I’m a big fan of WordPress. I’ve been using it to maintain a couple of blogs for about 2 years. We use it at work for our campus-wide blogging service and it has served us well. I am so impressed that an open source and free piece of software works so well and is so feature rich. The WordPress community of developers have a lot to be proud of.

I am using WordPress as a CMS for my personal web site, but really I still use it as a blog with a few pages with static content. I know people use it as a CMS, but not until this weekend did I truly see the potential for a small web site. An artist friend of mine has a web site that I helped design. He has been using Adobe Contribute to keep it updated and this has worked fairly well. However, a recent OS upgrade made his Contribute stop working. He would need to purchase the latest version, which is kind of pricey.

I thought that WordPress might be a workable solution for him and approached him with the idea. I showed him the interface and how all edits are done through the browser. I showed him some themes and how with a simple change, the design of his site could be changed on the fly. He was intrigued and agreed to try it.

In less than 48 hours I was able to show him a working site that had more features than his previous site. I found a nicely designed portfolio theme and used my ace CSS and coding skills to modify it to suit his needs. I was able to use WP Categories to create the navigation structure, so all his paintings are categorized by type. If he decides to move one post from say, Figurative, to Archives, he can do so with a click of the mouse. He doesn’t have to change the navigation or edit any code. A plug-in made creating a contact form a breeze. I had to hand code this before. We will be able to install new features using plug-ins.

The potential to create online catalogs of work for artists using WordPress is intriguing. I now have an easy way to help my artist friends create elegant and easy to maintain web sites.