A case for WordPress
March 29th, 2006 | by Klaus Holzapfel |
This is not an scientific review of blog software. There are many great studies out there. We’d just like to share our own decision making process with you.
We took a good look at the available options before we choose a platform for our blog.
I started my first blog with blogger. I was very impressed with the intuitive signup process and with all the features available right out of the box. You have the option to host your blog at blogger or externally at your own server.
We wanted a tight integration of our blog with our website, therefore a blog hosted on another server wasn’t really an option. Hosting a “blogger” blog at another server seemed a bit cumbersome.
We soon realized that bloggers had a number of limitation we didn’t like and shied away from it.
We then looked at another software name plog (now renamed to lifetype). I liked the feature-rich interface but it didn’t look like there is a big support community for this software out there. We had a hard time locating plug-ins, themes and getting questions answered.
BlogCMS is another blog we looked at. We also felt that the support for this blog software wasn’t the very best.
We obviously came across the popular Movable Type as well. All the other packages are free - Movable Type charges a license fee. All the other blogs are written PHP, this one is written in Perl and much harder to install. The documentation was also disappointing. We thought that a paid for software should have top notch support, at least for installation questions. We learned that this was not the case and dropped the ball.
We then came across WordPress. Just the right time in December 2005. A new version was just released. The installation of WordPress is a piece of cake. You Grandmother could do it for you! WordPress offers 100’s of themes at pages like this.
WordPress has support for many other languages. (We needed a German blog as well.)
Most important: The WordPress support community and forums are active. We can find answers to most of our questions in no time. This was a big confidence builder for us.
There is a ton of free great software out there. In terms of benefits and ease of use we would rank WordPress at the top of that list.
Who should use WordPress?
If you are an individual and just would like to get your feet wet with blogs, we would recommend bloggers.com. If you are more serious and would like to have more control over your content and how to market and present it we would recommend taking a look at WordPress.
True, blogging is very easy. It is also very easy to make a ton of mistakes with blogging.
I would argue that mastering the art of blogging is actually rather complicated and involves quite a bit of a learning curve. Not choosing the right platform should be the first error to avoid.
