Wordpress is one of the top platforms that small business owners use to start blogging, but many don't realize they can also run a sophisticated website and online store from the Wordpress platform.

In our Sales Rescue Team free website review service, we talk to dozens of small companies every week and we've seen many of them tapping into Wordpress.  One of the struggles we've heard is how to customize it, how to make it look like what you want, how to add ecommerce, online storefront, capabilities.

In reality, we struggled with that, too. You can get part way complete on a new website only to find that it doesn't allow you as much flexibility as you had hoped. When we made the switch back to Wordpress in mid 2008, we knew there would be some hiccups. What made those hiccups easier to deal with was the Thesis Theme for Wordpress. It is a robust theme that I consider a mini-application for helping a small biz owner to customize Wordpress to exactly what they want, often with just basic commands from the Thesis dashboard.

Here are three examples of what I like about Thesis:

1. You can design for one, two, or three columns with the click of a radio button. Better yet, you can add a photo box with rotating images by simply uploading them to a rotator file within the Post Images section of the dashboard.

2. You can add pages to the site and decide, again with a quick click, to add them to your site navigation menu.  No redesign of your site to add or subtract a navigation item. Just check the box, or uncheck it.

3. There's a second tab in Thesis called Design Options where I can pick the font, the colors, the more aesthetic options.  I changed the background color of my main navigation links so that as you mouseover them, they have a orange-red background highlight. On this, as I click that option, it gives me a color palette and I can simply choose and play around with different color options.  Cool.

We have so many conversations about Thesis that I've started trying to answer the basics in some web tutorials via YouTube, Vimeo, Slideshare. I've posted some of them here on the Sales Rescue Team pages: Why I Use the Thesis Theme for Wordpress.

Take a look and let me know what you think and what you're using to manage your small business.

TJ McCue is an online content specialist and founder of the Sales Rescue Team.