Using WordPress To Complete Your Online Presence
We are now using WordPress to create dynamic and easy to use websites for you business. WordPress is an open source blogging system, publishing platform and also a content management system. The reason we are using WordPress is because it is easy to use for the end-user and it is also very cost-effective which plays a major part in today’s economy.
About WordPress, WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.
What You Can Use WordPress For, WordPress started as just a blogging system, but has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more through the thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes, WordPress is limited only by your imagination.
Clean, Lean, and Mean, The core of WordPress will always provide a solid array of basic features. It’s designed to be lean and fast and will always stay that way. We are constantly asked “when will X feature be built” or “why isn’t X plugin integrated into the core”. The rule of thumb is that the core should provide features that 80% or more of end users will actually appreciate and use. If the next version of WordPress comes with a feature that the majority of users immediately want to turn off, or think they’ll never use, then we’ve blown it. If we stick to the 80% principle then this should never happen.
Striving for Simplicity, We’re never done with simplicity. We want to make WordPress easier to use with every single release. We’ve got a good track record of this, if you don’t believe us then just take a look back at some older versions of WordPress!
WordPress Bill of Rights, WordPress is licensed under the General Public License (GPLv2 or later) which provides four core freedoms, consider this as the WordPress “bill of rights”:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
The freedom to redistribute.
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.
Part of those licensing requirements include licensing derivative works or things that link core WordPress functions (like themes, plugins, etc.) under the GPL as well, thereby passing on the freedom of use for these works as well.
Obviously there are those who will try to get around these ideals and restrict the freedom of their users by trying to find loopholes or somehow circumvent the intention of the WordPress licensing, which is to ensure freedom of use. We believe that the community as a whole will reward those who focus on supporting these licensing freedoms instead of trying to avoid them.
The most responsible use of WordPress community resources would therefore be put to best use by emphasizing high quality contributions that embrace the freedoms provided by the GPL
The following is a list of some of the features that come standard with WordPress, however there are literally hundreds of plugins that extend what WordPress does, so the actual functionality is nearly limitless.
Full standards compliance - full compliance with the standards of the W3C
No rebuilding - make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site
Pages - allow you to manage non-blog content easily
Links - allow you to create, maintain, and update any number of blogrolls
Themes - you can even have multiple themes with totally different looks
Comments - Visitors to your site can leave comments on individual entries
Spam protection - integrated blacklist and open proxy checker to manage and eliminate comment spam
User registration - built-in user registration system
Password Protected - give passwords to individual posts to hide them from the public
Easy installation and upgrades - upgrading from previous versions and other software is a piece of cake
Easy Importing - importers for Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and b2
Workflow - types of users that can only post drafts, not publish to the front page
Typographical niceties - intelligently convert plain ASCII into typographically correct XHTML entities
Intelligent text formatting - intelligently avoids places where you already have breaks and block-level HTML tags
Multiple authors - different privileges with regard to publishing, editing, options, and other users
Bookmarklets - make it easy to publish to your blog or add links
Easy to use - Interfaces are polished and easy to use
Never Lose a Word - automatically saves your work as you type so you don’t have to worry
Publish Anywhere - internet’s everywhere, so why shouldn’t your workflow be?
Save Drafts - Save your unfinished articles, improve them later, publish when you’re done
Notification - can keep you in the loop by sending you an email each time there is a new comment
Integrated stats system - designed to give you up-to-the-minute stats on how many people are visiting your site
User profiles - Every user on your website can define a profile
File/Picture uploading - allows you to upload pictures or files, and link to them or display them in your articles
Categories - allows you to organize your posts into categories, sub-categories and sub-sub-categories
Previewing posts - Before publishing you can preview the articles and check how it will look like
Highly affordable - WordPress is highly affordable. Most of its features can be used for free
SEO friendly - optimize your website by adding tags to all your pages and posts. It is also very easy to update regularly
Social Media - completely compatible with all forms of social media like Facebook, You tube and twitter
Automatic backups - keeps backing up your website automatically and you do not have to do the daily backup on your own
Free support - community has a lot of active members to guide you if you require any help to fix any issue
Add-ons - add plugins to change your website into a E-commerce, real estate, advertising, online shop and product guide website.
This is why we have decided to start using WordPress to create our clients websites because of all the features and because it is cost-effective with the fact that it is easy to use for the end-user.