Wordpress

Wordpress started out as blogging software.  That means it is optimized to present postings in chronological order and make commenting on the posting easy. 

An example of an idea situation in which to use Wordpress would be someone who wants to comment on daily events.  They might make several posts a day about items of interest and readers would respond with their take on the issues.  The postings would all be in chronological order and can also be placed into categories.  The result is a website with an expanding volume of content related to the subject of the blog.

Wordpress was designed from the ground up to be easy to use and install.  Many web hosting companies have it pre-installed or have one button installs available.  Even if you have to upload and install it yourself it goes very quickly.  I had lots of practice and got to where I could install it, complete with a couple of introductory postings, in about fifteen minutes.

Once installed, it is easy to use.  The text editor is modeled after Word so anyone with word processor experience will quickly feel at home.

If you want to include images as part of your blog it gets somewhat more difficult.  Wordpress comes with some image handling ability and there are a variety of plugins available.  Plugins are code written to extend wordpress and allow it to do something which was not available in the default install.  There are hundreds of plugins available.

Wordpress has a plugin folder where upload the plugin files and then you use the plugin manager part of wordpress to activate the plugin of your choice.  The landscape is constantly changing because wordpress and the plugins are a work in progress.  If you can't find what you need today, you can proably find it tomorrow.

Wordpress makes a great program to use to get your feet wet with website publishing.  Free, easy to install, easy to use, with many features that will extend it to do what you need.  We frequently install it on new domains as a place holder while we work on actually developing a site.  By making a few posts about our plans for the site we can jump start the indexing process.

If thats the case, why would you not use Wordpress?