Why WordPress?

I’ve recently updated some existing web sites to use WordPress for a couple different clients. They just wanted me to make some changes to their site.

They had no idea that WordPress would allow them to update their own site themselves. They thought that a web site is just a web site. Only web developers could make changes to them. They had no control of their own site.

The old school way of building a web site, the way I did it since 1994, is to manually write out static HTML files and put them on a web server. Each page lived on it’s own, like having a bunch of pieces of paper laid out on the living room floor. You have to change each one individually.

Smart people got the idea to develop a “Content Management System”, CMS, to take care of the hard, repetitive stuff. There are now many of them. Drupal and Joomla are the primary competitors to WordPress these days.

The idea of a CMS is that some of the elements on a web page are the same from page to page. Generally there’s a header, a sidebar, and a footer, with the content in the middle somewhere. The content changes, but the template stays the same.

If you had an automated system that would just add the same header to every page, then you only have to update the header in one place, one time. If you can have a system that manages the static stuff and lets you play with the changing stuff, life would be easier.

Using WordPress allows me to build that template, all the hard stuff, the common stuff, as a web developer, then allows my clients to manage all the stuff in the middle, the content.

I haven’t built a web site without using WordPress in years.

Why WordPress? Control.

In any CMS, there are “admin” pages, a section of the site that is password protected. Those pages control the images, the posts, the pages, the content of the site to be updated easily.

Want a new page? Log into the admin and add a new page. Want to write a blog post? Log in and write a new post. Find a typo that someone else did? Log in and fix it. Add an image and put it in your blog post.

WordPress puts the control of the content back in your hands. You don’t need a web developer to write HTML every time you want to change something. You don’t need to know how an internal combustion engine works to drive a car. You just drive.

WordPress takes all of the technical, hard stuff and handles it for you. You just create the web site. Type some stuff. Click a button. It’s a piece of pie.

You do need to know how to move the shift lever and turn on the engine. You need to know how to turn the steering wheel. The level of technical knowledge required is like driving a car.

If you are still paying someone else to update your web site, or if you don’t have a web site yet, now is the time to use WordPress. It’s cheap. It’s easy. It’s available.

Take control. The road is waiting.

If you use WordPress, what do you think about it? If you don’t, why not? Leave a comment.