WordPress – The Ultimate Blogging Tool!

“A blog is a discussion or informal website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts)”.  - Wikipedia

It’s weird to think that something so simple has made such an impression in the digital world, but these days people genuinely use blogs as their main source of income.  Yes that’s right, people are actually make a living off writing about their points of interest, and are essentially generating money from it. I was going to give you an idea of who the top end bloggers were, but the truth is it depends what topic and what type of blog you’re looking at. There are Personal Blogs, Collaborative and Group Blogs, Microblogging, Corporate and Organisational Blogs, and Aggregated Blogs. Then these are further separated into genres like fashion, health, fitness, food, travel, political, beauty, lifestyle and so on. To top it off these whittle down even more, as there are specific formats of blogs such as vlog, linklog, sketchblog, photoblog, tumbler blogs, typecast and also phlog. So as you can see with all these varieties of blogs, it’s no wonder that blogging has become such a mainstream industry.

But where’s the best place to start out if you’re new to blogging?

Well there really is no right or wrong answer to this question as everyone is different. What it actually comes down to, is what you feel the most comfortable doing. As a suggestion maybe one way forward is to use one of the most traditional forms of blogging (if your starting out), which is to blog via posts on your own website. If you’re a non-technical person don’t panic this doesn’t mean that you need to suddenly learn how to code or be an established web developer. In fact, what most bloggers do is use an open source web platform called WordPress.

WORDPRESS

Thanks to its efficiency and adaptability WordPress is one of the most popular web development solutions around. It functions on an open source technology,which uses a source code that is “open” to modification and enhancement by any one, meaning you have complete control over how your website looks and functions. You can install a range of plugins, widgets, and themes to customise your website making it unique to your business. Other features include:

Multisite Abilities- A network of WordPress sites is much easier to maintain – either with a subdomain.domain.comstructure, or a domain.com/subdirectory structure.

Customise the types of Posts- WordPress actually started out as just a blogging system, but has evolved over the years and is now utilised as a full content management system and so much more. This is great news for theme developers, as it reduces the need to fiddle around with custom fields.

Easy Menu Management-Word Press allows the developer to create several menus, categories, and you can even custom external or internal links. The “Menu” function comes with default widgets for you to utilise to your liking.

Cross-blog communication tools-This is the perfect tool for any blogger as it enables visitors to leave comments on different individual entries that you might upload, andwith Trackback or Pingback it in turn allows you to comment on their site. This tool also gives you the control to enable or disable comments every time you post.

Eliminate potential spam-To eliminate spam on your website, WordPress comes with a variety of tools such as an integrated blacklist and open proxy checker. Obviously you can of course install other widgets to support spam protection but these tools are already built in.

Protect your Posts – Protect all posts you upload with individual passwords, and any posts you want to make private will only be visible to you when you hide it from the public.

No reconstruction – Any changes you make to the templates or entries on your WordPress site are instantly replicatedacross all pages where necessary so you don’t have to reconstruct each page.

From its dynamic features you can now see why so many bloggers use WordPress solutions, however you don’t have to be a blogger to use WordPress, as many other businesses use it for different purposes.WordPress is incredibly easy to setup, and although it doesn’t come with a guide book, there are endless tutorials on how to use it on YouTube.