I discover that WordPress makes an excellent content management system.

CMS. I’ve seen the acronym quite a bit lately. Sadly I had to ask Miraz what it meant. (Blast my “swiss cheese” knowledge!) For those of you who are too shy to ask someone, it stands for content management system. It refers — at least as far as WordPress is concerned — to a system for publishing content on the Web.

I maintain a bunch of Web sites, most of which were originally created with Dreamweaver using HTML. Basic, boring stuff. Not very polished because of my limited knowledge of CSS and higher-level Web publishing languages and tools. And Dreamweaver was cumbersome to work with, especially on my 12-inch PowerBook’s little screen. (Dreamweaver, like so many software programs these days, is best to work with if you have a lot of screen real estate.) I wanted another solution, one that would make modifying pages and adding new content easier.

The answer, as I’ve discussed elsewhere in my blog, was a blogging tool. I got a false start with a blogging client called iBlog, then discovered and settled down with WordPress. I immediately converted two of my most content-heavy sites to WordPress format: wickenburg-az.com and aneclecticmind.com (which also now includes my blog and langerbooks.com in support of my book).

But was WordPress a true content management tool? Something I could use for a plain old Web site? Something that didn’t get new content a few times a week? Something that required easy-to-navigate pages so customers (preferably the hiring and paying kind) could find the information they needed? Something that could be formatted with my company’s “branding”, matching the appearance of existing brochures and advertisements? Something that would make them want the service I was selling?

I got the answer to that question this week. And the answer was yes.

Feast your eyes on the recently redesigned and republished Web site for Flying M Air, my helicopter tour and charter company. I think it makes a fine example of a WordPress CMS-executed Web site.

Although the site looks simple, there’s a lot that went into it. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing articles here that explain the challenges I faced in building the site and the solutions I came up with. I’ll provide lots of source code for you programming types, as well as tips and tricks for people who don’t like to roll their sleeves up quite as high.

Whether you’re using WordPress for a blog or a plain old Web site, I think you’ll find something of interest in the upcoming articles. So keep checking in. I’ll write them as I find time and you can find them here.