In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a big fan of WordPress. I use it as a base to build all of my websites and here’s why:
1) It’s only good for blogs, right?
I think the upcoming release of WordPress 3 takes it closer to putting that debate to bed with a resounding ‘No’. WordPress 3 allows custom post types and taxonomies, which makes creating different content editing areas for different parts of the site a breeze.
They can also be managed by privileges as well, so if you’re creating a larger corporate site, you could have certain areas editable by certain people. For example, you could give access to your Product Pages just to your product team and access to your Press Releases and Latest News pages just to your marketing team.
The new Navigation menus and custom Taxonomies also allow you to compartmentalise your site a lot more, taking it away from the traditional ‘Blog Stream’ post format and giving you a lot more flexibility with how you arrange your own site.
2) Easy to update
Although all these custom post types and taxonomies sound complicated, WordPress has a well-designed Content Management System that is highly customisable. This makes updating and editing your sites very easy and means that you’re not having to pay someone to do it for you.
3) Fully extensible
The choice of plugins to extend WordPress’ abilities is phenomenal. Some of my favourites include Headspace 2 for SEO, Google XML sitemaps and W3 Total Cache. I also like Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and Popularity Contest for creating the ‘Most Popular’ and ‘Related Posts’ sections of websites.
4) Search Engine Friendly
It is widely recognised that WordPress is, with a little preliminary tweaking, highly optimised straight out of the box and, with a few extra plugins and a little more tweaking, it can be made into the kind of site that the Search Engines simply adore.
And because of it’s well designed interface, continuing to maintain your Search Engine Optimisation campaigns couldn’t be easier.
5) It’s Free
WordPress is an Open-Source platform that is entirely free to download and use with little restriction.
So those are my top five reasons why WordPress is awesome. If you’re interested in having a custom wordpress site or plugin built, get in touch.
Interesting post Simon, thanks