10 Reasons why WordPress is the Future of the Internet

(Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes)

Larry Herrin is totally sold on WordPress as a small business sales and marketing platform. Here’s Larry’s reasons in his own words, for yet another Monday guest post.

When Dave Doolin asked me to write an article for Website In A Weekend a while back, he said,

“In my opinion, WordPress is quietly, without fanfare, turning into a technology as vital to the net as Google, Twitter, Facebook, web browsers, etc. WordPress is a key enabling technology for your small business.”

I believe he’s right.

I don’t even like to call WordPress “blog software” anymore. It’s grown and evolved to be so much more than that.

Millions of users have chosen WordPress to create and design all sorts of websites. We’re talking websites that have served as eCommerce stores, private membership sites, corporate presence websites and so much more. WordPress isn’t limited for use only as blog software. And that leads me straight into the first of the Top 10 reasons why WordPress is the future of the Internet. Here we go:

1. WordPress as Content Management System

It’s easy to use WordPress as a full-on Content Management System (CMS). You may have heard of Drupal and Joomla, two very heavyweight, open-source CMSes. Well, it’s also a fairly heavyweight task to learn how to use and configure them properly. Not true with WordPress: With all of the plugins and widgets available, it’s really an easy task to configure WordPress to serve as a regular private or corporate website, a private membership site, a full-featured eCommerce site, and much more.

2. Blogging strictly not necessary

You can Use WordPress to easily make websites that don’t look like WordPress blogs. Take a look at Ford Motor Company’s Auto Show website. Cool, huh? Now take a look at the NASA Ames Research Center website. Yup, even cooler. Both are WordPress sites. Heh. More on this later.

3. WordPress is everywhere!

Millions of people already consume information from WordPress sites every day. WordPress blogs are very popular. According to internet marketing experts Quantcast, “around 200 million people visit one or more WordPress.com blogs every month, and they view over a billion pages on those blogs.” *

4. Control your own domain

You can install WordPress on your own web hosting service under your own domain name for full control over your domain name, your content — and your site’s existence. With other blogging solutions like Blogger.com and even WordPress.com, you have limited control over the look and feel of your blog. Many third-party plugins and widgets are also not supported.

It is also worthy to note that your blog can be taken down by Blogger.com, WordPress.com or any other commercially hosted or free blog for any reason they deem necessary — like maybe someone complained about the content of one of your posts or comments.

Whoops!

There goes all your hard work and content, and you can’t get it back! Oh, and if your provider decides to go out of business or decide to stop offering you space to host your blog, your blog is out of business, too. You may be able to rescue the data before they shut you down, but your permalink structure and search-engine keyword rankings just broke for good. Do yourself a favor and self-host your blog.

5. Theming

Themes make it easy to customize a site so it looks nothing like a WordPress blog. I’ve been particularly enamored of late with two WordPress themes: Thesis and Atahualpa. One (Atahualpa) is a free theme that really seems too versatile and detailed in its level of control over the site to be free. The other (Thesis) is so obviously professional, versatile and detailed that its developers could never have afforded to offer it for free. In both of these themes, the level of control you have over the layout and design of your site (by merely filling out forms, checking checkboxes and clicking radio buttons) is extraordinary.

6. Easy to install

Installing a WordPress blog/website is super easy. With most modern web hosts, it literally (not figuratively, but LITERALLY) takes about, [wait, let me count them] – SIX mouse clicks and a few characters of typing after you log into your web host to have a functional WordPress site up and running. That count was using Hostgator.com, my web host. After WordPress is installed, it’s just a matter of customization as desired from within WordPress’s point-and-click admin pages (picking your theme, modifying it, adding posts and pages, etc.). Speaking of which…

7. Easy to personalize

WordPress is easy to personalize. Many themes (such as the aforementioned Thesis theme) have numerous options to choose from that are just point-and-click. You can use the same theme as millions of others, yet look unique.

Beyond that, you can use widgets. The WordPress community has developed a large and growing collection of widgets that allow you to plug all sorts of things into your WordPress sidebar. If there’s something you want to change or add to your sidebars (and other locations too, using certain WordPress themes), you can bet that there’s been a widget written that will help you do it quickly, with drag-and-drop ease in newer versions of WordPress.

8. Easy to use

WordPress is really easy to use. How easy? Well, you’d have to take it for a test-drive to get the feel of it, but I can tell you this: it’s used by way more than 15 million publishers,** many hundreds of thousands (millions?) of whom run sites that are way more than just a blog. If they can do it, you can, too.

9. Search engines love WordPress

WordPress is SEO-friendly (especially if you use the right plugins — or even just the right theme to start with). We all are learning how important search engine optimization is, right? Well, the aforementioned Thesis and Atahualpa themes are just about maxed out on SEO-friendly features. Even if you don’t use either of those themes, all it takes are a few of the right plugins to maximize your SEO efforts. Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine. Without going into huge detail (that’s another post for another time), I’ll just say that, in order to correctly perform about 80 percent of your on-page SEO with each post, the plugins you need to have include All-in-one SEO pack, Google XML Sitemaps, Akismet spam filtering and Sociable. And to top it all off, they’re all free, and they’re all found by doing a search within the WordPress admin interface (under the “plugins” menu, the “Add New” item). Website In A Weekend has a plethora of valuable info on this site to help you out with SEO as well.

10. WordPress is free

It’s free, and it’s got a strong open-source development community behind it. I don’t think we need to worry about the longevity of WordPress. Continued, regular development of WordPress, especially with the size of its installed base, is as close to being a sure thing as is possible in the age of Bernie Madoff and historic stock-market losses. And you can’t beat “free” — not even with a stick.

I’m sure there are many more reasons why WordPress rules, tell us your reason!

Here’s a great link, and these reasons don’t overlap very much: Top 10 reasons to use WordPress.org for your website.

Larry Herrin is a an environmental scientist, Web entrepreneur, video producer, and a published writer and editor. His work has appeared in Coral Springs magazine, the Boca Raton News, Wedding & Event Videography (the former trade journal of the Wedding and Event Videographer’s Association), and on numerous websites. He lives in South Florida.