Make a Website Great

The number of options and technologies for building a Web site is overwhelming. However, unless you are truly aiming at something complex or unique, (such as a new dot com startup selling Moon dust to Martians) there is one choice for creating your website that clearly stands out: Building a WordPress site.

WordPress is an open source blogging tool, but it’s evolved enough so that it can be configured to look like an “ordinary” non-blog site. Or you can also have a hybrid configuration where WordPress looks like an “ordinary” website that has a blog section.

Since WordPress is open source, it is free to install, use and modify to your liking. Another positive aspect of WordPress’s open sourceness (yes, I just made that up) is the large community of developers who work on extending its functionality.

WordPress is highly expendable and customizable trough templates and plugins. Templates are mainly responsible for how an installation of WordPress looks, and plugins are responsible for adding functionality that does not exist in its core. Because of its great popularity, (largely due to the fact that it’s free and was developed early in the Web’s timeline) WordPress has a vast body of templates and plugins developed by individuals and companies across the world. And much of it is free. I don’t think there is another website creation platform that comes close to the number of templates and plugins available to WordPress.

The large body of WordPress templates and plugins, combined with continuous open source improvements to the WordPress core, gives website owners an opportunity to leverage a massive amount of work done by developers across the world for free. Consequently if you use WordPress, you get a highly functional website that can keep improving with easy upgrades and plugin installations as technology strides forward. All this is in stark contrast to basing your website on your own proprietary platform, that only improves as you personally invest in making those improvements.

There are other open source Web platforms, most notably Joomla and Drupal, that are considered more robust content management systems, however WordPress does hold several advantages over those:

• Ease of use and installation.
• Simplicity of development. Meaning that it easy to develop for, change and extend WordPress.
• A large number of developers versed in WrodPress. Consequently, it’s easier to find developers to do WordPress customizations.
• Larger number of templates and plugins.

Because of the above reasons, as I mentioned before, unless you’re doing something very special, creating your website with WordPress is a winning default strategy.

Even if you decide to completely outsource your website and have it built by someone else, most times, the best approach is to have your site build around WordPress. This way you’ll have an easy to use content management system, so that and even if you’re not a techie, you won’t have to call your Web designer for every little change on your site.

There’s another important thing I should mention. There are quite a lot of site builders and free blog platforms, such as the ones at Wordpress.com and Blogger.com, that let you create a site on their servers within their system. While this is an easy solution, it has one big disadvantage, which is loss of control. On the other hand, if you get your own hosting account and install your website there, you are not limited by what you’re allowed to do. You can install any templates, plugins, or software versions you want. Just by taking a relatively small step of getting hosting and installing WordPress, you’ll be free to have your site which ever way you like, unhindered by policies and restrictions of a third party.

Further reading: How to Install WordPress Using Fantastico