I theorized back at CAI in Bloomington, Indiana, last March that it would be possible to use WordPress to power a website for an auction company. WordPress is a remarkable, extensible and mostly standards-compliant website scripting engine that allows for very easy content generation without website coding experience. AuctioneerTech proudly uses WordPress, and I also use it for the Aaron Traffas Band website, as well as a more private website that I run for my family. I love its simplicity, customizability and expandability.
Today I came across a search engine for WordPress-powered websites. I punched up auction and found several websites for auction companies that were indeed using WordPress.
Here they are in the order I found them.
http://www.bentoncountyautoauction.com/
http://chevroletcarauctions.com/
http://laymanauction.com/
http://schultzauctioneerslandmarkrealty.com/
http://www.cloudsauctions.com/
http://www.chiswickauctions.co.uk/
Some of the sites listed above were customised to such an extent that there must be some developer actively involved in that customization. Some were not. Which are your favorites and why?
These auctioneers recognized the power and freedom of the WordPress system and have, to varying degrees, customized their sites to overcome some of the standard blog-with-menu-on-the-right-or-left design elements that come standard with most WordPress installations. Many website hosts such as LunarPages and GoDaddy offer the ability to install the basic WordPress system with a menu-driven control panel so that from the time you register and provide payment to the time you’re beginning to customise your installation, you’ve spent 5 minutes using your computer to register and install WordPress and a few hours waiting for the domain name to become active and never once touched an FTP client.
I’m not advocating the use of WordPress instead of a professionally-designed website. As an auctioneer, I’d rather have a great website than a working phone number. I’m merely pointing out that it’s an option for some auctioneers who can’t afford the hundreds – or sometimes thousands – of dollars that a real website costs.
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Aaron, thank you for the link.
Our site is the Schultz Auctioneers site. To give you a bit of background, I had been using wordpress for my personal blog for sometime, and was impressed with the nearly unlimited ability to customize the renderings. With that in mind, we purchased a professionally designed template ($150 or somewhere close), and then I set out to customize the site to make it look "non-blog." It took some time (okay, a fair amount of time) to set it up correctly with the variety of pages, and to make it function more like a traditional website.
What I love about using wordpress is:
Use of CSS: Changes to the website are easy to make, as I only need to change the stylesheet.
Easy to Add/Change Pages: I can easily add and change content on the site w/o contacting a developer. I'm big into self implementation of many things (i.e. our mail server is hosted in house, and managed by me). Plus, with the nearly unlimited amount of plugins available for wordpress, I've been able to add some very cool functionality.
SEO: The site because it is wordpress is very search engine friendly "out of the box", and with it being XHTML 1.0 Transitional, the search engines pick it up very quickly and are able to spider it very well. I've noticed a dramatic increase in traffic from search engines with the wordpress site compared to our previous site.
Cost effective: Our hosting is just under $100 a year (unlimited disk space, 400,000MB bandwith per month, 2,500 email accounts, 20 subdomains, 5 addon domains, 1000 ftp accounts, and 50 sql databases), and I do all the coding, and developing.
In fact, I like it so much, I'm working on a branded site for an annual auction we conduct. The site will be built on wordpress, but will again be a heavy modification to appear "non-blog."
I'm surprised there are not more auction companies using wordpress. The advantages as you mention are numerous!
Thank you again for the link!
@John Schultz -
Thanks for the comments, John. I'm a huge fan of WordPress. You've done such a great job with the modifications that I didn't believe the search engine at first and punched up the wp-login page to be sure that your site was indeed powered by WordPress. Very well done.
Aaron, thank you for the link.
Our site is the Schultz Auctioneers site. To give you a bit of background, I had been using wordpress for my personal blog for sometime, and was impressed with the nearly unlimited ability to customize the renderings. With that in mind, we purchased a professionally designed template ($150 or somewhere close), and then I set out to customize the site to make it look "non-blog." It took some time (okay, a fair amount of time) to set it up correctly with the variety of pages, and to make it function more like a traditional website.
What I love about using wordpress is:
Use of CSS: Changes to the website are easy to make, as I only need to change the stylesheet.
Easy to Add/Change Pages: I can easily add and change content on the site w/o contacting a developer. I'm big into self implementation of many things (i.e. our mail server is hosted in house, and managed by me). Plus, with the nearly unlimited amount of plugins available for wordpress, I've been able to add some very cool functionality.
SEO: The site because it is wordpress is very search engine friendly "out of the box", and with it being XHTML 1.0 Transitional, the search engines pick it up very quickly and are able to spider it very well. I've noticed a dramatic increase in traffic from search engines with the wordpress site compared to our previous site.
Cost effective: Our hosting is just under $100 a year (unlimited disk space, 400,000MB bandwith per month, 2,500 email accounts, 20 subdomains, 5 addon domains, 1000 ftp accounts, and 50 sql databases), and I do all the coding, and developing.
In fact, I like it so much, I'm working on a branded site for an annual auction we conduct. The site will be built on wordpress, but will again be a heavy modification to appear "non-blog."
I'm surprised there are not more auction companies using wordpress. The advantages as you mention are numerous!
Thank you again for the link!
@John Schultz -
Thanks for the comments, John. I'm a huge fan of WordPress. You've done such a great job with the modifications that I didn't believe the search engine at first and punched up the wp-login page to be sure that your site was indeed powered by WordPress. Very well done.
@Aaron,
Thanks for the compliment re: needing to access the wp-login page. I worked hard on trying to remove the feel of a "blog" but maintain the great features of wp. I'm with you on being a huge fan!
John
@Aaron,
Thanks for the compliment re: needing to access the wp-login page. I worked hard on trying to remove the feel of a "blog" but maintain the great features of wp. I'm with you on being a huge fan!
John
wordpress is very versatile, it can be used in many occasions.
wordpress is very versatile, it can be used in many occasions.
Auctions is a WordPress plugin which enables you to host auctions on your own ... page or better search engine results as a result of using this plugin.
Auctions lets you sell items, but I didn't think it was setup to host entire auctions by auctioneers. Am I wrong?
Auctions lets you sell items, but I didn't think it was setup to host entire auctions by auctioneers. Am I wrong?