In response to the current state of the American economy many companies are looking for innovative methods of reducing costs. A business looking to develop or overhaul their corporate web presence should consider shedding their expensive content management system for a lower cost alternative. Companies have heard a great deal in the last few years about the benefits of open-source. The recent culture of belt-tightening that has spread through all major industries provides companies with an excellent opportunity to explore these technologies.

Here at Brolly, we have just launched a new corporate website for Aurora Importing and Distributing, a medium sized Canadian food importing business, built entirely on the WordPress platform.

The Aurora Importing and Distributing website gives an indication of how powerful WordPress can be as a professional grade CMS. Using WordPress’ plug-in functionality we were able to develop extensions to build a dynamic product locator which interfaces beautifully with the Google Maps API, an interactive product catalogue as well as offer the entire website in both French and English. We have also developed a plug-in that enables the company to synchronize their internal corporate data with the web server to ensure the site stays as current as possible. Employees at the company were easily trained on the extremely easy-to-use WordPress administration system and are able to publish frequent updates. Affordable professional hosting solutions provided by companies such as Media Temple allow you to host your website on reliable servers that will scale beautifully according to the demand on your web application.

WordPress has been in a constant state of development since 2003. Each iteration of the WordPress software is notoriously stable and upgrading is a painless process. It is easy to keep your website running with the latest offerings from the WordPress community allowing you to benefit from new security measures and added features. Many content management systems have poorly designed user interfaces, limited features and come with a hefty price tag. WordPress is gorgeous, robust and entirely free. Thanks to WordPress’ API, third party developers are able to easily build custom software solutions that integrate with WordPress seamlessly.

Visit Aurora Importing and Distributing’s new website and the WordPress Showcase for some inspiration on what can be achieved using the WordPress platform. To get an idea of what the WordPress interface looks like, try starting your own blog on WordPress.com.