Why Use WordPress?

WordPress is an open source web application – it is provided free of charge to the end user to use and modify.

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability; designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. (from wordpress.org)

WordPress is a CMS (Content Management System) that allows the web site owner to create, edit, post and manage the content of their web site themselves – without necessitating the intervention of a web designer.

WordPress works much like a perpetual news magazine. This allows the posting of various items that can be easily sorted automatically by category or date. Because WordPress is based on a blog “engine”, it supports RSS news feeds, track backs, comments etc. which become another means of encouraging social interaction from your audience.

WordPress is a web application platform – it allows the integration, on the fly, of modules (plug-ins) that provide all kinds of  functionality to your web site – of which e-commerce, media gallery, mail list, calendar, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Management, RSS, Contact Forms are just a few.

WordPress is a templating system, which includes widgets that can be rearranged without editing PHP or HTML code, as well as themes that can be installed and switched between. The PHP and HTML code in themes can also be edited for more advanced customizations. WordPress also features integrated link management; a search engine-friendly, clean permalink structure; the ability to assign nested, multiple categories to articles; multiple author capability; and support for tagging of posts and articles. Automatic filters that provide for proper formatting and styling of text in articles (for example, converting regular quotes to smart quotes) are also included. WordPress also supports the Trackback and Pingback standards for displaying links to other sites that have themselves linked to a post or article. Finally, WordPress has a rich plugin architecture which allows users and developers to extend its functionality beyond the features that come as part of the base install. (from WikiPedia)

With an install base of several MILLION web sites, WordPress has a large support base within its user and developer community. WordPress is an Open-Source Project, with thousands of developers working on all aspects of WordPress’ future.

Wordpress is easy and and quick to install and configure – we can get a web site up and running in a couple of hours. Upgrading from previous versions and other software is a piece of cake. Try it and you’ll wonder why all web software isn’t this easy.

WordPress has a powerful internal search engine that makes searches for any instance of word or phrase easy. Your visitors can also sort content via the tags or categories assigned to your posts.

The developers of WordPress have gone to great lengths to make sure every bit of WordPress generated code is in full compliance with the standards of the W3C. This is important not only for interoperability with today’s browser but also for forward compatibility with the tools of the next generation. Your web site is a beautiful thing, and you should demand nothing less.

Changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.

Pages allow you to manage non-blog content easily, so for example you could have a static “About” page that you manage through WordPress. This can scale to hundreds of pages which are organized alphabetically, by parent page affiliation or by numerical sort order. As you create, modify, move or delete pages, page menus are automatically updated.

Links allows you to create, maintain, and update any number of blogrolls through your administration interface. This is much faster than calling an external blogroll manager.

WordPress comes with a full theme system which makes designing everything from the simplest blog to the most complicated webzine a piece of cake, and you can even have multiple themes with totally different looks that you switch with a single click. Have a new design every day.

WordPress fully supports both the Trackback and Pingback standards, and we are committed to supporting future standards as they develop.

Visitors to your site can leave comments on individual entries, and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own site. You can enable or disable comments on a per-post basis.

Out of the box WordPress comes with very robust tools such as an integrated blacklist and open proxy checker to manage and eliminate comment spam on your blog, and there is also a rich array of plugins that can take this functionality a step further.

WordPress has a built-in user registration system that (if you choose) can allow people to register and maintain profiles and leave authenticated comments on your blog. You can optionally close comments for non-registered users. There are also plugins that hide posts from lower level users. The user system allows up to 10 levels of users, with different levels having different (and configurable) privileges with regard to publishing, editing, options, and other users.

You can give passwords to individual posts to hide them from the public. You can also have private posts which are viewable only by their author.

We currently have importers for Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and b2. Work on importers for Nucleus and pMachine are under way.

WordPress currently supports an extended version of the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, and finally the MovableType API. You can even use clients designed for other platforms like Zempt.

You can have types of users that can only post drafts, not publish to the front page.

WordPress uses the Texturize engine to intelligently convert plain ASCII into typographically correct XHTML entities. This includes quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, em and en dashes, multiplication symbols, and ampersands. For information about the proper use of such entities see Peter Sheerin’s article The Trouble With Em ’n En.

If you’ve dealt with systems that convert new lines to line breaks before you know why they have a bad name: if you have any sort of HTML they butcher it by putting tags after every new line indiscriminately, breaking your formatting and validation. Our function for this intelligently avoids places where you already have breaks and block-level HTML tags, so you can leave it on without worrying about it breaking your code.

Cross-browser bookmarklets make it easy to publish to your blog or add links to your blogroll with a minimum of effort.

WordPress supports pinging Ping-O-Matic, which means maximum exposure for your blog to search engines