This is the first of a series of posts about how to build a website on WordPress. I'll tell you what tools I'm using here and for my other sites. You'll get my reviews and opinions about these tools. I'll let you know how well they work for me, what problems came up, and if they worked as advertised. I'll tell you if I still use them, and if I think you should too.
This should come as no surprise to those of you know me… I really like to build websites on WordPress. It's freedom. Freedom from webmasters. Freedom from designers. As well as the ability to assert our freedom of speech. Anybody who wants to publish their ideas on the Internet can use WordPress to get up on their digital soapbox. For most people, that's a good thing.
Easy to use, easy to edit, and totally customizable, WordPress is easily the world's most popular blogging tool content management system (CMS). In fact, as of August 2011, it powers over 60 million websites around the world.
Today WordPress powers one of every 6 websites on the Internet, nearly 60 million in all, with 100,000 more popping up each day. Those run through its cloud-hosted service, which lets anybody create a free website online, attract 330 million visitors who view 3.4 billion pages every month. [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/09/05/the-internets-mother-tongue/ Accessed 5-1-2013]
There are two versions of WordPress. WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress.com is free to use. Millions of people use WordPress.com for their personal blogging needs. For most of those people, that's all they need. One thing about WordPress.com though, is you don't have total control of the page.
For us control freaks or business people, the self hosted WordPress.org is what to use. We buy our domain and hosting, install WordPress, then install our theme. Installing WordPress on our own domain and hosting is a simple and straightforward process.
Remember the TV show “The Outer Limits”? In the show's opening they said “Do not adjust your TV set. We control the horizontal. We control the vertical…” Because we own infrastructure we control everything a visitor sees. This ability allows us to get our message across to our visitors in the best way possible (hopefully).
Advantages When You Build a Website on WordPress:
- Easy installation and maintenance
- No coding required
- Very customizable
- Easy to update and organize
- Search engine friendly
- Better security than HTML sites
- A large and helpful community to help you out
Here are a few disadvantages:
- WordPress updates happen a lot. Sometimes this causes bugs and erratic behavior from add-ons to your site
- Clunky and inflexible user management
- Doesn't use a WYSIWYG editor (What you see is what you get)
Even though it has a few warts, when you build a website on WordPress, you are using state of the art tools. As I said, I use it to power all of my websites. Check out my personal blog WillAdamsOnline.com. It's just another WordPress Blog.
What's your opinion of WordPress? Do you have any questions about using it? Contact me. I might be able to help.
