I get a lot of requests for help with WordPress lately (which I am happy to answer), and I’m mak­ing a good chunk of my money through my knowl­edge of the con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem.  I thought today I’d give you some back­ground on why I’ve made WordPress my go-to plat­form when design­ing author websites.

Broad Support and User Base

WordPress has one of the largest user bases of any con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem.  Why is this a good thing?  Well, it means that there’s a lot of com­mu­nity sup­port.  It means that if there’s a fea­ture you want, there’s a good chance some­one has already devel­oped it as a plug-in (there are tens of thou­sands of plug-ins for WordPress).  If you run into a bug or other prob­lem, there’s a good chance that you can find some­one else who has already expe­ri­enced this prob­lem with a Google Search.  This all trans­lates into fewer hours and more fea­tures for your author web­site.  You get more for less.

What this also means is that rather than hav­ing to go out and buy expen­sive books to learn how to design WordPress sites, I have been able to learn every­thing I know from read­ing online.  So I have less up-front invest­ment (although still quite a bit of invest­ment in mas­ter­ing parts of it). Those sav­ings get passed on to clients, ultimately.

Great Back-end Usability

The back-end of a site is the part that only the site author sees.  It’s where you go to man­age your con­tent, write new blog posts, and so on.  Because your read­ers never see this part of your soft­ware, you might be tempted to be sat­is­fied with any old thing–that is, if you’re already a com­puter expert, and don’t have any trou­ble learn­ing new inter­faces.  Not all inter­faces are cre­ated equal.  Now, WordPress hasn’t always had a nice, user-friendly back-end, but these days, it’s quite sim­ple and beau­ti­ful.  I enjoy spend­ing time inside of the WordPress soft­ware, con­fig­ur­ing things, and a good por­tion of my enjoy­ment is due to that.

And chances are, you’ve already used WordPress.  A lot of authors have already used sites like WordPress.com to set up blogs in the past.  So this means you spend less time learn­ing an inter­face, and more time work­ing on your writing.

Power Theme System

WordPress allows you to con­fig­ure and lay out your site any way you want, and it does it through a straight­for­ward theme engine with well doc­u­mented tem­plate tags.   Through a com­bi­na­tion of plu­g­ins, theme writ­ing, HTML, CSS, and judi­cious JavaScript, there hasn’t been a design con­cept I have come across that can’t be imple­mented in some fash­ion with the sys­tem.  And using a good blank theme as a start­ing base, you can have a theme up and run­ning from an HTML pro­to­type very quickly.  You dream it up, and I build it.  It’s as easy as that.

A CMS, Not Just a Blog

Some peo­ple make the mis­take of think­ing that WordPress is just for blogs.  That’s only a small part of what WordPress can do these days.  With a few basic plu­g­ins, you can build just about any kind of Content Management System fea­ture you might want.  And most impor­tantly to authors, it gives you a user-friendly way of man­ag­ing and edit­ing that con­tent.   Rather than hav­ing to spend money down the road pay­ing your web­mas­ter to update your site, you can do it your­self through the back-end.  It’s a win-win for you and your webmaster.

Conclusion

So those are just a few of the rea­sons I use WordPress.  I was very hes­i­tant to adopt it early on because I had read a lot of neg­a­tives, but each one of those neg­a­tives has been addressed by the devel­op­ment team.  Eventually, it made less sense to stick with an old warhorse like Movable Type and to move on and work with the younger, more dynamic WordPress.  Since I made the move, I haven’t looked back.

If you are an author, pub­lisher, or small busi­ness look­ing for a site built on WordPress, don’t hes­i­tate to con­tact me via Clockpunk Studios, my design com­pany.  I am avail­able to take new work on start­ing in early September.    I have a wide range of prices I can offer you, to fit many bud­gets.  We can build your dream site, or we can get you started with some­thing basic at your own domain very quickly, and add to that later.  So don’t assume you can’t afford it.  You might be sur­prised how cheaply you can get up and run­ning with your own WordPress-backed site.

Tagged as: authors, Web Design, web design for authors, WordPress