Val­ley Children’s Med­ical Center

I have built and been main­tain­ing a web­site, valleycmc.com, for a pedi­atric prac­tice in Indio, CA. It’s a small site of  about ten pages.

I orig­i­nally cre­ated the site in 2006 using only a text edi­tor. I knew it was going to be a small site with sta­tic pages. I of course antic­i­pated that some web pages will need occasional updating.

But as time went along, how­ever infre­quent these updates were, the process was always not as easy as it should be.  Fur­ther­more, there’s always a delay in post­ing changes because my client usu­ally either calls me or send me an email about the changes. I would then usu­ally fire up my ftp client then work or sift through lines and lines of HTML and php codes. While it’s not really that big of a deal, I knew my own process can be a lot less painful if I rebuild the entire web­site using a Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem or CMS.

I’m a com­plete noob at CMS so I nat­u­rally turned to Google for a lit­tle research on what avail­able free CMS scripts are out there. One quick search and Google quickly pointed me to the direc­tion of Dru­pal, Joomla, php-Nuke, and other usual sus­pects. But too be blunt, all of them are a lit­tle more com­plex than what I need. I need some­thing light with a very user-friendly interface.

It wasn’t until I came across this Read­ing Set­tings in Word­Press that I real­ized I could use it as a CMS.  I knew I could cre­ate pages but I did not want blog posts on my home­page and this set­ting options solved that issue for me. It enabled me to have both a “home­page” and a “blog” at the top of the nav­i­ga­tional menu to go to sep­a­rate pages. I thought the “blog” sec­tion would be a great page for impor­tant news and updates about the med­ical practice.

Word­press Editor

WordPress’ WYSIWYG edi­tor is also every­thing I needed. It’s light, flex­i­ble, and uncom­pli­cated. I, and more impor­tantly my client, can now update, add, or delete pages and posts in real time.

In the end, the deci­sion to use Word­Press as a CMS was a no-brainer for me. I’m already very famil­iar with its back end. It’s also sup­ported by a big com­mu­nity so knew I’d find every plu­g­ins that I would ever need for my small web­site. After this project, I can’t think of any rea­son why I wouldn’t use or rec­om­mend Word­Press: not just for med­ical prac­tices, but for any small busi­ness websites.

 Check out my client’s web­site, ValleyCMC.com, and let me know what you think.