I worked with a private college recently that has adopted an interesting CMS solution: Customized WordPress templates. The college’s Web team has deployed WordPress pages for academic and administrative departments, and even for high-level admissions and gateway pages. I was skeptical about the approach at first (for reasons that I’ll share below), but I have to admit that the pages look great, and this minimalist solution appears to be meeting the institution’s needs pretty well.

WordPress is undeniably the King of the Blogging Services. Nobody matches WordPress for blogging flexibility, aesthetics and ease of use. But as its feature set has grown over the past couple years, WordPress has become a legitimate Web publishing system that can handle a lot more than personal blogs. So, should cash-strapped non profits consider building entire sites on the WordPress framework? I think it merits consideration; Continue reading to find out why.

Some reasons your organization should consider building your site with WordPress:

1. You’re short on cash (hello, non-profit world!). WordPress is open source and completely free.

2. You don’t want to start from scratch. There is an entire community of Web designers churning out WordPress templates that are standards-compliant and, by and large, beautiful. Customizing a well-coded WordPress template is much easier than building a site yourself.

3. You need your site up yesterday. An out-of-the-box WordPress template can be up and running in literally minutes. A decent CSS designer can fully customize a template in days.

4. You want “Web 2.0″ features. WordPress pages come with built-in RSS and podcasting support. There are also hundreds of third-party WordPress plugins that add even more functionality to your site.

5. Your content is mostly text-based. WordPress handles copy–particularly chronological posts–beautifully. If your site is mostly informational and blog-based, you won’t find a better system than WordPress.

A few reasons you might not want to build your site with WordPress:

1. You need a centrally-managed CMS solution. When WordPress is deployed across multiple departments at the same institution, each group becomes its own self-publishing island. Workflow can be deployed within each group, but content cannot be managed by a central server-based administrator (such as the institution’s Web editor). If you need centralized control, WordPress is probably not the right tool.

2. You have lots of different types of content. WordPress is great at text, but limited in its multimedia capabilities. Of course, with enough tweaking, nearly anything is possible. But fundamentally, the WordPress system is for publishing copy.

3. Your site has a lot of pages. WordPress has great potential for smaller non profits or standalone micro-sites; but for big sites with thousands of pages and extensive architecture, WordPress does not offer enough flexibility or scalability.

Even if WordPress is not ideal for large sites, it is still a fantastic tool for blogs (obviously) and news pages, since they rely on incremental entries and need elegant RSS capabilities. I am surprised that more universities aren’t using WordPress pages for their PR & Communications offices, as there’s no easier way to provide RSS feeds.

I look forward to exploring further possibilities with WordPress with some of my clients, and I hope to share some additional observations in future posts.