Wordpress has been associated closely to blogging due to the extensive support it has received from bloggers around the world from all niches. The standard features of wordpress has been sufficient for most users. But for webmasters with a creative bent of mind and with time and resources on hand, Wordpress offers infinitely more features. The customisation possibilities of this software have to be seen to be believed. The plugins, the themes, the widgets and other add-ins ensure that customising a wordpress installation is ‘comparitively a simple’ operation. We will look at a website today to illustrate our point.

Before we launch our analysis of the site, a little look at what the site is all about. SuburbanHouseHunters.com is the website of a Chicago real estate company run by Ken Smith, a respected realtor of the area. The site facilitates buying and selling of property in around the Chicago, Barrington, Rolling Meadows, Roselle and other neighboring areas. The website offers a couple of guarantees to buyers and sellers. For buyers, a guaranteed savings of $5000 is on offer while sellers are guaranteed to get a satisfactory price for their property within 60 days. A search feature is also available on the website to help in finding the right property.

The simplest way to get a ‘different’ look using Wordpress is to change thw theme. Themes define the design of the website. Ready to use theme libraries are available on the offical wordpress site and also at various other places. You can also choose to get your own custom theme designed. Having your own custom theme would ensure that the look and feel of your website is unique. This is what SuburbanHouseHunters.com have done. The custom theme, complete with logos ensure that the website gets a ‘rich’ look. Also note how this website has used colors intelligently to ensure that the business look is preserved. This is a great example of targetting the right demography of internet surfers.

This real estate website uses extensively the feature of ‘pages’ in Wordpress. As defined by Wordpress, pages “are like Posts, except they can do much more than Posts, and they live outside of the normal blog chronology”. So each area has a dedicated page with custom content. All these pages appear on the right side bar. Plugins are also available to set one of the page as the home page. (Interested readers can check out this url). So now you have a ‘regular’ website look with no blog posts on the home page. In fact, if you observe carefully, the entire site is designed through the use of pages.

SuburbanHouseHunters.com is a good example of how Wordpress can be used to create a website look while continuing to enjoy all the benefits of the software. We have mainly looked at the use of Wordpress on the site but the site has other good factors going for it. And we are not the only ones to have observed them. A-ing.com talks about how this website has improved accessibility by allowing users to change the text size. TheWebSiteDesignAward.com highlights the business ethics of Ken Smith in being honest with his customers. With a lot of positives going its way, the site is linked to from a number of other reputed sites and has achieved a google PR of 6.

Do you know of any wbsite which has harnessed the power of Wordpress? Why don’t you share it with us?