WordPress is a mature, well supported content management system with a ‘self hosted‘ version as well as the free/commercial hosted option. While it started off as a blogging platform and still excels at that, full websites are also easy to manage with the WordPress platform. With hundreds of excellent plugins available, it can be used for all sorts of web design projects aside from a blog or website however. Here are three unusual WordPress sites that we’ve built for clients.
WordPress for Digital Signage
A client wanted an internal ‘digital signage’ system in their office, with easy to edit pages showing latest company news and key data on how well they are doing as a team, amongst other things. A tiny ‘Raspberry Pi‘ computer was attached to the back of a monitor on the wall, and this runs a web server with a local version of WordPress installed. We created templates to match the screen size and company branding, with custom fields so they could enter various types of information such as sales figures or new clients signed this month. The pages then rotated every few minutes, creating a point of interest and motivation for the team.
WordPress/WooCommerce ‘pay what you want’
WooCommerce is the ecommerce plugin offered by the company behind WordPress, so it ties in tightly to the core software and has hundreds of plugins available. We used some of these plugins to create a ‘pay what you want’ system rather than the site being a traditional ecommerce site based on categories and products. The customer could choose an amount to pay, then the basket step was skipped to streamline payment by going straight to the checkout.
Some extra fields on the WooCommerce checkout captured the invoice number and contact so payments could be matched up easily in the back office system. Payments were handled by Stripe, which appears to stay on the company website while actually processing payment details off-site. No payment details are stored on the client site, reducing their overhead for payment system auditing.
A Private Journalling Platform
The benefits of journalling are well known and I find it a great way to organise my thoughts before starting work for the day. Developers sometimes use ‘rubber ducking’ where coding problems are explained to a rubber duck or houseplant in order to talk it through and reach the answer ourselves. I find journalling does a similar thing! With journalling being highly personal however, I don’t trust any company to keep my innermost thoughts safe on the internet, so I run a local WordPress install as my diary. It runs on a system called Local which is a quick and easy way to run WordPress locally rather than on web hosting.
A ‘post template’ plugin is used to load some personalised journal prompts like these and keep me focused. WordPress as a journal works better than paper for me as I can search through old posts and categories them for easier browsing. It’s really helpful to go back to old posts and see how I dealt with previous situations and see patterns.
Summary
We’ve looked at three uses for the popular web design software WordPress here. As well as being an easy to use blog or business website, WordPress can be extended with plugins or custom code to meet all kinds of personal or business needs.
If you need a website building that’s a bit different to the norm, drop us a line or call 01636 812551 for a chat.