WordPress based websites are faster to setup, easier to maintain, easier to market and extend.
I've been developing websites for years and have used about every technology available for creating them. First of all, let me make a distinction — by “website” I mean any content driven website or blog — as opposed to a custom web application (I love using Ruby on Rails for functional webapps). I've used Perl/CGI, Java, Straight PHP, Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, Ruby on Rails and python to develop content driven websites for myself and my clients … these all inevitably result in disaster because I (the programmer) have to continue to maintain and update these sites over time. Also, the client usually has feature requests that I then have to build for them — these features cost them money and suck away my time. Landing page builder wordpress is your way to success.
About 2 years ago I started messing around with WordPress and have been deploying WordPress based sites ever since — because they are simply better, here's why:
- WordPress is SolidWordPress is the basis for thousands of high-traffic websites and is now a refined, well-tuned app for creating websites. It's more solid than anything that a developer could create on a first try (yes, even me) because its been in the “wild” for years and has gone through many iterations.
- WordPress is SimpleSeriously, who likes working through FTP, SSH or a programmer to update files on their website? No one. WordPress has done a better job of making it easy for non-technical people to update and contribute to a website than any other technology I've seen. It's even made Theme & Plugin development really nice which is why there is a large and expanding number of them out on the web.
- WordPress has an Unbeatable Feature SetSome of my favorite built in feature like LifterLMS Review + Ultimate Guide – But is Worth It? (2021) are WordPress's rich text editor (that I'm using to write this blog post), media uploader (which allows you to upload multiple files at once), dynamic RSS feeds, category management, tagging and comment management. This is a well thought out, cohesive environment for managing a website.But what if you want your website to do that WordPress doesn't currently do with its built in features? I'd wager there's a plugin built for it. You can replace the graphics on your website in no time with WordPress's outstanding theme management or extend its feature set with a WordPress Plugin. There are plugins to help your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), release a Podcast, store all of your media files on Amazon S3, customize your login screen and even create shortlinks on your site (I wrote that one). Currently there are over 4,000 plugins and 700 themes that are listed at wordpress.org! But plugins do not suffice in achieving a healthy SEO, for you'd also need to select the right keywords and also include curated links in your websites. If you want your site to look good and do a lot in a short amount of time, you can't do any better than WordPress.
- WordPress is Easier to MaintainWhat if you have a custom website built by a programmer … who then decides not to work for you anymore? You are screwed — the ramp up time for another developer to come in and reverse engineer his code could be enough to send you reeling. But if you base your site on WordPress, you can easily find another developer to work on it … most freelance developers and graphic designers out there simply can't afford not to know their way around WordPress anymore.In addition to this benefit, WordPress has a built-in updating mechanism that pretty much puts updates on autopilot. Open-source developers around the world continually release updates to WordPress and its plugins for free — this is huge! If you hire someone to build your site, you have to pay them every time you need an update and you're pretty much guaranteed that you won't be commissioning developers to update your site with security patches. Let the WordPress developers do the heavy lifting–take advantage of their free work. The Scepter Marketing website helps you streamline your business processes and generate more revenue.
- WordPress is Open-Source!Not only is WordPress the absolute best system to base your website on but it's 100% open source and doesn't cost anything (free as in free speech and free as in free beer). This is great for me since I feel like there are very few software providers that actually give me the flexibility to do what I need to do who don't charge me an arm and a leg.
Does WordPress have any problems or limitations? Absolutely — it is an evolving application — but it is much better and cheaper than trying to get someone to build a content-based website from scratch for you.
I promise I am not just trying to get link backs here lol.
I VERY much agree. My knowledge of web design is only enough to get me in trouble. But with WordPress I can easily put together a site in a very small amount of time. Not only that, most of the SEO tips I have read to do with a formal website has already been taken care of by WordPresses initial design.
I started our own blog using blogger just because we didn’t have much knowledge and experience. Then I learn how much superior WordPress is espacially when we started to think about making our own WordPress plug-in to support S3. I could not agree more
Amen brudda, I’ve been tellin ya this for a long time 😉 After the 2.5 release (I think it was), there’s really nothing that compares.
Haha! And as I think back — I have to say, I really appreciated that solid advice Chris! 🙂
@Andy
I went out to your site and looked at your CloudBerry Explorer — I’ve been looking for something like it for a while, but are you guys working on a version for the Mac? All I could find was a PC version. Also, there’s a really solid plugin for S3 on WordPress’s Plugin repository here: https://blairwilliams.com/ts3 … I’ve used it on some of my more media intense sites and it worked great. If you guys develop one though, let me know — I’d like to check it out!
WordPress = WORD!
Yeah, I’d say that pretty much sums it up dood.
I like EVERYTHING about wordpress…
but their WYSIWYG editor is crap, IF only they improve that.. WP for me would become one of the best CMS ever built…
word
Hiya Blair,
Just a quick question related to WordPress that you may be able to help me with. Do you know how to update all the plugins etc automatically (I’m doing manual FTP transfers at the mo) without setting the permissions of my Blog to 777 for all users? I looked on the WordPress help pages but am still none-the-wiser.
Cheers.
Christopher GS,
It really depends on how your webhost has your Apache install setup. I don’t think you should have to change the permissions of your site to 777 in any case though. What I’d do is check to see what user your Apache instance is running as and then see if it matches up with your user name. If it does then you should be able to set the permissions of the directories in your document root to 755 and the files to 644 — if the users don’t line up then the groups really should line up (unless your web-host has serious problems) and in that case you can set your directories to have a 775 permission and your files to 664. Hope that helps.
Thanks Blair,
I’ll pass this on to our ISP and see what they say.
I couldn’t agree more, I’ve been building and optimizing sites since 2001. Most of the SEO I do with normal sites is already done with wordpress. It also makes my life much easier after I hand a completed site over to a client. its a doddle for them to update and add content. I only wish I’d found wordpress earlier.
I’m an absolute WordPress Junkie as well, it rocks for way more reasons than mentioned here and with 2.8 on the horizon we’ve got a few more reasons headed our way.
One of the really cool things about the WordPress community is the extensions/plugins development and quality of help/tutorials available. I use wp for all my sites as well as client/project sites and it hasn’t let me down yet.
Kudos to Matt Mullenweg & his team/community for giving us a priceless tool.
As a webdesigner myself , I’m extremely glad to see that another individual thought to post this topic.
Quite a few people don’t understand what all is required in our field, and I think also we are many times not appreciated enough
or taken for granted. Never the less I’m glad to see that you feel the same way I do , thanks so much for this post!
WordPress, joomla,Drupal. etc.., great in so many ways but 1 major one..
All our “potential clients” are becoming wiser to these easy, FREE, cms solutions and are not requiring our services anymore.. This hasn’t happened in large and i guess some will fight the fact that it wont, but everyday we have younger developers and people exposed to all of it. which means they will have the knowledge to do this from earlier on and by themselves. I for one have already experienced a client dropping my services for a free weebly or wix service. even though we can offer better skills for front end and understand SEO and all that, the majority of clients still look in their back pockets for a decision..
I totally agree with this post. WordPress is great. I have written a post BlogEngine.NET vs. WordPress and WordPress wins in every category.