The first time I heard the name WordPress was several years ago when I first started to design my first website Vargis.Net which I later moved to this domain, VargisKhan.Com. I was completely new to the entire concept of website designing and had no idea where to begin. A friend of mine suggested that I should opt for WordPress since I have no knowledge of HTML or any other web language for that matter. Upon his advice I took a quick look and honestly did not like WordPress. Primary reason back then I can say was because I wanted to learn HTML and WordPress was more of a WYSIWYG editor. Hence I dumped the idea of WordPress and started working in Dreamweaver which was also a WYSIWYG editor but the work was done in HTML. Basic idea behind creating a website at that time was to share my travel experiences so I posted my travelogue and then for some reason forget all about updating the website. For years I posted nothing new and the idea of learning HTML just died in the back of my mind.
About a year ago I started updating the website regularly but it was proving too much of a manual work to maintain a blog-like website in Dreamweaver so I decided to give WordPress a shot. To my surprise, my initial apprehension was quite baseless as like million others; I too ended up liking WordPress a lot. Here are a few things which I really liked and in my opinion make WordPress the most popular blogging platform.
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1. Free: This I think is the best part of WordPress. It’s free of any cost and an open source program. Other website builders in the market ask you to pay quite some money for a yearly license. Dreamweaver is crazy costly. However, WordPress is free to both use and modify. Just download and install on your server and you are all set.
2. Ease Of Use: As I mention above, WordPress is a WYSIWYG editor but like other website building softwares available in the market today, it is not really that complicated. You don’t install anything on your computer and all the work is done online. There is not really much for you to even do but to write you articles and focus on quality of your content as WordPress takes care of almost everything else. I did manage to gain some knowledge about website designing in last few years but even for someone who has zero knowledge and is completely newbie, WordPress is incredibly easy to handle.
3. Themes – Since WordPress is so popular, there are millions of themes available that you can download and apply to your website per your taste. People are making their living designing and selling WordPress themes these days. There are plenty of options, both in terms of free and paid.
4. Widgets: What’s not already inbuilt in WordPress comes in forms of widgets. Like themes, these too are available in plenty, both paid and free. Whatever your need is, 90% chance is that there is already a widget for it. If you cannot find one, there are thousands of developers you can find on WordPress support forums who can design the widget for you per your need at a very marginal cost.
5. Option to modify: This is another great feature of WordPress. You can modify it as much as you want if you are familiar with the entire coding concept. If you do not know how to change the coding but need a modification done, you can always find a developer to do it for you at a small price.
6. Packed with features: From its early days, there has been a constant improvement in features that WordPress offers.
7. Easy to monetize: If you are planning to make money by either selling something or putting ads on your blog, WordPress makes it very easy. Ads can be inserted in the site without any hassle at all.
8. Constantly evolving: WordPress updates just keep coming. There is a constant work on the platform and it never gets stagnant. If there is bug reported, an updated version with a fix would be out quick.
9. Excellent Support: Try contacting Google for any support, maybe adsense or something else and you would know what I mean. It would be months before they respond, if they in fact do at all. But this is not the case with WordPress. Despite being such a popular platform, getting help is amazingly easy. Just go to the support forums, post a question and get an answer.
10. SEO Friendly: It comes designed in a way that it makes it quite easy for search engines.
For me, WordPress is as good and easy as blogging can get. No other platform comes even closer.
