Knowing A Little About WordPress and Why It Is So Good For Blogging
People who are not well-versed with the process of starting a blog but want to start one would be stuck when they have to make a decision on what platform to use for their blogging needs. There are many different options available to them to create their blogs but of course they would want the best one out there. Blogger and WordPress come head to head when you want to start out a blog because both these platforms are the most robust and powerful platforms for anyone to start a blog in the cyber space.
When you research online you will find out that just like any other product of the world there are groups here too. There is a group that would never support Blogger and the other group would never like to hear a word against Blogger. One side defends WordPress and the other side defends the Blogger. There is no doubt that both these platforms are great but we can see for sure right now that most people prefer to go for WordPress blogs since there are huge advantages of doing that. Let’s read a bit about WordPress and its benefits for using it for blogging.
What Is WordPress?
WordPress is an online platform that allows you to create a blog and manage every aspect of it. This is a place where you put the pieces together to create a blog from the scratch. The most important thing to know here is that you don’t have to be technically sound in order to create a blog on WordPress. If you know what internet is, how to move the mouse and drag and drop things here and there you would definitely know how to use WordPress to your advantage. You can simply call it the online CMS – content management system.
What is a website? A website is your content on the internet. It is put together in an organized way and made accessible to the world when you host it on a server. The content management system lets you manage the content of your website. The job of WordPress here is to make it easy for you to handle the content and put it on your blog. Content means the text, images, videos, widgets, plugins etc. that you put on your blog. People see the front face of your blog whereas you are working on what they see in the back.
A Little About WordPress’ History
Before WordPress came into being there was b2/cafelog. This particular software was the father of WordPress since when there was no WordPress this was the software being used by the bloggers on the internet of that time. Matt and Mike, the two users who were maybe tired of using the b2/cafelog started out on the journey of creating a platform based on the pillars of the existing b2 platform. It was nearly in the middle of 2003 that they both announced to the world the result of their efforts. It was WordPress in the world and people really liked this new and improved platform.
The most interesting thing about WordPress is the fact that it is a free platform. It is an open-source platform where hundreds and thousands of people around the world work on it together to improve its functionality and make it a better product for the rest of the world. The basis of WordPress is MySQL and PHP, and the most likeable thing about this platform is its plugins. Since its inception in 2003 WordPress has been evolving and getting better. Its UI has been getting better and the options for bloggers are just what they want.
At the moment there are more than 60 million websites on the internet that use WordPress as their CMS. Most people who work with WordPress are happy with what it offers to them. The biggest rival for WordPress remains Blogger. However, there is no doubt that WordPress has left every other competitor behind it with its popularity and acceptability in the recent years. WordPress has been improving fast since its inception and is currently at its 4.2.2. version. A newer version of the platform is to be announced in the August of 2015.
Why WordPress For Blogs
Internet is full of reasons why WordPress is the best platform to run your blogs. The first and foremost advice you will get from most of the bloggers who got the fame by building their blogs on WordPress is that you should not go for the free version. What they think is that a free version limits you in many ways. Not to mention, the paid version of the platform is very affordable for anyone. Even a student going to college can easily afford the yearly costs of the WordPress’ self-hosted blog.
One of the major reasons for using WordPress for blogging is its ease of use. In a world where you are free to express yourself however you want there should not have been any limits on your freedom of expression anyways. However, with so much technical coding required to make a website many great minds were held back from owning their own blogs. However, with the coming of a platform like WordPress it became easy for almost anyone to create a blog. As the funny online meme goes, “even your grandma can use it to create a blog”.
WordPress is free to use. Of course, you can use the paid version of the platform as well but there is always a way to go with the free version. Those who know the art of persuasion have done a great job with free versions as well. Even with the free version you have access to some great themes and options. You have access to almost all the options but your access is a bit limited. Even if you go with the paid version you only pay for signing up for the platform but rest of the stuff you get for free.
It is an open source platform which means there are thousands of people around the world that are ready to help you with your issues. If you have a problem then there are high chances that someone else had that problem as well. If you visit the support communities, forums and blogs you will definitely find an easy solution to your problem. This is the beauty of an open-source platform. People who are working on improving the platform are constantly updating the repository of information with useful guides and tips on how to fix the many problems.
When you are working on a blog you want to make sure that everything you do looks a bit different. There are many occasions when you find yourself in a position where you want to add certain functionality to your blog. Coding or finding inferior ways to make things possible is not the best practice in this scenario. You can go for plugins which are the most famous part of WordPress. There are so many plugins out there by now that you might find a plugin for almost anything unique that comes in your mind about your blog. From contact forms to photo collections – there is a plugin for everything.
The great themes available on WordPress make your job easy when you are starting a blog. When you are just starting there are tons of things you can’t figure out. There are so many things that you can’t make heads and tails of things. The best thing to do here is to go with the default options. Thanks to the developers of WordPress they have made this area so impressive. You can always look at hundreds and thousands of other blogs that have been created with default themes available on WordPress to get an idea of how to go about this.
WordPress is great for SEO. The first thing you need to know here is that Google may reward websites within its search results that are hosted on reliable platforms. WordPress is more reliable than any other platform you could think of. WordPress is not good only for blogging but has become a great platform for creating ecommerce websites as well. Not to mention, you can now create websites that are compatible with any mobile devices as well. All the options on your blog are customizable.
A self-hosted blog on WordPress with adequate daily traffic is considered quite a thing on the internet today. What this means is that you can easily attract business on your blog just because you are using a safe, sound and impressive platform. People would be more open to collaborating with you. Think about guest blogging. People would love to have their blog posts hosted on your blog and your posts hosted on theirs. When you think you are growing bigger on WordPress and need more space, you can use the scalable features of the platform and take advantage of the multi-site aspects of the platform.
