3 Ways to use WordPress as a Service

There are many ways, and many reasons, why you would want to use WordPress for something other than publishing a blog. Maybe you want a place to keep track of your ideas, somewhere to remember links you find or you simply need an online presence. Anything you can think of you can create.

The fact is that WordPress can be transformed into a powerful personal tool for a huge variety of purposes. I won't go through the whole process of installing and setting up WordPress here.

If you want help with getting started let me know in the comments section, I'll be more than happy to help get you set-up and running.

WordPress as a Service

I've made use of WordPress for different publishing and content sharing tasks but I've also deployed solutions to personal problems built solely from WordPress. I've even built sites from WordPress that are used within organizations to make their communications more efficient in the form of an Intranet.

As a Mind-Map

Are you forever taking notes and jotting down ideas for this, that and the next thing? If that's the case then you need a place to store and organize it all.You might want to make everything public or keep it secret - doesn't matter. It's simply a case of changing a single drop down box on the writing screen.

We could all do with a single location to keep our brilliant ideas and stop us forgetting them. WordPress's built in file uploader makes it easy to include files with your notes and the tags and categories make it super easy to organize it all and file it away for later use.

As a Professional Resume/CV or Vanity Blog

Zwin is a Professional Resume/CV Wordpress themeIn the world of working online it is expected that you have your Resume in a digital format - so you can email it off to potential employers. Sometimes you have it in MS Word format or PDF but how about having it directly accessible online as well?

You might already have a site for your company but if not you can quickly create a vanity blog (either self-hosted or through WordPress.com) and link it from there. There are thousands of suitable, ready-built, themes that would work well for a Resume.

It's so easy for you to get an online Resume set up this way that it would be a missed opportunity for you not to get yours online too. That way can have a clearly formatted, well presented and stunningly designed Resume sure to catch they eye of any potential employer.

WordPress for an Intranet

Not everyone works on their own like I do - in fact most of us work for a company with other people and people in a company need to communicate with each other. They have to share information and documents, discuss ideas, collaborate on projects and assign tasks. Having WordPress as an Intranet is a fantastic use of it as a Service.

Believe it or not you can set-up WordPress to do all of that in under 20 minutes!  The WordPress and BuddyPress cores combined with a few select plugins provide a fantastic Intranet.

I'll be covering using it as an Intranet in much more detail on my personal site in the coming weeks.

Wrapping Up

Truthfully you could put WordPress to use for any reason you wanted. Traditionally WordPress is a blogging platform but these days it's considered more of a Content Management Solution. For me it's not just a blogging platform - or even just a CMS - it's a content sharing platform that can be turned to any purpose with very little work. It is so versatile that it's used on over 60 million sites worldwide!

So there you have it. 4 possible uses for WordPress as a Service that you may never have thought of. Go ahead and set yourself up a test install and see what amazing things you can do with it.

Do you know any other interesting ways WordPress can be used or do you use WordPress as a solution to any of your company's problems? Let me know in the comments section!