As it turns out, many people have had the same thoughts – there’s a whole load of resources at there on the web on how you can do just that. Here’s just a couple of the resources I used:

Using WordPress as a CMS

101 Techniques for a powerful CMS using Wordpress

As my first venture into this, I set about the redesign of my own site – www.optimasolutions.co.uk, and what you’re looking at now is the result so far.

Are there problems? Definitely. I’ll try to put some of those into a future post if I get time. But the end result is that it’s remarkably easy to get a site up and running with WordPress as a backend, and the advantages it brings are huge – you have an instant resource available to you in the plugin library to do pretty much everything you need, from automatically generating xml sitemaps and submitting them to all search engines, to automating your SEO, to, well, pretty much anything you can think of.

Initial experiment a resounding success then – I look forward to seeing what WordPress can really do when I become more familiar as time goes on.