why love WordPressA few days ago I have been asked if one should use a CMS such as WordPress to build a site or to develop the site from scratch on a custom platform.

Well, personally I used to be a fan of building websites from scratch by hand.

I like to know I have the power and knowledge to do whatever I want there, I have built a lot of websites from scratch and I am happy with almost every one of them.

However, developing these sites on a custom platform took a lot of resources: time, work and first thing first, I am a professional software engineer, I know to do this kind of things, because I do this for a living, but not everybody is a developer, isn’t it? And, beside that, during the lifetime of my custom built websites I have needed some new features that I had to also implement by hand, taking as example the way WordPress plugins were built so I got to the conclusion I would have better started my site on a blogging platform.

At that moment I took some time to study a bit the way WordPress was built and what you can do with it. For this, I have also built a few sites using CMS as a platform, to have a complete understanding. After these tests, I can tell you the following:

  1. Seting up a website on WordPress platform is fast and easy compared to a custom website. Just think about it, developing a custom website takes time and money (you need to hire somebody to develop it for you) while WordPress is available for free download at any moment. All you need to do is install that copy of WordPress on your shared server and you are ready to go.Most hosting companies provide WordPress installation by default, as a feature. You want a WordPress copy installed? No problem, we’ll take care of you! There, now you have your own blog set and ready to go. No extra fees, no development money, no waiting time!
  2. There are so many free plugins for WordPress that you can set your site to do almost whatever you want in no time. Think about this: I have wanted to install on one of my custom websites a social bookmarking toolbar, so people can stumble and digg my articles. Of course, since it was my own custom site, I had to write my own custom toolbar for this!Oh, wait, on WordPress is very easy, there are a lot of free plugins that do exactly this feature! Want another one? I needed a Tell a friend script for my custom website. Of course, I had to find one or write it by hand.Fortunately I have found an open source script on the internet so I didn’t have to spend time to write it myself, but, I have spent half an hour to tweak it and install it on my site and I was able to do this because I have developed my site so I knew everything about it. How can you do this on WordPress? Well, simple, you just download and install a plugin for it! There!
  3. But I do not want a blog, I want a static site!! Well, there is no problem, my dear friends, WordPress is above all a very customizable CMS (Content management system/software) so you can adapt it at any moment just from your WordPress theme to look like a regular, static site and not as a blog. You can do this and people won’t even be able to tell you what’s the platform behind your site!
  4. Google and WordPress work together. That’s another white ball that you will surely learn to appreciate! Let me tell you a story…There is this little robot called Googlebot, working for Google, that comes from time to time to take a look on your website to see if you have changed anything. If you want to give a hand to this great little robot you will need to create what is called a “sitemap” and point Google to it. Of course, you need to manually rebuild that sitemap and tell Google you updated it each and every time you do so. This is not mandatory but it helps a lot. Why am I telling you about it? Because there is one great little plugin for WordPress that does that for you without even telling you about it. Yep! Every time you write anything on your site, this little plugin rebuilds the sitemap and then tells Google automatically about it so you won’t have to! Isn’t that great? Now ask yourself what would it take to do this on a regular, custom website.
  5. SEO for WordPress is accesible to everyone. Of course, what could it be? Yet another plugin! There is a plugin, actually there are more plugins doing this for you. You install one of those plugins and they will change the titles of your posts in a SEO compliant way, they will add fields for keywords, description, etc. These are little things with great results when it comes to being found by Google. And being found by Google mean free traffic…free money, right?
  6. So many free WordPress themes to chose from, there’s got to be one for you! I think you know what I mean, you don’t need to pay for a template, you can just pick one for free out of those 5.098.253 themes available on the internet. And you know what? There are some great ones out there, trust me on this one!
  7. WordPress is continuously evolving so new features will appear every single day, giving you more and more power over your website. Usually, new features mean new bugs, but the huge number of users will assure immediately reliable live testing and the very team that developed it will remove those bugs. Still want more?
  8. Never underestimate the power of subscriptions(RSS&mail). WordPress comes with the capability to offer syndicated posts through the use of RSS. This way you can have quite a good base of people receving you posts right in their mail or in the RSS reader. Think how difficult would be to do this on a custom website!
  9. WordPress is so easy to update! I don’t think I need to speak much about this, we all know that using the online interface we can update the content of the site so easy! Imagine if you build a custom website, you would need FTP, you need to update the files by hand. Not so user friendly, isn’t it?
As a conclusion, if you need a personal or small business website, I would recommend you to start it using WordPress, it will save you a lot of work and trouble on the long term! Trust me on this!