WordPress is a free, Web-based software program that anyone can use to build and maintain a website or blog. Its creators call it a “personal publishing platform” because it was originally intended as an easy way to set up a blog. But, thanks to the efforts of a large “open source” community of WordPress programmers working all the time to extend and improve its capabilities, WordPress has become much more than just a tool for bloggers.

Today’s WordPress is really a “content management system” (CMS), which means that it can be used to run fairly big websites — like the Ford Motor Company Global Auto Shows site. The Ford site incorporates great photography and Adobe Flash graphics and navigation — like a traditional high-end website — and it also takes advantage of WordPress blogging capabilities to gather comments from site visitors and make it easy for anyone with a username and password to edit and update the site using nothing more than a web browser.

WordPress is just one of a number of such programs. Some are easier to use than others. There are free services at WordPress.com, Blogger.com and Vox.com. You can download WordPress for free and install it on a third party web host. The same goes for MovableType. TypePad (typepad.com) is an example of a fee-based service.

McBuzz Communications designs, develops and improves websites for clients with small and medium-sized businesses. Unless a client has the deep pockets to build a custom CMS website “from scratch” (frankly, this is never the case), we always recommend that they use WordPress or some other “blogging” platform as the basis for a new website.

There are four main reasons to consider using software like WordPress for a new website:

1. WordPress designs are based on “Themes”. Themes are composed of images and cascading style sheet (CSS) webpage layouts, and this makes it very easy to customize the look and feel of a WordPress site using a pre-existing Theme and a new page layout created in Photoshop (or a layout imported into Photoshop from a QuarkXPress PDF, an Acrobat PDF, InDesign PDF, etc.). On the low-end of the design scale, you can basically drop a company’s logo into the top corner of the page and you are good to go!
2. WordPress software allows anyone to create and edit new web pages and blog “posts” using only a web browser. No knowledge of HTML or other code is required. The WordPress editing interface is very easy to use. It works a lot like simple word-processing software. And, the site administrator can grant various levels of access to others, allowing them to contribute to the website/blog. Because the interface is web-based, creating and editing pages can be done from anywhere with an Internet connection.
3. The blogging features in WordPress allow you to update your website/blog frequently, and to receive and respond to comments from your readers. This is great for your human customers and potential customers. It is also great for search engines, because search engines love fresh content.
4. There are many more features of a WordPress website or blog that make it much, much better than a traditional “static”, “brochure-style” website (i.e., built once and never updated after that) when it comes to search engine optimization. And many of these features are taken care of automatically, requiring little or no effort (or programming skill) on your part. If you would like specific examples of WordPress websites that do well in search engine results vs. other websites, give us a call at 1-800-209-2919 or email us using the link under the McBuzz address at the top of this page.

Popularity: 12% [?]