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Why WordPress Is So Good

Why WordPress Is So Good

on Oct 2nd 2012 with 29 comments

Since 2006, I’ve been working with WordPress daily. My first work with the platform was in a blogging situation where I used a basic self-hosted site to keep a blog about my life. Before that, I had been using Google’s Blogger which was becoming a little unwieldy for what I wanted to do.

That’s why I made the leap to self-hosting and that’s when my journey with this incredible piece of code started.

Since then, I’ve been using WordPress for any number of different situations. I’ve used it for blogging, news verification, liveblogging, ticketing for events, event management, portfolio publishing, magazine style sites, a home for a discount card and many more. I’ve worked it into websites for churches, innovation management consultancies, concert promoters, news organisations, creative industries companies, concert promoters and loads more.

In fact, I’ve never found a project that WordPress didn’t work for – sometimes with a little coding, sometimes right out of the box.

Recently, I’ve had a lot of questions about WordPress from people who I’ve worked with in various other capacities or come across in day to day life. I always enjoy helping them get started with publishing information about whatever sector they’re working in or interested in.

That’s why I wrote the book WordPress for Mere Mortals which has just been published as an e-book by Rockable Press.

The Common Problems

There are a lot of questions that get consistently asked and which seem to really confuse people. That’s OK. WordPress is so flexible that there’s bound to be a lot of confusion. Here are some of the most confusing things that we can clear up pretty quickly:

Q) What’s the Difference Between WordPress.org and WordPress.com?

A) WordPress.com is run by a company called Automattic, and offers a version that’s taken care of for you which you can find by going to WordPress.com – all you have to do is write your blog posts. If you want to do something more complex, head on over to WordPress.org to download the WordPress software and get started, but remember you’ll need somewhere to host the files yourself.

Q) What Belongs on a Page and What Should Go in a Post?

A) A page contains information which is unlikely to change over a great deal of time. For example, your contact page is probably going to remain largely unchanged over months or even years. A post contains something which is time sensitive like a message about an offer that your cafe has on at the moment or news about a big client your law firm has just won.

Q) How Do I Change the Design of My Blog?

A) Easy! WordPress streamlined this process for you by allowing people who write code to create themes. Themes mean you don’t have to know anything about design. You can find some great ones on ThemeForest.net for starters. Just download them to your desktop and then log in to your WordPress installation (yoursite.com/wp-admin) > select Appearances > Themes > Upload your ZIP file and then ‘Activate’

Q) Can I Upload Pictures?

A) Yup! Uploading pictures and other media (video etc.) is really easy. Just start writing a post and when you want to put a picture into the text, just select the ‘Upload Media’ button which is right above the text formatting options. Find the file on your computer, then press ‘Upload’, and then select ‘Insert into post’.

Why Should You Use WordPress?

There are many reasons why you would want to use WordPress above other choices. Here are some of them:

  1. Availability of plugins – a plugin is a package of code that someone has written to accomplish a specific task. For example, Akismet is a plugin which makes sure that WordPress doesn’t get completely spammed by wayward spammers. Some more fun examples of things that plugins can do are embedding Flickr streams, put one of those neat sliding images that you see on websites these days, make your events calendar look and work better than the default one. Plugins are available freely and most of the time don’t cost anything or much. If you want to find a plugin to accomplish your goal, just Google this formula “‘insert your problem here’ WordPress Plugin (Free)”
  2. Designers are on your side – the design community loves WordPress and you can be sure that there’s already a theme out there that already fits what you’ve got in mind. That can save you a whole bunch of money. As previously mentioned, you can just head over to Envato’s ThemeForest where there’s a wonderful selection. One of the best new themes is Radiant by Brandon Jones (http://themes.mdnw.net/?theme=Radiant)
  3. You’re in good company – There’s an impressive list of people who are using WordPress already. They include: Playstation, Smashing Magazine, The Who, Tom Jones, Pac-Man, GigaOM and many more. If those guys are using WordPress, they must all agree on something.
  4. Support is great – If you ever get stuck, you’re never alone. There has never been a time in all the years I have used WordPress that I haven’t found the answer to a question by Googling the problem. The WordPress.org support forums are incredible places to find answers to questions with a very dedicated community who love to help.

    5. WordPress for Mere Mortals

    As I mentioned above, I wrote the book WordPress for Mere Mortals to help people get over some of the problems that they have with starting out on WordPress.

    We’ll start off with why WordPress is the tool for your project. Did you know 60% of the internet is powered by the WordPress platform? Everything from your neighbor’s blog about her dog Chuck to the Prime Minister of Great Britain’s website! WordPress is very diverse and you can do anything you want with it.

    Then we’ll move on to some very practical guides about buying a domain name, finding a web host and choosing a theme for your site before we take a look at what a post is and how that’s different from a page.

    We’ll also go through the process of managing all of the content on your website, and uploading pictures. Then we’ll also cover stuff like how to embed video from YouTube. Finally, we’ll have a look at some plugins that will help super charge your site.

    If you want to get started with WordPress or you know someone who wants to start a website or blog, you should get this book, WordPress for Mere Mortals. I wrote it so that anyone could understand it – even after the introductory chapters, we still use very little jargon.

