Today we start a new series on a very simple and VERY powerful blogging software and content management system or CMS called Wordpress.
First let's start out with Who is using Wordpress.
The easy answer is bloggers use Wordpress more than anyone. It's the #1 rated blogging platform out there.
Small businesses use Wordpress. You can have a great site in a short amount of time that is easy to update without having someone to code it for you.
Affiliate Marketers use Wordpress mainly due to it's SEO abilities and easy plugins for advertising.
What is Wordpress:
Wordpress has been around for more than a few years now. It's primary use is for blogging. In fact, I'll go on record to tell you that in my opinion it is by far the best blogging software that exists commercial or open source. Since the latest release to 3.0 it even rivals in a lot of ways full featured content management systems like Joomla and Drupal depending on what your end goal is with your website.
Wordpress is built with php and uses a MySql database on it's backend. It's installed on a web server and is very simple to install and very simple to use.
If you want to see some of these sites in action, go check out http://wordpress.org/showcase/ there you can see some of the up and coming popular blogs and top rated wordpress blogs out there today.
What Wordpress isn't:
When you think of how your website will grow in the next 5 years it's important to figure out what frame work to use. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not speaking of how many users and amount of traffic, but more, what services will your website provide. If you are dishing out content and all you want is a blog, it's foolish not to use Wordpress. If you just want a web presence with a few pages on the Internet, I would say Wordpress is you best bet. If you intend to have a website / blog / e commerce / bulliten board / classified ads / wiki / ...you name it. To be honest, Wordpress can do it, but there are probably at this time a few better options out there.
I would venture to say that 80% of the websites out there are good fit to just build them in Wordpress rather than a larger CMS as most websites are there to deliver content and content is what WordPress does best.
Why use Wordpress:
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Wordpress is Open Source licensed under the GPL. It's free to use in terms of cost, it is built by a worldwide community of developers who contantly ensure that it is secure, fast, and beautiful. Commercial software you could wait for updates or security fixes, Wordpress makes all of that super simple.
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VERY easy to use. I would be remiss if I didn't speak to how simple Wordpress is to use. It has an easy to use Dashboard that you can control the look and feel as well as the content of your site. You don't have to have coding experience, and really anyone can use it.
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Extensible – This is very important because you can add a gajillion features to Wordpress and more every day. This differentiates WordPress from a lot of compeitors as it gives the adminstrators way to make a really rich and wonderful user environment. This also allows you integrate other web services such maps, facebook, twitter, advertising, etc.etc.
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Search Engine Optimized – Wordpress right out of the proverbial box is fast and optimized for search engines. On top of that there are a number of plugins that help that along even further. The only thing I know that is better than a WordPress site to search engines is that you hand code every single page ensuring everything is perfectly tagged, cleanly coded, linked properly, and the content is well written. Costing a ton of time and money to achieve that. Doing that you will likely get a .01% chance of out doing a Wordpress site that someone wrote an article in 5 minutes. It's just that good.
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Standards Compliancy. Who cares you ask? Well let me put it this way. You ever go to a site where a picture is hanging over the text, then when you open in another browser it suddenly works. When sites use standards the output is very similar whether you use IE, Safari, Firefox, Opera, etc.
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A billion Themes and counting. - To be honest I have no idea of the actual number of themes that are out there but it's HUGE. There tons of free themes to choose from, and then there are tons of paid themes to choose from. If being completely original is your thing, then the themes are easily editable, and easy to customize, the community is vast so finding a developer or designer with the skill set to make exactly what you want is not too hard to find.
Ok that's why you should, so here is why you shouldn't use Wordpress:
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You're very shy and you hate people looking at your website.
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You enjoy fixing really hard technical issues and don't want to be bothered by writing content for your users.
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You find that patching up security holes in your software is a really great way to test the skills of unruly hackers.
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There just doesn't seem to be a wordpress theme out there that has flashing words, dancing gifs and midi playing in the background like that site you built in the 90's.
Seriously, the reasons to use Wordpress for a site far outweigh the reasons not to use it.
So get ready over the next few weeks we'll be going through the very basics to the more complex ins and outs of Wordpress.
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