WordPress: Why You Should Use It
Posted on 22. May, 2009 by Terry Reinert in WordPress
This is the first post in what will becoming a WordPress specific series of posts on my blog. This series of posts will mainly focus on how to tweak WordPress and WordPress themes to operate and look the way you want them to. However, I will also be throwing in other tidbits of information along the way. But before I get into editing themes and other crazy topics, I thought it would be best to explain why every photographer and artist should have a WordPress blog.Well, any photographer and artist that wants to be found anyway… so here goes the first post in my new WordPress series!
First off, what is WordPress? Easy enough… if you are reading this post then you see WordPress in action assuming you aren’t reading from a RSS feed. WordPress is a blogging platform and also categorized as a content management system. It allows users to easily configure, manage, and update their website with new content using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. Adding content to your WordPress blog does not require any programming skills at all… so you won’t have to pay a web designer or programmer everyt time you want to add something to your site. All you have to do is log into your admin panel, click on the Add New Post link and start typing away!
There are many reasons for using WordPress even if you do not want to blog regularly. There are themes for WordPress that do not look like a blog at all. I personally prefer to use Brian Gardner’s themes who is the man behind StudioPress. They look very professional, are widget ready, and very easy to customize. I have used his themes as a baseline to create many different websites including the one you are on now which looks like a blog and based off the Streamline theme as well as Robert Vanelli’s site, Exposure PAS, which is more of a hybrid between a static website and a blog built off the Church theme. Again, even if you do not want to blog regularly it is still good to use WordPress so that you can update your content whenever you want instead of paying a designer to do it each and every time!
In addition to the above, WordPress is SEO (Search Engine Optomization) friendly and there are additional plugins available to extend its base SEO capabilities. This is important because search engines are one of the top ways to drive traffic to your site. If you are not ranked very high then you are less likely to be found by potential customers. With a little bit of knowledge you can turn your WordPress site into a top ranking site on Google. For example, if you search for “Areia HDR” in Google, my review of their software shows up before Areia’s own website does! How is that for wicked good SEO? Now to be honest I have to admit that I did do additional SEO related things to make that happen… but WordPress does go a long way in laying the SEO foundation that you can easily work from.
I mentioned plugins in the above paragraph… there are a TON of plugins available for WordPress that do all sorts of things… One of my future posts in this series will cover plugins in details but if you look around my blog you will see many of the ones I am using… for example, you can rate this post using the stars at the bottom of this text which is handled by a rating plugin or you can read my latest twitter updates in the sidebar from the twitter updates plugin. Between the plugins and widgets that are available for WordPress you can pretty much do anything with it.
So that is just a quick overview as to why you should consider using WordPress for your photography or artistry website. Here are some other blog posts from others that discuss the same topic if you are not already convinced…
Keep an eye out for more posts from my WordPress series coming soon…
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