    And, if you have any questions about getting started with WordPress, you can always tweet me on @iammarcthomas – I’ll give you a hand or point you in the right direction.

 
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Marc Thomas is a journalist from Wales, UK. He edits Plastik Magazine – a site about creative culture in Cardiff. You can find his personal website at http://thatisjustawesome.com  

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  • http://themeawesome.com ThemeAwesome

    Downloaded the sample pages and took a peek. Very nicely done. I believe I will buy the entire thing ;o) – Even though I have worked with WordPress for years, I always learn something new, especially when it is presented from another perspective.

    Thanks for the effort and keep up the good work.

    • http://spencerplumbinginc.com/ James

      Same here, I always learn something new about WP reading WP blogs. It’s one of the best things for designer who are not that into coding ;)

      • http://themeawesome.com ThemeAweseom

        @James – so true, and that’s one of the things I love about WordPress, the community. Its huge and active. If I am trying to do something and I can’t figure it out, more than likely I can find a post somewhere by someone who wanted to do the same thing.

    • http://wpthemesdaily.com Robert

      WordPress amazes me by how people can turn a platform to several purposes for websites ;)

    • Danny

      Actually Drupal is more flexible than WordPress.

      • http://jinxed.com.hr Jinxed

        Actually, joomla is much better than drupal. XD

  • http://www.mbaranowski.pl/en Mike Baranowski

    Few days ago I’ve published post about very same subject on my blog.
    I’m a WordPress Developer since about two years for now, and I think WP is great tool when you need fast starting base.

    http://mbaranowski.pl/en/wordpress-en/wordpress-as-cms-worth-it/

  • http://codeconquest.com Charles from CodeConquest.com

    One mistake I made when installing WordPress was downloading it off the WP website and then uploading it manually. After doing that I had to set up a MySQL database which I had no idea how to do.

    I recommend that if your hosting provider has an automatic WordPress installer in your website control panel, use that instead of doing it manually – it’ll be a lot easier. :)

    • http://www.creativethien.com John Tran

      You should learn how to do this, speaking as a designer myself it’s quite easy to figure out. There are ton’s of video tutorials on how to do this.

    • http://www.facebook.com/markgazel Mark Thomas Gazel

      1-click installs have two major flaws. One they are usually put in a folder outside the root like example.com/wordpress. Most want them in the root and it’s actually more technical moving WordPress than just installing it yourself.

      And two the 1-click installs are usually a couple of versions behind.

  • Shahzad Saeed

    It is common that people switch from blogger to wordpress as their blog grow. Last year I’ve done the migration and so far happy with it. One of the nice thing about WordPress is that we do have a big open source community for support.
    Nice post Marc! Thanks for sharing

  • Steven

    WordPress may suit some people, but since starting my new job, we work with PyroCMS and I must say it’s much nicer to work with & develop for.

    The community may no be what WordPress is at the moment, but it’s growing. For quick 4-5 pagers for a small business who just need a CMS, WordPress is still easier due to the number of themes and plugins available

    For complex development & bespoke work Pyro is definitely the way to go though!

  • http://wparena.com wparena

    Although WordPress is an excellent CMS now, but with increasing number of uers, creating more attractive to attackers (hackers), specially Cross-Site Request Forgery and Cross-site scripting attacks ..so there is a need to protect from these kind of vulnerabilities ..:)

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  • http://wordpressdeveloper.me Muhammad Adnan

    and I get a lot of Work in WordPress. It is a flexible CMS, Every project can be transformed within WordPress ;)

    Awesome, I love you WP

    Adnan

  • http://www.amrabdelaziz.com amrabdelaziz

    wordpress the best in the world :D

  • http://www.wpknight.com James

    Great article and e-book, I’ll be sharing this! Thanks

  • Saroj

    ” Did you know 60% of the internet is powered by the WordPress platform? “. Matt Mullenweg says its 17% of the Web. Did you mean 60 million.

    • http://deepakrajpal.com Deepak Rajpal

      You are right saroj, its apprx 16 (sixteen) % not 60 (sixty) %.

  • http://loftopia.com Tyler

    I think it is important to mention that content that can go in posts or custom post types should; the handling of posts is much more efficient then pages; If you are going to have several 100 pages, it would be better to try and get a portion of that in posts.

    I have a site that has several 1000 pages and WP will not load the pages in WP Admin interface

    • Kutuzov

      If you look at the database scheme, and you look at the queries used by the admin interface, you realize that both your problem and solution seems highly suspect (with the usual settings for things like pagination of course). I don’t mean to argue with your experience, I’m sure you experienced exactly what you say. I’m just saying that neither the stated reason for the problem or the supposed solution make much sense.

  • http://dynamicweblab.com Maidul

    WordPress have large community to help you. And huge collection of free plugins will reduce your development time.

  • http://rafalgicgier.com/portfolio/ Rafal

    Hey Mate,

    Nice post there; as a WP developer I really am glad that people promote this platform :-)

    There are probably plenty of people arguing about that, but statistics speak by themselves – WP takes the first place out of all CMS solution and I’m really glad about that.

