Why did we use WordPress to power this blog?

Posted 5th July 2010 by Andrew

As promised in my last blog post (We are now running WordPress 3.0!) here is why we used WordPress to power this blog. We started this blog in October 2009, but before we got up and running with it we did a little bit of research into blogging software and also got some great expert advice into what would be the best blogging software for us to use.

Time and time again WordPress seemed to be a lot of peoples preferred choice and now many months down the line I can honestly say we don’t regret using WordPress for a second!

Below are just some of the reasons we love it:

Open Source
WordPress is open source, which means we can download it and use it for free!

User Friendly
You don’t really have to be a computer expert to use WordPress. The admin section is very easy to navigate and it’s even easier to add posts/content… if you know how to use Microsoft Word you’ll know how to write and edit a post.

Supports Many Users
Here at Media Lightbox there are a number of people who write blog posts… each has been set up by the admin and can login under their own user names and passwords etc with different access rights set up to each.

Themes Support
There are LOADS of themes and templates for WordPress if you don’t like the themes that come with the default installation of WordPress. You can look on the Internet and you will find thousands of free themes that you can download and install (there are also paid themes that are normally better then the free ones). The theme we use is one called Flexx (Please note our programmers have edited this theme quite a bit).

Plugins
With WordPress plugins you can do just about anything that you want and they install in seconds. For example, if you want to add a poll into your blog posts you can easily find the relevant plugin that will do the job for you.

SEO Friendly
Search engine optimization is a big thing for any blog and WordPress uses different functions which allow it to be very search engine friendly. (you can also download SEO plugins that will improve this again)

Web Standards
WordPress follows all the Web Standards and keeps your blog compliant to all the rules that have to be followed.

Large community Support
Whenever you face any problems, you can go through tons of WordPress forums and communities online and find answers for all your questions.

Set Published Date
There are many, many more great reasons to choose WordPress than the ones I’ve listed above but this last one is also very cool… you can write a post one day and set it to publish at a later date. Example… when I wrote this post it was Monday 21st June at 3.30pm at my desk in our Belfast office… although the post went live on Monday 5th July when I was not at my desk… actually all being well I will be on holiday in Turkey!… here’s an artist impression of what I may be doing when WordPress automatically sets this post live: