As WordPress grows more popular and ever more powerful, using WordPress as a CMS is now becoming mainstream.

First of all, what is a CMS? The letters stand for ‘Content Management System’ which is a fancy way of saying ‘website’. Yes, you can make a WordPress blog look and feel like a traditional website. A WordPress blog doesn’t have to look like a blog at all.

How? Well, first of all you need to decide what you want your CMS to look like. This is no different from designing a website. On some paper, sketch out what your front page will look like, where you want your navbars and where those navbars will lead. On a traditional website the navbars will likely lead to other static pages. So, make a list of the pages you’ll need to create.

Then choose an appropriate theme. If you’re using a free theme from WordPress, choose something minimal and simple. It’s easier to add features to a theme than take them away.

The front page of your blog will probably be a static page, one that is always displayed as the landing page of your site. This page could be a hub page with links to other pages, just like a conventional website, if you like.

Many themes have tabs or buttons that navigate to pages. If you’re going to have a lot of pages it will be better to avoid a theme that has a horizontal menu of pages because you’ll likely run out of horizontal space. If you’re going to have a lot of pages put your navbar vertically down one side.

You’ll soon find that there are a lot of ways you can do this. The easiest is to use a ‘Pages’ widget. This will automatically update as you add another page. You can specify the order of pages down the list if you want. And you can organise your pages into a hierarchy by specifying parent pages.

Strip out all the bloggy looking widgets from your sidebars. But be prepared to be open to ideas because WordPress provides some very powerful and flexible ways you can harness widgets to do what you want. Categories is one example.  By applying one or more categories to a page you get an alternative and more intuitive way of navigating your blog.

And if posts and comments are not appropriate, then you don’t have to include them. Just organise your blog as a network of pages and you’ll be fine.

The great beauty of WordPress is that, as you add pages, it automatically updates menus and links. You’ll never have to worry about broken links again and your CMS will grow gracefully as you add ever more pages. That’s got to be worth it!