    Surely there are pros and cons of it but its flexibility and enormous community make it stand out of the crowd.

    +1 for you :)

  • http://techengine.in TechEngine

    I found WP pretty interesting to work on, however, there is one negative point about it as well i.e., if you upgrade your wordpress version, it changes the entire customizion, you might have done to make your wordpress based website attractive and easy to browse.

    Except this part, WP is an amazing platform!

    :)

    • http://wp.envato.com/ Japh Thomson
      Staff

      Hi TechEngine, that’s not actually true at all. All customisations should be done via themes or plugins, so updating WordPress itself won’t change your customisations. Also, if you want to be able to modify a theme, you should create a child theme, then you can update the parent theme without losing your customisations. Sounds like you have some reading to do :)

      • http://jinxed.com.hr Jinxed

        Designs / Themes shouldn’t deal with such things. Only thing that made wordpress so popular is his attractive admin interface (you could say people were brainwashed).

        There are much better platforms for developers (like PyroCMS, Joomla or Drupal) and I don’t buy arguments like “wordpress is much simpler to use for the non developers”.

        Different post types you have to make to achieve a certain behaviour of the website and the widget “hell” certainly aren’t a +.

        The best article/pages management system I have ever seen is in Joomla and let’s not mention the simplicity of making joomla themes compared to wordpress themes.

        • http://wp.envato.com/ Japh Thomson
          Staff

          Hi Jinxed, you’re entitled to your opinion, my own personal experience tells me differently. All these platforms exist because we all like to do things different ways. That’s fine. You like Joomla, I like WordPress, we each do our jobs with the tools that suit us best.

  • John Curier

    WP would be great if it had a proper multi-lang enviroment (nowadays essential), it’s still very crappy. A long road to walk ..

    Anyway, one of the best solutions for small websites out there.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/GypsyLion Omar Capers

    A Google Search [Why WordPress?] led me here.

    To give you an idea of my perspective, I ask this because I am a content manager / web producer. I don’t code sites. I hire PHP developers as consultants, for that. I work directly with clients, their content, and strategically connect them to their audience, period. CMSs have so far been a god-send for non-coding people like myself. Therefore I think my opinion on it’s useability weighs in slightly heavier here because I am sort of the pinnacle profile of the End-user. I help to answer the “Why” question in the 5-Ws when it comes to building a new web site. Developers are the one H—the “How”. So I find plugins and widgets that get the specialty jobs done. I also make all of the design decisions for the presentation of the web site, so get a specific look (theme) is very important.

    Don’t get me wrong, I think WP is great, once you get it working the way you want, but I’ve found that it often doesn’t live up to it’s 5-minute install promise.

    One of the main problems I’ve had with the downloadable WP app was it’s lack of portability out-of-the-box (excuse me if I’ve missed an update or plugin that addresses this because I’ve abandoned WP for a year). Portability is important to me because I like to design/build locally using MAMP and would love to just one day upload the WP site I’ve worked on and have it function on any server, and any URL I put it on without having to finagle it (due to serialization).

    Drupal and Joomla don’t use this technique of serialized URLs, therefore, they will always function under any URL. This is a non-issue. That’s the reason why relative URLs are great for portability and why absolute URLs are not. WP’s serialization makes the point of having relative URLs mute.

    I’ll admit that I don’t code at all beyond the front-end (HTML/CSS)—and the only reason why even I know about serialized URLs was because I’ve had a problem with moving WP that required many Google searches and ultimately the help of a developer to fix—but I’ve had much more success out of the box with Joomla than with any other CMS—and I’ve worked heavily with others (Drupal, WordPress) due to client demand. Yet, when I get NEW clients, I always prefer to take them down Joomla street when they want a quick, brochure-ware site that looks great (and works anywhere), that they themselves can update and maintain without a bit of coding.

    I go the Drupal route if they need something bespoke, with unique functionality, and they can afford the development curve, while WordPress I have had nothing but Microsoft-like disappointment, and run the other way when a client asks me to help them publish something in WP. To me, the downloadable WP app is the canary of hosting mines. The app dies if the hosting environment is less than ideal for it. And this is a difficult thing to trouble shoot with WordPress out-of-the-box and when you’re dealing with an economical hosting service.

    This is almost like the PC VS Mac question: If you’re an IT guy (code-savvy, and can build your own PC), then why waste the money on a Mac (something that works great out-of-the-box)? But if you just want to get something done (and can’t afford the time to get a Computer Science degree), spend a little more and buy a Mac. Joomla 3.0, to me, is closer to being like Mac OS X—it just works, whereas WP is like MS Windows Vista—widely available but buggy as hell, while Drupal is like Linux—rare, high learning curve, but capable of anything if you know what you’re doing.

    So I guess WP is great if you:
    1) Don’t need ANY customization or custom functionality not ^currently^ offered by a plugin.
    2) Just want to blog…
    3) Don’t need to move it through multiple development / hosting environments (like clients switching hosts, and changing domain names)
    4) Can tolerate your site breaking when you tryout a new plugin (good luck getting your backup working on a different URL).

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