I have lots of experience with WordPress.  So I figured if I could help anyone by providing this list that I should!  I should warn you that some of these plug ins will take a bit of technical know how while others will be more simple.  You may even notice some of these plugins on our internet marketing blog!

Here is a list of my Favorite 15 Plugins to Help you Build your Website Property!

1. Navigation:  Personally I like to integrate the drop down menus manually instead of plug-ins. You can either make use of http://users.tpg.com.au/j_birch/plugins/superfish/ or http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/ddsmoothmenu.htm

   For those of you who are not accustomed to editing css and getting it integrated, you can go for this plug-in

2. Search: WordPress comes with a Search Module by default but it’s limited in functionality. Get the ‘Search Everything’ Plug-in which allows you to practically search anything on WordPress including pages, posts, comments. Want a more functionally search with search hints?  Get yourself ‘Live Search Popup’ !
3. BreadCrumbs: Want to put a nice little one-two-three level trail to help visitors understand where they are on your website? Go and get the ‘Breadcrumb NavXT’ plug-in
4. Newsletter: Yes even this solution is available and it is free. The functionality offered by ‘Mail Press’ can match any commercial script available
5. Events Calendar: Do you have upcoming events and no way to announce it intuitively. Worry no more get yourself the ‘Event Calendar 3′ Plug-in. It allows you to display calendar added events on it which become visible when hovered.  A detailed description can be provided via light box effect and even a post can be created of the same and a link put inside the light box window.
6. Forum: Want to run a forum like PhpBB but don’t want to have a separate admin for it but run it along with WordPress? Simple forum will help. It’s a good replacement for PhpBB. Maybe not that functional but will satisfy most of the same requirements. 
7. E-Commerce: is this possible with WordPress? No – not possible right? While not the most robust there actually is some solutions!
8. Media: Want to display media files, create video playlist, add videos in your posts? WordTube does all this and more! It even lets you use videos from YouTube
9. Gallery: Want to create photo galleries or albums? Add descriptions? NextGenGalley is the right plug-in for the job. It’s easy to install, upload files, and manage galleries and albums. While displaying images you can choose from a variety of effects   such as lightbox, thickbox, shutter etc. This Plug-in has been developed by Alex Rabe who has also developed the WordTube Plugin mentioned above.

10. Forms: this is an integral part of any website and a very important way for people to get in contact with you. Luckily for you, the guys at DeliciousDays have developed a plug-in called cforms II which helps you create forms, customize them add validation. The functionality and features offered by it should satisfy most of your form requirements. You can create multiple form templates. The creation part is simple and can be handled with ease. This Plug-in rocks and is a must have!

    Phew!!! 10 Plugins and still the list is not over. Exhale… here we go!

11. FAQ:  Faq’s are required by certain sites. The best plug-in that I have so far used is FAQ-Tastic. It allows you to add questions, answers and allows you to add a rating option for as well. It goes a step further putting a contact form below the FAQ enabling users to ask questions that are not present in the FAQ’s which will be directed to your backend.  You can then either answer it directly and can post it to the FAQ section.  I had downloaded this to test it and saw that it was incompatible with WP2.7 a solution to fix this can be found here: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/225393
    1. To ‘AJAXify’ your FAQ get this plug-in. The only downside mentioned by the developer is this doesn’t not display the rating. However, I fiddled with the CSS code and got it working.

        

12. SEO: In today’s world your site had to rank well on Search Engines!. Heres a list of Plug-ins that should help you optimize your site.
    1. All-in-one-SEO-Pack: Title, Description, Keywords; manage it all individually for each post and page.
    2. Head Space 2: This plug-in does all that’s mentioned above and much more.
    3. Google XML Sitemap Builder:  generate am xml sitemap pain free.
    4. Google Analyticator: Insert Google analytics to you page.
    5. Stats: Want to see stats from you backend?
13. Page Management: Want to manage your page dynamics like page order, create page links that point to external links? Get these plug-ins to do the job Page-Links-To PageMash . By default whatever you type as the page title in the backend will be used as the name when a page link is created. So to overcome this use this plug-in
14. Blog: Now wait a second -  don’t forget that WordPress was predominantly meant for blogging. Here’s some cool plug-ins to enhance your blog.
    1. WP-Rating: want to see what users think of your post? Well ad this rating plugiin. Its easy to install and manage. The ajax functionality is really good from a usability point of view.
    2. Bookmarking: I recommend  ‘Sociable‘,  but if you want the extra option of email to friend get the ‘Share This’ Plug-in
    3. Related Posts: it’s always good to have this plug-in which will give an opportunity to the users to delve more into your site.
    4. Tag Cloud: Tag clouds are cool, make it even more cool with a flash 3d representation. I won’t say more – so install WP-Cumulus and have fun!
15. Custom Fields:  There are some cool custom field management plug-ins to help ease your workload and at the same time make it much more user-friendly for the end user.
    1. Flutter: This plug-in is a life saver. It helps you give absolute control over custom fields, group them, add media/text area options to it. The possibilities are endfless. It’s a must have.
    2. Custom Field Template: This also helps manage custom field. If the above plug-in is too much for you resort to this

Have you made it this far?

