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So you want a website, you want it fast, and you want to be able to update the content yourself. However, like most start-ups, artists or non-profits, you don’t have a lot of money to invest up-front. It’s a common problem, but thankfully, it’s also an easily resolvable one!

If you’re familiar with WordPress, you’re likely familiar with it as a blogging tool. WordPress does blogging beautifully and has a huge open source community of developers and designers gathered around it. There are myriad plugins* and themes available for free online that can help you create, if not an entirely original blog, at least a very attractive and functional one.

Better yet, in addition to being a powerful tool for blogging, WordPress can also function as a CMS (Content Management System) — with the help of a knowledgeable designer/developer. Here are some examples of sites using WordPress as a Content Management System:

* - StoryCorps: An NPR Project, StoryCorps’ mission is “to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening.” StoryCorps has gone through some heavy customization, and has a custom template. Their website credits page lists a few of the plugins they use to accomplish some of their functionality.

*- The Fat Experience Project: FXP is an oral and visual history project, seeking to humanize the life lived large. Its format is similar to a blog, but is more extensive and magazine-style. Their template is Mimbo Pro but has been aesthetically altered with their own images and color scheme. They are using a few plugins as well for audio files and for translation. This is a good example of what can be done using a CMS-enabled template as your foundation.

*- Little White Lies: Designed by a creative agency, LWL shows an excellent mix of static content, blog content and the flexibility of WordPress using categories, posts and pages together in a well-organized fashion.

Using WordPress as a CMS is not as simple as it is to use it as a Blog. You will need to enlist the help of a talented and tech-savvy developer/designer to create a truly functional solution. There are free templates available that can aid you in this, but they are fewer in number than blog templates and you may find yourself wanting something a tad more original. The benefit, however, of using WordPress as a CMS is that you save yourself a great deal of time and money at the foundational level by only requiring a developer to help with customization and setting you up with the content layout so you can start filling it up yourself.

To Start Using WordPress as a CMS:

* - Find yourself a good green web host

* - Hire yourself a talented designer with the following skillsets: PHP, CSS, XHTML

* - Be prepared to invest in, at minimum, 10 hours of their time for customization of an existing template, or double/triple that for a truly custom solution.

* - Log in, type, submit and go!

If You are a Designer/Developer, Check Out the Following Articles and Resources:

* - WordPress Codex: User:Lastnode/Wordpress CMS

*- Things to Consider when Choosing WordPress as a CMS

*- Robert Basic’s Tutorial: An excellent walk-through.

* – Be wary of plugins. As WordPress releases new versions, some plugins that aren’t continuously being revised and supported may cease to function. Relying on a plugin for a huge portion of your site’s featureset may ultimately find you either stuck using an older version of WordPress than you’d prefer, or needing to scramble at the last minute to find a replacement plugin in order to upgrade. Be sure that when you choose plugins that you are choosing the ones with excellent reviews, an active development team and checking around to see what support is like before you install them.