Semiologic Pro

Wordpress is one of the best blogging platforms/content management systems available, and it's free. One of the problems with the basic Wordpress download is that it doesn't look too good, and it's not really set up for search engine optimization. On the other hand, a hugh benefit with the wordpress system is that there are many themes available that change the look of your blog, and many plugins available that add specific functionallity.

So, you can go grab yourelf a good looking theme, add some great plugins, and customise your wordpress blog, then start adding great original content ... if you are very lucky. What happens most of the time is that the plugins that you've added conflict and throw something out of alignment. Often you'll find that instead of being aligned across the page, each element of your blog stacks one on top of the other - it all looks great, or it would, if only it was all in the right place. You can happily spend a hundred hours trying to sort it out, only to end up back where you started, and that's not why you wanted to build a website, is it?

Most people give up, some get round the problems but compromise along the way. One man who's mastered this process is Denis De Bernady. I don't pretend to understand the sort of person who can happily spend thousands of hours coding this stuff, and making it all work coherantly. Frankly, every specialist that I've found who can make these things happen tends to be a terrible communicator, it's like their brains are wired differently. But what Denis can do, and has done is work, out a system for making Wordpress work for Internet Marketers.

His creation, Semiologic Pro combines a very clean wordpress theme (with multiple, interchangable skins) and a selection of custom plugins, to produce a package that gives you all the design, seo, and content management functionallity you could ever want, without having to tear out your hair, and bang your head against something hard, in order to make it work. I'ts not cheap, but it's a multiple site licence, so buy once, and use on as many sites as you like. I can get a new Semiologic Pro blog online and configured in around 30 minutes, and most of that is the time taken to ftp the files to my server. You can see a blog that I made using SemiologicPro here.

You can also use and download the semiologic theme for free. it doesn't have the functionallity and specialised plugins that the pro theme has, naturally, but it's still a really good looking theme.