2k COMPUTER sOLUTIONS

 

THE ADVANTAGES OF WORDPRESS

 

Whether it’s a personal or business website, blog or entertainment page, it’s important for the graphics of a website to relate to the message. While the text written across the page you are viewing is the main point, images and aesthetic appearance enhance the meaning behind the words. A way to do that is through using html/php coding to represent graphics and text. However, it’s a tad difficult writing pages and pages of code when you’re wracked for time and you don’t want to spend mindless hours finding that specific spot you want to edit. But you want your website to look polished and appealing, right? So here, it’s proper time to introduce the most used publishing platform of today: WordPress. A tool designed to provide your viewers with the necessary information you publish while capturing their attention with visual graphic appeal. Did I mention it’s Open Source?

WordPress has quickly soared on the popularity scale. From its beginning as a small project in 2003 to its current status, Wordpress has become the choice publishing platform for a lot of big businesses as well as a celebrity amongst private bloggers. Companies such as General Electric, Coca-Cola, The New York Times, and the developers of Flickr use the WordPress program to keep their company members up to date as well as to update customers on new programs, promotions and/or new products. It’s what keeps the world in tact. Artists such as Wyclef Jean, and Jane Monheit, celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse, and comedian Jane Fonda have been using WordPress to manage their blogs and websites for a couple of years now.

One of the reasons WordPress is so popular is because of its Open Source platform with which WordPress allows individuals or groups with new ideas for a plug-in or theme to publish them and make them available to all users. It’s easy to use, has a wide variety of options for themes and text design options as well as exposure levels. These are reasons as to why the general public is in love with the program. While WordPress can publish even the simplest blog, it can also be developed into something bigger, such as a business store. Meaning, it’s flexible. It’s apparent why WordPress has become a crowd-favorite publishing platform for celebrities and businesses alike to use.
What WordPress offers to its users is an innovative and stable platform with valuable features such as themes, full standards compliance [code created by WordPress is universal], and things such as a cross-blog communication tool which notifies you of any links or references made to your site/blog. Spam protection always makes things a breeze when you have problematic comment spammers. WordPress also features a Multiple Author feature, where several users with different levels of administration skills are allowed to manage a single website or blog. The Ping Away feature allows your blog to have the maximum value of exposure on updates on common search engines such as Google.

One of the best things about using WordPress for blogs is that the host site does not have control over your design. You can edit and design whatever you please on your own accord. It’s Open Source, which means that you pay absolutely nothing, and any new designs for plug-ins or templates that anyone else comes up with can be yours as well. A full community of WordPress users and developers aid each other on the site’s forums, enabling users to communicate problems and new ideas to the developers and to each other. Installing is easy as pie, and you can even custom create your own themes with CSS to override any templates you don’t like, should you choose to do so.

Promoting on WordPress is easy. Whether it’s about promoting your own blog, your merchandise/suppliers, or even advertising new posts, WordPress has you handled. “Pinging” is done automatically, notifying the blog directories that your blog has a new page or addition, and users or viewers are highly encouraged to view it. Its “Revenue Generating” option allows users to add contextual advertising such as Google AdSense, or links to merchants or suppliers, even your own products! Over the past couple of years, WordPress has included tools and plug-ins for all the masses, businessman to every-day blogger.

What a user expects from a publishing template, WordPress has it all. When you register, the right to administer polls to test the popularity of each post becomes a very good tool. Not only does it give the user [you] feedback on what is most popular amongst the readers, but it’s also a very nice way to get to know the demographic that the blog is reaching. With this, the blog writer has more time available to focus on what the public wants. Another useful tool is the SEO, the Search Engine Optimization, which draws as much attention to your blog as it can on the most commonly-used search engines. This also appeals to a wider demographic, allowing your blog popularization amongst people who mightn’t have heard of it before.

So why not join the already massive community of WordPress? If you’ve got a small or large business, it’s your best friend. A marketing tool, a spam-filtering tool, themes that you can either customize or use pre-made, a smart text editor, and billions of opportunities to customize your site or blog to your heart’s content… All made simple. And what if you’re a blogger? No problem! Polls to check your viewers’ interests, SEO to update any sites that make references or mentions of your blog… What more could you ask for? Oh, yeah. It’s free.

 

Neda M. Ilieva
2K Computer Solutions