Using WordPress for more than Blogging

Friday, November 20th, 2009

We recently launched a knowledge base for a client using WordPress to manage information. The company is a professional services company that had a password-protected section of their site filled with PDFs and Word documents. They spent a large amount of time formatting and branding Word documents and saving them as PDFs. They had the client section of their site divided into manageable categories with links to download the PDFs. We proposed the idea they we use WordPress to manage their client section to provide a way for their clients to communicate feedback about a given information resource and a way for the clients to search for the content they needed. It would also cut down the time they spent formatting and converting to PDFs. An added benefit was that we could highlight the most recent resource additions and use the keyword tagging function built into WordPress as an additional to direct visitors to the content they were looking for.

What we did was create category page templates, reused the categories they already had in place, enabled visitors to comment on a given article (post) to ask additional questions or provide feedback, add tags to the sidebar and in each article, and added the search functionality that sorted the results alphabetically rather than the standard most recent post at the top. The result was a section of the site that our customer could manage themselves, had multiple ways for visitors to find the information they were looking for and a mechanism to receive feedback on the quality on the information they were providing.

Both my client and I were very happy with the result. One value add over time will be our use of a separate Google Analytics instance to track how their clients are using the knowledge base to find information and using this information to improve the quality of their content. My goal is to do a case study about this in 6 months or a year.