I think the above list should be more than sufficient to meet the requirements of running a CMS website for small companies. Do you have any plug ins that you think the community could benefit from?  Please make sure to list them in the comments section!  WordPress developers have put in a lot of effort to develop these tools and your contribution will not only make it worthwhile for them, but also motivate them to improve and even develop new plug-ins for the benefit of the WordPress online community.

The purpose for writing this blog is to help anyone that is interested in learning why WordPress is more than just blog software.  In fact, if planned properly, WordPress can be used as the foundation piece for the content management system of your corporate website.

Why Use WordPress as a CMS?

1. The biggest reason: WordPress is open source with a strong development base and even stronger support community.
2. Plug-ins: WordPress has a huge array of plugins that can be added to the site with ease. Currently this plugin database has 3,880 plug-ins.  Simply put – any feature you can think of is more or less available or can be customized to meet your requirement.
3. Financial: WordPress saves you time and money because of the available modules and themes.  New modules or plug-ins developed by you can be reused and also shared with community of WordPress users.

Things To Consider When Considering WordPress

1. First of all make sure you have clarity on the site requirements and what it is you want to do with it. What are the functionalities you want to implement? Also make sure to glimpse into the future for future requirements.
2. Now decide whether your requirements are achievable via WordPress.

• Are the requirements readily available?
• Are plug-ins available for the features required? If they are not will a customization of a plug-in work?
• How hard will it be to integrate your requirements in WordPress.

     3.  How user friendly will it be for the end user to manage the site using the backend and features you have added on.

I can tell you that from my own experience WordPress will work perfectly at saving you vast amounts of money and also future administrative issues.  While these are all valid considerations I believe that if developed properly WordPress can be incredibly valuable in launching your website efficiently and with maximum flexibility.

The favored plug-ins that will help you build your CMS site using WordPress.

Make sure to check out my upcoming post where I examine my top 15 WordPress Plugins!

This is something that is rarely done properly.  Its more about asking yourselves questions. The answers are usually the easy thing to answer. So why bother asking what you know or can easily find? The answer is simple; it helps you to organize what you want to build and ensure that you do the exploration necessary to uncover any future requirements. 

Moving forward, lets look into the thought process which I am going to refer to as the "WWW Thought Process". This is not an established process, theory or assumption but something that I thought about in the past in my regular experience here at TechWyse. It also helps in classifying the steps involved. The naming sounds apt as we are developing the website for the world wide web. Expanded, the "WWW" as per my thought process stands for

1. W – Why you need a Website?
2. W – Who exactly are your target viewers?
3. W – What features do you want to offer on your Website?

1. Why you need a Website?

This the primary question you should ask yourselves. In most cases, the answer will be "I want to promote my business online". What you need to think about is, what to focus upon by which you can gain success when promoting online. What do I offer?, What strengths of mine should I focus on?, What’s lacking in the competitions websites?, What promotional offers can I do?, What will attract the customers? and so on. This can be used as groundwork for gathering information to put on your website.  Properly done, it will help you to categorize your website into different pages, sub-pages and thereby helping you to form a site with proper framework.

2. Who exactly are your target viewers?

This is an important question you should ask yourselves if you are planning on promoting your website. This involves identifying the potential viewers based on

• Geographical Location
• Age Group
• Sex
• Specialization / Industry

This classification will vary between businesses. What makes this thought process vital is, the web is vast and infinite, targeting the everyone means you are targetting no one.  Its always best to concentrate on potential viewers who can be converted to sales. Its best to lay the foundation first and then branch out. That way the yield will always be plenty.

3. What features do you want to offer on your website?

Finally, you should ask yourselves, "what will make your website stand out among the rest of the pack." This is very crucial and should be carefully thought out. Doing a competitor analysis will always prove beneficial. Questions to ponder include:

• Should I use image galleries/ video galleries?
• Should newsletter / RSS subscription be offered?
• Should I use a quick contact to initiate inquiries?
• Should I enable an ecommerce site for online sales?
• Should a search feature be present?
• Should I opt for CMS to manage the website?

The features that you can deploy are limitless.. The question that you should really ask is, "what features will be beneficial to the people visiting the website and what features will be beneficial for you in managing the website."

If your competitor lacks a win-win feature opt for it, if he has it, think of improving upon it to make it more user-friendly.

To summarize; when creating a successful website you need to satisfy not only your requirements but also satisfy the needs of the viewer by way of information, usability and accessibility. So by thinking on the visitors behalf you can build a plan to develop a successful website catering to both your needs and the visitors.