10 Sites You Can Make With WordPress Apart From a Blog

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The self-hosted version of WordPress, available at WordPress.org, is much more than a blogging application. It’s a content management system and a web publishing system that can help you create a wide variety of websites and features that you might not even realize you could be doing!

Following are ten things you could do with WordPress in addition to blogging. Chances are, no matter what you want to do with WordPress, there are themes, plugins, and tools available that will make it fairly easy. If you can’t find the tool you need, there is probably a WordPress developer who can create it for you.

1. Business Website

Did you know that a large number of business websites are built on WordPress? You can find an example here. That’s because with a single mouse click in the Reading Settings section of your WordPress dashboard, you can turn the home page of your site into a static page, like a business site’s home page. You can then add more pages to the site, modify navigation, and even add a blog.

Many free and affordable WordPress themes are available that make it incredibly easy to create a highly professional business website using the self-hosted WordPress application.

2. Ecommerce Website

If you want to sell merchandise or create an online store, you can do it easily with a WordPress theme designed for that exact purpose. You can find some examples on theTemplatic website.

There are also many free and affordable WordPress plugins that enable you to turn your site into a complete e-commerce website or simply add a shopping cart to your site. The WP-Ecommerce plugin is one of the most popular options.

3. Forum Website

WordPress integrates seamlessly with a variety of online forum tools. There is even a WordPress plugin, Simple Press, which makes it even easier to create a forum on your site!

4. Aggregation Website

If you’re a fan of sites like Alltop or PopURLs and want to create your own website that aggregates links from specific blog and website RSS feeds, you can do it with WordPress. TheOneNews WordPress theme and Accumulo WordPress theme are both very popular options.

5. Member Site

Creating a member site with WordPress can be as simple as publishing a private site (or making specific pages and posts private) and inviting people to become members. Simply give members user rights through your WordPress dashboard such as subscriber or contributor, so they can view and submit content. The choice is yours based on the WordPress user roles you grant to members.

If you’d prefer not to give members access to your WordPress dashboard to contribute content, you could use a WordPress plugin such as the Gravity Forms plugin or Formidable Pro plugin for members to submit content.

There are also WordPress plugins like WP-Members that give you more control of how members register for your site and access content.