perhaps you want to share images of people enjoying your products or of the props you used at a tradeshow. Whatever it is, WordPress can help. WordPress has tools that allow you to share all your photos with friends and followers online, and an intuitive user interface that makes browsing those pictures easy.

Business Websites

For most businesses, their websites aren’t the primary way they generate sales. But merely having a site can help a great deal. Prospective customers will usually want to check out your website as a matter of course to see what your company is about, what your values are, and, frankly, whether you have the expertise to construct a great website (as that might be an indication of the quality of your products).

WordPress is an excellent tool for creating company websites because it offers much more functionality than standard website builder templates. With its many plugins and the ability to edit the source code, WordPress provides a world of opportunities to savvy companies who want to create bespoke experiences for their users.

News Sites

Many companies need outlets through which they can tell the world about stories that they are interested in. And while many will choose to push them through a blog or articles section on their main site, others will create an entirely new website just for current affairs.

WordPress can help in this regard too. In fact, WordPress is such a great tool for news that some of the most prominent news organisations in the world, like CNN and Techcrunch, use the platform to distribute their stories. WordPress allows the builders of news sites to create summary pages that link to articled and automatically update once new stories come through.

Question And Answer Sites

You’ve no doubt heard of Quora. It’s a website where you can ask pretty much any question you like and hope that somebody, somewhere has an answer. One of the great things about Quora is the fact that the site allows users to vote on whether they think an answer is good or not, pushing the best responses to the top of the list, and relegating those that do not make the grade.

Because of its rich set of features, WordPress can be used to build question and answer sites too. WordPress users can choose between several plugins, including DW Questions and Answers and CM Answers.

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