WordPress Review

About this time last year I set about looking for some way of easily giving my web design clients what they craved – a simple, quick and cheap way of maintaining their own websites without resorting to buying expensive software, learning web design or paying me a fortune to maintain the site for them, something I’d rather not do anyway!

So having established that there was no easy way of adding content managment to an existing site, I googled “free cms software” and got introduced to the main players in the market, , namely: Joomla, Drupal, Simple CMS & WordPress.

The funny thing now as I look back was that even though WordPress appeared in my google search I didn’t cop that this was what it turned out to be, a free, downloadable piece of script that you could install at your domain name/website and use as a website builder/cms. Rather, I associated it with the hosted version at http://www.wordpress.com which I had been using and was impressed with for a few months previous.

After messing about with Joomla & Drupal and finding them way too complex and over the top for mine and my clients needs and after finding Simple CMS a little too simple, I continued my search, starting to feel a little disappointed. The SECOND I realized that there were 2 versions of WordPress, one of which I could use independantly of wordpress.com, I knew my atheist prayers were answered!

Heres a quick Feature list for this fantastic piece of web software, king of CMS and Blogging tools:

• Add, Edit and Remove a limitless number of Pages & Blog Posts,
• Install themes/templates in a matter of minutes, completely changing the look and feel of your site/blog,
• Use purely as a website management tool and ignoring the Blog part,
• Add external links easily,
• Add link and blog categories,
• Plugin integration to add almost any website functionality you can think of,
• Automatic communication tools to communicate with other blogs,
• Search Engine friendly – (Google loves WordPress!!),
• Spam protection built in,
• User Registration and multiple Authors/Editors,
• Import Blogs from other popular blogging sites/platforms,
• Text Formatting,
• Add images, files, audio, video, etc..,
• Add links,
• Drag and drop widget/module layout control,
• Ability to let users leave comments,
• And a lot more..!

Try it – www.wordpress.org (not.com!)

Leon.