Back in the ‘good old days’ of the internet (haa!), websites were all hand-coded and different. Then, along came Content Management Systems (CMS) of all variety for a while, and WordPress seemed to win the long haul opinion for the best standard CMS on the web.
If you’re at a standard web host, you’ll likely see that there are many CMS available to install in fairly easy processes.
Which one should you use?
WordPress has by and large been the industry standard for bloggers for a while now. One good thing about them being so big and widely used is that they probably work hard to ensure their stuff is somewhat secure. However, since so many people are using WordPress, many hackers try to infiltrate sites that have not been kept up to date or have insecure plugins.
The benefits of going with WordPress, however, are great. For one, not having to hand-roll everything makes it so you can more easily focus on your content. Two, there are many plugins available for you to use. Three, if you don’t find what you need, you can make your own fairly simply and the way you do this is abstracted in a way to make it so you can merely concentrate on the plugin development. Mind you, you do have to do some coding, but they have abstracted it well.
Another nice thing is that there are a lot of themes for it. These are like skins for your website. It can be really fun to make a few good posts then ‘try on’ the different themes to see which make you appear most like you think your customer will expect you will look.
When I first started out, the war was still going on for the winning standard of CMS and I had chosen Joomla. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but I was patching all the time instead of writing content. A nice thing nowadays is when there are patches you may have them automatically applied if you wish. That way you can stay up to date on security issues and concentrate on providing your readers with value.
When you go for WordPress, however, be sure to use WordPress CMS and not just sign up for a blog hosted through WordPress.org. You want to own this thing. If you want to be able to control what you do with your business and come across as professional, you’ll want to host your own domain name and then likely use WordPress as your CMS.
