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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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.” *
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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.
- 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.
- 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…
- WordPress is easy to customize. Many themes (such as the aforementioned Thesis theme) have numerous options to choose from that are just point-and-click. 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.
- 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.
- 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). Dr. WordPress has a plethora of valuable info on this site to help you out with SEO as well.
- 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.
** “…6 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 9 million active installations of the WordPress.org software.”
I’m sure there’s 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 consultant, author and web entrepreneur. One of his eCommerce websites sells Palm Pre accessories He has owned and used three different Palm/Handspring smartphones since 2001. He is hopelessly addicted.
Nice overview! I think that I could add another 10 reasons why WordPress is the future of the internet, and then another 10 on top of that. I’m sold on it. What it does, it does *really* well.
.-= Sean´s last blog ..How to Print a Woodblock =-.
@Sean, Excellent. Jot all 20 reasons down, and we’ll just keep on truckin’.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Techsmith did it again with Jing Pro… sort of =-.
Many eons ago (around 2000), we used to develop CMS tools for all of our clients. This was a chore that was often as complex as building the site in the first place. We were so proud of it though and our clients were always impressed.
Fast forward to today and WordPress has made a CMS tool available for everyone for free! Thumbs up to WordPress and the strides it has made over the last few years!
Excellent post! I like the point about the ability to customize WordPress themes – it allows users to create a unique look and update it as they need to rather than picking from a bundle of stock templates generated months (if not years) ago.
.-= Walter´s last blog ..What Shovel-Ready Means for Road Construction =-.
@Gabe, WordPress really is a great CMS tool for small business.
@Walter, themes are only getting better. My hunch is that there will be an update button for themes – just like plugins – in the future.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..The Fear — And Consequences — Of Failure =-.
It really doesn’t get much easier than WordPress blogging thats for sure, everything is a snap with the exception of the 800 updates per month.
.-= Extreme John´s last blog ..Sunday Smash Link Luv, Twittley for Twitter, Yahoo Meme =-.
Good post about the advantages and ease of WordPress!
I love and WordPress–it’s so easy that I can get a class of community college students blogging in 15 minutes–the hardest part is choosing a name for their blog! The MU isn’t as easy so far unfortunately.
@Extreme – WordPress has just enough “superfluous complexity” to keep our monkey brains happy and engaged. I’m pretty sure typepad is a technically better platform… but typepad doesn’t have the story nor the engagement to fire our imaginations!
@gwendolyn – welcome aboard. I like your banner very much. I was at 8:45 and L this year, right next to the windsurfers. Hope to see more of you here.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Blog World Expo Recap: 8 Proven Monetization Strategies For Media Producers =-.
Actually I have been sold to WP for a long time and this is the reason why almost all other “blogging” adventures I have are on self hosted WP. I would really like to move my blog to WP one of these days. I need both help and guarantee from someone who can assure me that I am not loosing any search engine rankings (this is where I am not too comfortable with). Do you know of anyone who give me a hand?
.-= DiTesco´s last blog ..DiTescos Weekly Echo #6 =-.
“WordPress has just enough “superfluous complexity” to keep our monkey brains happy and engaged.”
That says it all, right there. Like a good game, it takes minutes to learn and years to master.
.-= Holly Jahangiri´s last blog ..Monday News & Views (on a Tuesday Morning) =-.
@DiTesco – That’s a tough one. The hard part is you don’t have access to your account (right?) like you would with a self-hosted account. If you did, you could set up the redirects, and let them just run for a year or so. After that it wouldn’t much matter I don’t think.
@Holly – Very good! I love it. You will see it again.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Blog World Expo Recap: 8 Proven Monetization Strategies For Media Producers =-.
Ya wordpress has become a lifeline to the net. Nowadays if a fella doesn’t have a blog he is in trouble. Especially WP! It dwarfs all of the other online blog services. I personally prefer and recommend self hosting your own WP install. And taking advantage of the cool plugins and widgets available for WP.
What a nice breakdown. I’ve definitely seen a huge shift in the years towards WordPress-based websites, and for good reason. The only bummer for me is that I’ve found designers charge a little more to create the themes for these than they would for HTML. Obviously, it’s worth the price because I can manage it on my own after that, but at first I’d have to remind myself of the reasons you list as being worth the extra dough.
.-= Susan´s last blog ..PPC Tools You’re Not Using – Lesson 2 =-.
Great Post Dave, I still can’t believe wordpress is free! Well some of the templates… today i’m entering the world of the ‘premium’ theme, i’ve found the premium themes suit ‘business’ websites a bit better.
Now that my blog is running smoothly I take for granted how easy it is to click ‘add post’ and wordpress takes care of everything.
Is there anything ‘more’ a user can do with the All-in-one-SEO pack or does it take care off most SEO needs?
.-= Andrew´s last blog ..10 Reasons You Shouldn’t Be At Work Today… =-.
@Susan, @Andrew – I recommend premium themes from a reputable coder who is making his or her living from coding the theme. Such people have a *powerful* incentive to keep up with changes to the WordPress code base. Which “free” programmers simply don’t have. I own a dev license for Thesis, but I suspect any of the top 6 or so theme purveyors would be equally as good.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Blog World Expo Recap: 8 Proven Monetization Strategies For Media Producers =-.
