3 Simple Reasons Why I Think You Should Use Wordpress to Build Your Website
As a blogging platform, wordpress has been able to tap in millions of users both for its self hosted as well as the .com version. While worthy competition do exist from other platform providers, WP to many has become the definition of free publishing. However, this post is an attempt to look at Wordpress as a CMS or a website development tool rather than as a blogging platform. Below I enumerate my reasons why I feel websites should have some wordpress love.
1. Wordpress is Easy and Free
WP has been often taken as a success story of the Open Source world with the following that it has gathered in relatively small time. While the initial interest might purely have been because it was free and therefore worth a try, it has scaled so fast because of its ease of use and flexibility.
So much so that the Wordpress.org installation instruction page proudly proclaims the whole process as the Famous 5 minute install. With tools like Fantastico it might very well become the under 1 minute install as well. The admin panel has seen a lot of changes from the initial versions to the much loved one of WP 2.7, however even before the new version I have always found the interface practical and uncomplicated to get on with what I need to do. If you need to set a website up in a jiffy, I don’t see a better tool than Wordpress.
2. Wordpress is Flexible
When I first bought a domain name to develop a website I ran around quite a lot trying to figure out what’s the best tool to get things up, and I heard a lot of opinions and suggestions from Joomla to Drupal to custom CMSs. However, I had no idea of development and all these things cost too much to get made. (The developers charged quite a lot). The project never took off and all I had was a PSD sliced HTML home page.
A few months later I came across a website that looked somewhat like a blog, but had a lot more. It had polls, it had pages, it had a videos section, there was a photo gallery. And the man running the site said that his blog makes a couple of hundred dollars every month. It was not just my initiation into the world of making money by blogging but also to wordpress. A couple of searches and I was drawn into WP awesomeness. You can have separate pages, there were millions of free themes, and WP even gave space for you to edit them.
I found a blog post somewhere that listed some useful plugins for WP. Analytics, polls, a contact form (long cherished dream, which I will tell some other day), Feed subscription, Favicon, Bookmarking, Related Posts, Rotating Images, Adsense Manager, Ad Manager (and some powerful ones at that).. I went mad. All these features and all I had to was upload a file and activate it from my admin panel. Suddenly a blog could do so much more. Later I realized that WP even allows you to even keep a separate page as your home page so that your visitors don’t need to see your blog upfront. This was the begining of WP as a website thoughtflow.
You need to make video sharing site – WP has plugins, you need an e-com site - WP has plugins, you need to parked page – wp has plugins, you need a corporate website- wp has plugins and themes, you need a personal site – wp has themes, plguins and a blog, you need a gallery – WP plugins and themes, you need magazine – wp has themes, you need real time site stats- wp has plugins.. the list can go on.
3. Wordpress is Community
And the list above can go on not because Automattic which owns WP keeps churning out these features, but because it lets others do it. Wordpress has one of the most active community of users and evangelists online. The scores of wordpress themes both free and paid are not just an exhibition of design but often defines trends in web design and development. I don’t know CSS, I don’t know PHP but I have customized almost all of my 5 odd websites the way I wanted them to look. In the process I also learned enough of CSS and PHP to parade around as someone who can handle it.
The power came not through my own curious intelligence or experiments but through the numerous tutotrials and powerful themes that the community of WP designers have made available over the years. Again it is not just about the theme. All the features above are more often than not free plugins developed by people as part time projects. Developers often take it as an excercise to experiment and innovate. There are many who enhance someone else’s project and make the plugins better.
The number of articles covering Wordpress hacks is huge. The activity never seems to stop and that in turn finds newer people jumping on board. Essentially WP has become a web product. It is not just for bloggers or content publishers anymore, it has a larger set of web designers in the system, a huge developer system added to this. In turn this means that you can develop a website with any feature that you want and look whichever way you want it to and you are sure to find someone to do it for you, the talent pool is that huge.
There are a lot more stuff that I can add to this post in my appeal for WP. However, they would basically be reiterating the above points. These 3 reasons form the fundamentals of the Wordpress ecosystem. So if you need a website made using wordpress the forces acting in your favour are the ones above. Wordpress makes your site search friendly (SEO plugins), it makes it social media friendly (heck a blog is social media), the only thing that remains is paid advertising to get traffic on your site which you can do even if you don’t own a website so doesn’t add up in the marketing aspect of your web design and development. Content is what keeps people on the site and makes them come back often, and I don’t see a simpler content platform than wp to add the dynamism of content on the site.
In essence, wordpress helps you get traffic on the site and helps you keep them and all this for a fraction of what you would pay otherwise to get your site developed, in some cases even free. In some post some other time I will also list a few examples of websites that you’ll be surprised to see use wordpress as a system to run their site. Till then go make one yourself, it will take 7 mnutes.
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Waiting for your next post.
Wordpress pretty much rocks. It is amazing how fast it has grown in the last few years and how robust it has become.
I wanted to invite you to check out a new whitepaper on SEO for Wordpress: A Non-techies guide. It has lots of tips and best-practices to help normal people (not uber geeks) get an SEO friendly wordpress going.
I would certainly appreciate any feedback or comments you have too…thanks in advance.
Wordpress is quite an easy platform to use. It makes things so much more easier.
Not only wordpress is easy to use, flexible its also very secure too. There are indeed lot of great features in wordpress so i would recommend everyone to try this great CMS!