“If all you do with WordPress is blog, it’s like buying a Swiss Army knife and only using one blade,” says ESI Web Services President Marina Marsh.

Technology services company East Summit, Inc has launched a campaign to reveal the true power of WordPress to the small and medium enterprises that can benefit most from its features.

Although WordPress is great for blogging, it also has sophisticated content management capabilities built into its core. Developers can create complex, powerful websites more easily than they can on their own or with competing packages like Drupal and Joomla. Best of all, clients can update their own site content without having to pay a web designer every time they need to change a comma—without having to learn any HTML or PHP.

That’s why WordPress won Packt Publishing’s Best Open Source CMS Award in 2009. And that’s why more and more SMBs are turning to WordPress when it’s time to build their websites.

Marina Marsh, president of ESI Web Services, explains: “When clients ask us if this can be done or that can be added to their site, we never have to say no. With WordPress it is possible to add, upgrade, expand without spending a fortune. A complex site with a lot of custom coding added, which would typically cost $25,000+ if an enterprise CMS were used, costs $10,000 – $12,000 with WordPress. We can create a fully functional online business solution with features like shopping cart, membership area, directory listing, newsletter subscription, forum, SEO and much more for under $6,000. Plus it is very easy for clients to understand and use the admin tools and it requires very little training to get them up to speed.”

WordPress has the flexibility to serve many different types of businesses. ESI has experienced no problems meeting the stringent security requirements of financial services firms when using WordPress. The company’s developers are just putting the finishing touches on an e-commerce site for InWeave Rugs and a directory site for New Mexico Film Affiliates. Other customers include such diverse entities as Dallas Birth and Women’s Center, Managed Petroleum, Élan Fundraising, and more.

A WordPress site doesn’t have to look like a blog, either. Those who have only seen the handful of themes available to WordPress.com users will be amazed at the possibilities. If you look at the samples at www.esiwebservices.com, you’ll notice that none of them looks like a typical blog.

ESI’s developers and customers also like WordPress for its inherent search-engine friendliness, easy backups, and ready integration with popular social media tools like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Clients can even create their own social networks with WordPress. Offline editing tools like Windows Live Writer and Ecto make it possible to update a WordPress site without being connected to the Internet. And expanding a website is easy: there’s no need to overhaul the whole design just to add new pages, or even a whole section like a store or a discussion forum.

Experienced users of WordPress warn that while anyone can set up a basic blog and choose a free theme, creating a complex, custom site requires considerable experience with the system and appropriate design and development skills. A major site with SEO (search engine optimization), an online store with dozens or hundreds of products, integration with Salesforce.com, and custom plugins can take more than 100 hours even for experts to build.

That’s still a fraction of the time it used to take to construct such a site from scratch in HTML. All business owners have to do to cut their site development costs in half—and drive their site maintenance costs down to a tenth of what they were—is to stop thinking of WordPress as a blogging platform, and start thinking of it as the answer to their web development needs.