How popular is WordPress? The number of worldwide WordPress installations grows daily, but right now, more than 75 million sites use WordPress, or are built entirely on the WordPress blogging platform. WordPress is a free, open-source content management system, used initially for blogging, but is now used regularly to manage the entire content of websites around the world.
What makes WordPress attractive as a website platform?
WordPress works well as a content management system for a number of reasons. First, it’s a mature product. Initially introduced in 2003, WordPress is well supported and has constantly added new features over its history. With such a large user base, WordPress is developed and tested rigorously by both its developers (Automattic) and its user community. With that many eyes on the product, flaws in the WordPress website platform are spotted and corrected quickly, and the product is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
The price is right. It’s hard to argue with something that’s free, and WordPress provides a seemingly endless array of both free and for-pay themes, plug-ins and configuration options. WordPress provides a truly low-cost, high-powered website platform to manage websites. You don’t need to be a professional designer to have a professionally designed website.
WordPress is easy to use. WordPress has one of the simplest and most intuitive user interfaces available today. You can create pages instantly, and your pages will have the same look and feel as every other page on your website. Better still, if your website is hosted, host operators are very familiar with WordPress, and many will throw in a WordPress installation at little or no cost when you purchase a hosting package. They’ll take care of the installation details for you, and you can focus on site content and management.
Plug-ins can really add value to your website platform. In addition to a large spread of themes, WordPress also supports an enormous collection of plug-ins. A plug-in is a module of programming code that adds a function or feature to the program. There are thousands of plug-ins available for WordPress. Like WordPress itself, and its enormous collection of themes, many plug-ins are also free or low-cost. With a WordPress plug-in, you can add social networking capabilities, search engine optimization functions, discussion forums, contact forms, website optimization, analytics and more. This allows you to tailor the website platform to meet your precise needs.
WordPress is a highly functional, easy-to-use website platform that can meet the needs of your business. If you would like more information about WordPress and how you can use it as a website platform, please contact our Creative Director, Dave Ramsell or give Dave a call at (330) 243-0651 to set up a consultation.
Photo Credit: djayo, via FreeImages.com
