10 reasons why I use WordPress

Spot the WordPress

I was get­ting use to blog­ging using Blog­ger and Pos­ter­ous. After awhile I felt there was enough lim­i­ta­tions in both, for me to look around.

Don’t get me wrong. I love both Blog­ger and Pos­ter­ous. Blog­ger have lots of sup­port online and its every­where and Pos­ter­ous is easy to use.

!. Both could do the job, though after read­ing about it, I find it a bit more tech­ni­cal. I just wanted some­thing sim­ple and easy to use and with the the flex­i­bil­ity to go further.

.

Ini­tially, I signed up with WordPress.com (the hosted ver­sion). Its free. I did it, to get a feel for the Word­Press inter­face. Next I signed up for Blo­getery (its dead now).

Only when I was com­fort­able enough, I signed up with x10 host­ing. They pro­vided free host­ing. There I learnt about CPanel, FTP and what­ever is required for server maintenance.

I’m mostly self-taught and have no for­mal edu­ca­tion on com­puter systems.

Finally, I took the plunge and paid for self-hosting. It was back in May 2010. And I’m very happy with the decision.

Here are my 10 rea­sons that I choose Word­Press (self-hosted).

1. Word­Press is free.
   , its Open Office. Say what you want, free doesn’t mean its cripple-ware.
2. Full Con­trol over my Blog.
   
3. Themes.
   Its every­where, from free to paid and you could even design your own. Its enough to drive you crazy. I wanted to change the theme almost every other day when I started.
4. Plu­g­ins.
   What are plu­g­ins? They extend the func­tion­al­ity of Word­Press beyond the fea­tures that come as part of the base install. What­ever you want Word­Press to do, there is a plu­gin out there. I got car­ried away, and at one point of time used nearly 30 plu­g­ins. Now I man­aged to cut it down to half.
5. Upgrades.
   Word­Press upgrades are so easy. In ver­sion 3.0.1, I just need to check the dash­board. It will indi­cated if there is a need to update themes, plu­g­ins or Word­Press upgrades. All I need to do is click and its upgraded. Sim­ple and painlessly.
6. Devel­op­ers.
   There is a mas­sive net­work of devel­op­ers. Why is that impor­tant? It sim­ply means that updates and releases are pushed out con­stantly, imply­ing that the code is always up to date.
7. Word­Press can be any­thing.
   
8. It is an open com­mu­nity.
   It wel­comes new­bies and advanced users alike. I can go to codex.wordpress.org and get the tech­ni­cal mumbo-jumbo and take my time to under­stand it.
9. Sim­ple Soft­ware.
   It is a light­weight, sim­ple, aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing soft­ware package.
10. Its very easy to use.
    From upgrades of themes, plu­g­ins and core files to post­ing an arti­cle. The back­end does a fan­tas­tic job. It is eas­ier to mod­ify, man­age and build any­thing with it.

If you are seri­ous in blog­ging, self-hosted Word­Press is the way to go.