WordPress–Its Time Has Come

WordPress started life as a blog hosting platform. But it has evolved, and now it’s quite capable of hosting quite a complete Web site. In fact, if you’re a reasonably typical small business and don’t have more than 1,000 visitors per hour to your site, then WordPress is the tool you should be using to build your site.

All of my new clients have WordPress sites, and others are converting to WordPress. In fact, I’m converting my own site to WordPress to build my own expertise. I don’t have to be a Webmaster, because I’m not a designer, but I do need to work with the software. I’ve hired a WordPress wizard who helps with complex issues or with site conversions.

What about Joomla?

You may remember me as an advocate of Joomla, and I was. Joomla is an open source content management system that let you build a site with a reasonable amount of work that you could set up so that non-technical people could maintain the content. However, WordPress is much simpler to use than Joomla and today has more capability. This chart of market share from our friends at w3techs.com shows that WordPress has outstripped Joomla and other platforms in market share:

Why WordPress?

There are a lot of reasons to go with WordPress. Here are some of the important ones:

It’s open source and free. No more $300 tools for building Web sites.
It’s easy to use and maintain. It won’t cost as much for your Webmaster to build and maintain your site.
Once the site is set up, it’s easy for non-technical people to maintain the content. So you’ll have that current content that Google craves.
It stores all the information about the site in a database on the site, so when you change Webmasters you just change the password and give it to the new Webmaster. You can change Webmasters without redesigning your site.
There is an astounding amount of functionality available as free or very cheap plugins. Your site can have all sorts of great features without a need to program them.
When you’ve installed a plugin and don’t like what does for you, you can remove it just as easily as installing, with a single click.
It’s easy to make a WordPress site Google-friendly. There are even free plugins to help with the task.
Converting an HTML site to WordPress is less expensive than you would expect. Plugins have been built that help with transition, although they do leave a significant amount of work to be done manually.
Because WordPress is the leader in market share, and because anyone can play with it for free, there are a lot of Webmasters with WordPress experience.
If you need to change Webmasters, just change the password to log in to maintain the site, and a new Webmaster can take it from there. You don’t have to rebuild the site if you want to change Webmasters.