Big Media Leveraging WordPress for Online Presence

Proving once again that WordPress is not just the domain of hobby blogs and small online entities, we are spotlighting international news giant, CNN as a WordPress user. CNN actually has a constellation of WordPress blogs covering a wide variety of topics from the news giant’s coverage, ranging from personal pieces to global events, with specialized niches in between.

While they certainly aren’t limited to doing so, CNN has chosen a consistent look and feel across these blogs. This allows visitors to instantly orient themselves and use the collection of sites regardless of which topics they are jumping to or from. Additionally, design changes to one site can be easily applied to all the other sites with much less possibility of conflict.

Their choice of a traditional main column and right hand sidebar design is very clean, the latter allowing CNN to feature recent, popular, archived, social content and more while keeping the current stories and articles uncluttered.

A consistent header ties in CNN other online assets, while a modest footer wraps up the site all that small print the lawyers love so much.

The CNN implementation of WordPress is a good example of how you don’t have to push theme design to the bleeding edge to get an efficient, useable web site that makes your content or message the centerpiece of your visitor’s experience.

• CNN Blog Portal
• Anderson Cooper 360
• CNN Newsroom
• CNN Goalmouth

About this series: One of the biggest hurdles decision makers have to overcome in understanding just how powerful and versatile WordPress is as a web presence platform is one of perception as merely a “blog” (the other is the word “blog” itself, but that’s a topic for another article). From its humble origins, WordPress has evolved into a full blown Content Management System. Those decision makers with the vision to embrace that fact have been rewarded with a robust and economic resource that rises to the challenges of an ever changing internet landscape. Fueled by one of the most creative user communities in the open-source world, WordPress is the solution of choice for a growing number of businesses; from small groups staking their online claim to some of the largest names in business.

In this ongoing series, I’ll be sharing some of these with you and showing you how they made WordPress work for them.

If you’d like to see how WordPress can transform your web site and allow you to take the reins of your online presence, we offer many quickly deployable solutions for new WordPress users and enhancements and services for existing WordPress sites.