@Andrew – The key with AIOSEO is to simply use it consistently, and understand what you’re using it for.
What AIOSEO really does is make sure your page is complete semantic HTML. That’s really all it does. And a good theme will handle a hunk that as well, automatically, except that the automatic results won’t be very _reader_ friendly.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..7 Ways To Evaluate Blog Post Quality — Tuning your BS detector =-.
Dear Dave, I just found you via the comment you made on Yaro’s blog on 10-21-09. I like to check out other’s blogs (tell me every blogger does!). I read you as Dave Doolin, but if it were listed Dave Doolin/Dr. WordPress, I can’t imagine the extra clicks you might get. It is probably through Gravatar, so something for me also to check. Well, you got me. Love your site. Looks authoritative. OK, the premature gray helped as did the PH.D., I must tell you, but, only as my father was an anthropology student from the University of Chicago. Mainly, there are few bloggers who appear to be, mature….over 40′ish, so it is a definite plus when you find someone who ALSO knows their stuff, so to speak. Age has the most exciting history topic replete with a witness attached to it. Makes for the best storytelling and teaching. Oh, as I am writing this on the fly, I have to add also that the insinuation that you don’t just fly by the fingers nine to five daily at a desk adds to your rounded education, thus, making you worthy to be listened to. Wow. That water pic…makes one wonder. Just what all do you know? A true renaissance man?
Someday, WordPress will be lined up in the Web giants like Google and Yahoo!
.-= Kelvin Servigon´s last blog ..Why I Use Globe Tattoo Broadband =-.
@Sheila Mae – I’m a polymath.
@Kelvin – That’s what I think!
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..7 Ways To Evaluate Blog Post Quality — Tuning your BS detector =-.
I agree with you Dr WordPress. WordPress is the future of the internet. I am using wordpress for all my sites and blogs. Easy to customize, Wide range of plugins (Of course, its free) and themes force everyone to switch wordpress. Nice writeup about wordpress..
.-= World News Blog´s last blog ..Verdasco Claims Last Spot in London =-.
@WNB – Sent you an email. Love your site.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..News of the New – Another WIAW Week in Review =-.
199% agreed to whatever’s being said above, and they really need no repetition right? I can’t believe how drastic WordPress will change the way web developers, well, develop websites in the future.
I suppose it’s not too far fetched to say that there’ll be 2 camps in developing websites. 1 side will be the traditional web developers (html+css+javascripts+flash+start from scratch) while the other side will be wordpress theme-ers. No guessing which side will have an easier job, but equally paid just as well. ; )
I can’t even begin to imagine how much further WordPress will be able to evolve into, simply because, it can do so much!
It’s like the iPhone, and the plugins are the Apps. Impressive!
Actually, there’s some very tech out there, and I have a “static” site going into development in a couple of weeks. All about the right tool for the job!
But yeah, WordPress really is a game changer. So many people are teaching themselves how to program because they want a new plugin or whatnot. And that’s a good thing.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Made to Stick: Earworms for your brain =-.
Good post! Yes, WordPress is really a light-weight, flexible CMS for the future. Hopefully, the WP + WPMU merge works well and the CMS is headed for an even brighter future after 3.0. Like you, I run WordPress + Thesis and I am very, very happy with it. WordPress is indeed an application to love.
Code is Poetry!
Lars, I am really looking forward to the WPMU integration.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Website In A Weekend: Friday Evening – Off to the Races =-.
I am currently building a website for my wifes quilt business using WordPress and atahualpa theme. since I use that for my blog I already know how to do it. they look vastly different even using the same theme. WordPress is way easy to use, Joomla was much more than I wanted to tackle.
.-= Justin Matthews´s last blog ..My Brain Hurts! Free Thought is Hard. =-.
I am *definitely* going to hit you up for a case study on this! If you’re game that is. I’ll link it both ways from Dave Thackeray’s article on Atahualpa, so that reader’s there get a chance to go to your article.
I’ll want to spotlight some quilts when you’re done as well.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..How Do You Eat An Elephant? – Eleanor Edwards tells all =-.
Yes wordpress is my favourite blog. It gives more insight to bring more in me.
i have several blogs from word press and i’ve set up numerous websites for others using wordpress…..a year ago i could barely find the button to turn on a computer and now i’m helping others with websites!(?) wordpress is easy and fun…can it get any better?…..
.-= maureenlynne´s last blog ..green turquoise rooms and accents =-.
The deeper you dig, the more you find. It’s pretty cool!
Thanks for stopping by.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..DIY WordPress: Super Easy Custom CSS for Menus (Huge pic) =-.
I love wordpress and I use it for my personal photoblog. It is easy to use and very flexible for you to really do what you want with it.
Thanks, Anna, it’s been an amazing experience learning how to use WordPress and meeting so many really cool people.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..The Starfish Principle – Trying counts as success =-.
Yay wordpress. Two thumbs up.
Julie ~ jbulie’s blog´s last post ..ㄥ❀∨モ criticism ♥
I did some linking on that comment. You should get a trackback. Check it out!
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Are you blogging or web logging Is there a difference
very excellent post, wordpress is best for internet…Thank you for shaing
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