Let me say right out the gate that I am a total Wordpress fan. I love this blogging platform through and through. Sure, there is room for improvement, but there is with anything in life I suppose. Let me give you an introduction into this software and why you might want to use it.

First, Wordpress is 100% free. That’s right, you don’t need to pay a penny to get, upload it to your server, and get it running. Also, most plugins are also 100% free. Yep, you can extend Wordpress with a ton of plugins. And, yet again, a ton of Wordpress Themes are 100% free. So, now you can skin your Wordpress blog and personalize it – all for nothing. How’s that for a good start?

Second, as a blogging platform, Wordpress is elegant. Wordpress offers you a very easy way to write, manage, categorize, and edit posts. And you can make your posts very search friendly in terms of the url. So, instead of your post pages being http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=40 you can have a nice search engine friendly name like http://www.yourdomain.com/great-site-names/.   You can easily moderate comments.  Heck, you can even turn comments on or off.  You can schedule posts.  This is nice if you want to write a bunch of posts at once and then have them appear each day during the week.   Just schedule them and forget about it.  Wordpress allows for easy blogroll managment.  You can add links and delete them very easily.  And a while ago, Wordpress added widget support for themes.  This means that you can drag and drop stuff to sidebars on a page and it will show up.  This could be things like recent comments, recent posts, archives, etc.  Blogger recently added something similar.  There is even some user management within Wordpress.  This will allow you to add authors for your blog with limited rights.

Wordpress also gives you a great way to adjust your theme on the fly.  I’ve already alluded to the widget support.  This has to be built into the theme you are using.  But you can even edit your theme from within Wordpress.  It has a theme editor built in.

And when it comes to doing actual posts within Wordpress, I find the editor simple enough for most anyone and powerful enough for 99% of posting needs.  I think they do a good job finding that middle road.  If you ever need that functionality extended, you can always get a plugin.  A good example is embedding things like youtube videos.  There are some good plugins that allow you to do that simply and easily.

So, Wordpress is free, easy to use, and easy to extend.  That sounds like a good thing for anyone interested in blogging.

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