Using WordPress as a small business website
I’ve developed a teaching module that helps students start to create a simple business web site using WordPress. The students launch a new site on a web host via an install script, come up with a simple category structure, and download/upload a new theme.
As an example of a business WordPress site, I use nextbusnews.com. NextBus is the groovy technology that tells me real-time how late my next MUNI bus will be (more details on how NextBus uses WordPress as a simple content management system here).
It amazes me that only 36% of US small businesses with net access have a web site (as reported in the Wall St. Journal last week). This is 2008, not 1998!
Is there an opportunity for WordPress to become a kind of generic small business solution? Business sites can be done now, of course, with some tweaking and geeking. But, following the analogy from Stephen O’Grady’s talk at WordCamp on Saturday, perhaps someone needs to build a company on top of WordPress, in the same way that Google builds its services on top of open source software. A small business website service built with WordPress, but where 99% of the users don’t even know what WordPress is? Edublogs for small business, but maybe without even using the term ‘blog’? Is this a good idea? Is somebody doing this? In the meantime, we think there are lots of good reasons to teach students about open source business platforms and basic content management via WordPress.
(I’m going to wait on an official release of this teaching module until after I hear from reviewers at the WITS 2008 Technology Instruction in Business Curriculum Competition.)
This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Internet Apps class, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 
on August 19, 2008 at 3:46 pm Newt Barrett wrote:
J.P.
Thanks for the shout out.
The NextBusNews.com site is something that my company worked on with NextBus. I am a WordPress fanatic and have helped create a number of WordPress sites–including my own. I write a lot about WP at ContentMarketingToday.com
You might want to take a look at some just launched sites: http://www.swfloridabusinessnews.com, http://www.5advise.com, http://www.mimismanners.com, and my book site, http://www.getcontentgetcustomers.com. They are very different, but all built with WP.
One of the things I love about WP is that I can prototype a website very quickly, even though I am not really a techie.
I guess I should add that I believe that delivering relevant and valuable content is every bit as critical as the web design.
Cheers,
Newt
on August 29, 2008 at 6:25 am Content Marketing Today » IT Prof at U of SF Lauds WordPress as Small Business Web Development Tool wrote:
[...] a recent post he gave a shout out to NextBus as a great example of a cool company with a cool WordPress-based [...]