My love affair with WordPress

Yes­terday, I received two emails from dif­ferent cli­ents, both inquiring about building WordPress-based web­sites. I responded, as I usu­ally do: “Word­Press is awe­some! I love building sites with Word­Press! Let’s do it!” I’ve found that I’m using it as the back­bone for a lot of my web­sites these days (including the entirety of this one!), and I love it more and more the more time I spend with it.

Why?

1. It’s open.

Com­pared to sim­ilar platforms—Movable Type being the obvious example that comes to mind, which all is pro­pri­etary and messy and hard to work with—WordPress is a dream. Their web­site puts it best:

Everything you see here, from the doc­u­ment­a­tion to the code itself, was cre­ated by and for the com­munity. Word­Press is an Open Source pro­ject, which means there are hun­dreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most com­mer­cial plat­forms.) It also means you are free to use it for any­thing from your cat’s home page to a For­tune 500 web site without paying anyone a license fee and a number of other important freedoms.

So instead of building you a cus­tom­ized system (which I still do where the pro­ject war­rants it), we start with a totally free, full-featured system (with fancy-pants fea­tures like revi­sion his­tory and auto­save and such already built-in), then build on it. And whenever the core system upgrades, you can upgrade your install­a­tion at the click of a button. Essen­tially, instead of having a static system that never changes, you get one that is con­stantly being improved and worked on by a huge team of developers.

2. It’s flexible.

Once you’ve got the core system up and run­ning (so about five minutes after you start, because it’s super-simple to install, too), you can cus­tomize it to behave in exactly the way you want.

So, while it’s tech­nic­ally intended as a blog­ging plat­form (and at its core, it really is), there are thou­sands of plu­gins, wid­gets, and themes you can install in order to change its func­tion­ality. Gen­er­ally speaking, I’ve found that I can almost always find some­thing close to what I’m looking for. And if you can’t, you can edit your theme tem­plates of write your own plugins—and since Word­Press is all written in PHP, a highly pop­ular and easy-to-use scripting lan­guage, it’s easy to work with.

(The port­folio items this web­site, for example, are actu­ally entered as blog posts. They are then dis­played using a highly mod­i­fied tem­plate, called only for posts in the port­folio category.)

3. It’s easy.

Not easy in the “sleeping with your brother” sense, but easy-to-use. Word­Press is crazy easy to use. I’ve set up sys­tems for cli­ents who don’t have a great sense of tech­no­logy, and they get going with very little dir­ec­tion from me.  Even the more com­plex CMS-type setups are simple to use: last week, I met with a client for a training ses­sion I’d anti­cipate might take all day—instead, it took two hours.

I’ve seen the UI go through a number of dif­ferent revi­sions, and it keeps becoming more intu­itive and user-friendly. And as far as text format­ting goes, well, if you can handle Word (which I actu­ally cannot, but that’s a dif­ferent story), you’re set.

4. It’s friendly.

To search engines, that is. I don’t know a great deal about SEO—it’s com­plex, it changes all the time, and there are many com­panies who do nothing else but SEO. Accord­ingly, I focus my atten­tion on making web­sites that work well and look great. Word­Press does all sorts of clever things auto­mat­ic­ally, like cre­ating permalinks for your pages, that means that search engines will just nat­ur­ally pay more atten­tion to you, without you having to worry about it. (And of course, if you’d like to get more fiddly, there are quite a few plu­gins that will give you some extra control.)

5. It’s pretty.

Of course, for all its bril­liance, Word­Press would be entirely use­less if it weren’t pretty. Luckily, it’s built with a mind for aes­thetics. This means that there are all sorts of gor­geous themes you can down­load and install, if you’re so inclined, or you can hire a designer to make you a fant­astic one-of-a-kind design and they won’t be pulling their hair out trying to do it for you. It also means that some nit­picky typo­graphic ele­ments you’ll prob­ably never notice, but I will (like smart quotes, formerly the bane of my web-existence, although I’m still keeping my toes crossed for em-dashes, which I use like they’re going out of style, which admit­tedly they most likely are), will auto­mat­ic­ally be inserted into the text you type. Gen­er­ally speaking, it takes great care to ensure that what you enter, no matter how nutty, turns into nicely-formatted code (which will also, trust me, save your designer’s hair).

In short: Word­Press is great. I love Word­Press, and so should you!

Tags: design, SEO, websites, wordpress