If you’re still new to the world of blogging and websites, you may have heard of WordPress and might be wondering what WordPress is. WordPress is publishing platform used for building websites and blogs. It powers millions of websites worldwide, and many big brands use WordPress: CNN, Playstation, New York Times Blogs, People Magazine, and even Ford – they all use WordPress!

WordPress is here to stay.

It’s an opensource CMS (Content Management System) that has taken the world by storm – as of August 2011, “14.7% of the top million websites in the world” are powered by WordPress. Most web designers, web developers, and users praise WordPress for its ease-of-use, hence why it’s become so popular, and its growth just keeps on accelerating. Just to give you an idea, last year, WordPress was used by approximately 8.5 of the top million websites in the world, so to jump from 8.5% to 14.7% in one year alone speaks volumes for how popular WordPress is becoming, and how much people love this platform!

Here’s my favorite statistic:

August 2011 powers 22% of all new websites.
– Rao, Leena (19 August 2011). “WordPress Now Powers 22 Percent Of New Active Websites In The U.S.”. TechCrunch

WordPress is no longer just for blogging.

WordPress used to be known primarily as a blogging platform, and it remains the best solution to use for blog, however it has come a long way and has become a very comprehensive Content Management Suite used to power many different types of websites, including business sites, job boards, sites featuring classified ads, etc. WordPress is extremely very flexible, adaptable, and if a specific feature or features that are not built-in are needed by a user, there are literally thousands of plugins available to enhance WordPress’ functionality, so there is likely solution already developed for that need – the possibilities are literally limitless!

On the other hand, it definitely does make it easy to have a blog on your website, which is highly recommended as part of your online marketing strategy. Search engines such as Google love WordPress because it uses well-written code, and keeping an active blog tells search engines that your site is alive and well, thereby increasing your website’s rank and your chances of being found via organic searches. If you’re looking to get a head start with Search Engine Optimization, WordPress is the way to go for your website and/or blog.

WordPress is cost-effective and flexible.

A great thing about WordPress is that it’s completely open source – which means that the source code used to run WordPress is available to the general public. This means that anyone on the planet can modify the code if necessary and customize WordPress even further to be what they need. Often, this isn’t necessary, but it also means that any plugins and themes (templates) created for the WordPress platform must also be open source. Plugins are basically add-ons that can be easily installed in the WordPress dashboard area to add features that are not part of the core code, and themes are what provide a blog or website based on WordPress its design. Imagine a world-wide community working together to add more features and functionality to WordPress – you’re not limited to only being able to use specific employees or developers to produce customizations, which means it’s a powerful CMS system ready to do what you need it to, it’s flexible, and easy to customize.

WordPress is supported by worldwide community.

Because WordPress is open-source, it is freely available to be downloaded, installed, and used on your own servers. This makes it extremely cost-effective. It would cost a lot of money to have a custom CMS developed that could do the same thing that WordPress does, but why spend that much? There’s no need to reinvent the wheel with WordPress being freely available, customizable, and very actively supported by a worldwide community of WordPress developers, users, and supporters! WordPress is updated regularly, with new functionality, bug fixes, and security fixes.

Also, because there is such a large community surrounding WordPress, any developer can work on a WordPress-based site to update it, make changes, etc., so you can never be held ransom by any one designer or developer.

WordPress is easy to use!

You don’t have to be a technical genius to learn how to use WordPress. I always tell my clients: if you know how to edit a Microsoft Word document, then you’ll be able to easily update the content on your WordPress site. Updating pages and/or blog posts on WordPress is literally as easy as editing a Word document – you don’t have to be a web designer to update your content. That is the magic of WordPress!

WordPress offers a backend administrator interface that’s visually easy to navigate and very effective. Everything is organized in a logical manner, so it’s easy to find the are your looking for, such as editing a page (located in the “Pages” section), editing a blog post/article (in the “Posts” section), uploading images (located in the “Media” section), managing users (in the “Users” section), etc.

WordPress is the best Content Management System to use to build your website!

It is for these reasons and more that UC Web Creations works exclusively with WordPress. If you’d like to have your own WordPress-based website and/or blog, please contact us – we’d be happy to help!