In the past I used Joomla! for all of my website needs. Joomla! is a great content management system yet also has its flaws. Recently, since times have been slow, I decided to experiment with different content management systems for the websites I design and compare them to Joomla! The best one I have found is wordpress.

I originally thought that Wordpress was just a blogging solution since that is how it is advertised. Now I have used this software on almost a dozen sites and each of them are dramatically different. I have used it to create content sites, social networking sites, blogs and it can really be used for almost anything you can imagine.

Some reasons to use Wordpress? Wordpress has almost twice the number of plugins that Joomla! does. A plugin allows you to add onto the out of the box functions these Content Management Systems have. You can make your site into a photo gallery, a video site like YouTube or in a real estate agents case you can use it to add listing tools and much more.The best part of it all? Its FREE!

I have been testing this out on my new site Monterey CA Homes for Sale.

Wordpress is easy to install as most hosting companies offer a 1-click install to set up the site. Once your website is set up you can use your personalized login area to get into the administrative area of your webiste:

Once you login to your wordpress website you will see your "Dashboard"

One of the reasons I like wordpress is because the dashboard is SO easy to use. The learning curve is also much lower then Joomla is. The other thing is that you can do almost anything from here; look for free templates, plugins and edit your pages. Since we are using the Monterey Homes For Sale site and using real estate websites as an example here I will show you some of the things I am testing on this website. I will also go into more detail on plugins and templates you can use on your site in the future.

Lets add a plugin to the website. We are going to test out the Great Real Estate Plugin, which allows you to add listings to your website.

First we need to go to Plugins - Add New on the sidebar of the Administrative Area.

You will see the following page:

Now Search for the Great Real Estate Plugin:

Now we have to install the plugin. On the right side of the screen you will see a link titled "install" next to each plugin that the search results gives. Click this to install. The next screen will show that the plugin has installed and you will then need to click "activate" this will allow us to now use this awesome plugin.

Now lets test it out.

On the right menu of your Administrative area in Wordpress you will now see a tab that says "Real Estate" click on the little arrow to the right of this to see the options. We are going to click "Listings".

Later we will go over a couple of features of the Great Real Estate plugin, add a listing, go over free templates and talk about adding widgets to our new Wordpress website! If there are any other features you would like to know about in regards to wordpress please let me know.