WordPress - Application of the Year
In the January edition of the Affiliate Classroom’s monthly journal, Mark Thompson nominated WordPress as the application of the year.
He wrote:
In a year with so many great products it hasn’t been easy choosing a product of the year. But in spite of all the powerful products released in what has undoubtedly been a vintage year, there was only ever one real candidate.
This product has enabled everyone to create great sites quickly and promote products and sites with ease. The product comes with numerous features and a wealth of additional plug-ins. And best of all it’s free.
…. it gives us great pleasure to announce that the Affiliate Classroom Product of the Year 2006 is: WordPress Version 2.0
Obviously I agree with Mark, as I am sure many of my customers do!
But I didn’t always feel that way …
WordPress - Shock Of The Year
WordPress shocked me when I first discovered it in early 2005. We had just billed a customer over $5000 for a smallish ASP.Net site. This was lower than the going rate for an interactive, customized site - so our customer only grumbled a little about the price. But what if he had discovered he could have got a database-driven site for free? One with a better editing interface. One that he could extend with plug-ins for free. How about no waiting time for additional custom development. Even better - no large development bills.
I literally felt sick. My full-time developer had spent months building his skills in ASP.Net. It now looked as if his ‘school fees’ (that I had paid for) were a waste of hard-earned cash. Not to mention the ASP.Net ‘bibles’ I had bought for him. They were now more useful as door-stoppers.
I thought a long time over the implications of WordPress and open source. Eventually I decided that I needed to learn how to benefit from this free software, rather than resist and continue developing as in the past.
Progress Over The Past 2 Years
That was back in the days of WordPress 1.5. There were some plug-ins and free themes, but nothing like the range and quality of plug-ins and themes now available.
There are now several sites listing hundreds of plug-ins - offering all sorts of additional functionality to your site. Some are great, and others not-so-great.
There are also many more themes available for free. Many still look ‘bloggy’ but there are also a few that are suitable for niche sites. A big improvement from 2005, when many WordPress sites were very bloggy looking - until RapidNicheWebsites came onto the scene.
What WordPress Delivers
What makes WordPress so great as a website platform?
- It’s very easy to edit (no HTML skills needed). So you don’t need a techie to maintain your site.
- It’s multi-user - so you can share the updating of your site with multiple users. In a business, each functional area can take responsibility for their own area. Having multiple contributors - each being to add their entries themselves helps ensure your site enjoys regular updates.
- You can post-date of articles. This means you can batch-write a series of articles, but trickle-publish them by setting different scheduled dates.
- It provides for easy handling of “rolling events” like marketing promotions, speaking engagements, and training days.
- You can allow for reader participation through comments and trackbacks
- Instead of being locked in by a developer, you can get free support by the very responsive developer and user communities.
- Its built-in auto-pinging and RSS capabilities helps tremendously with Search Engine Optimization and traffic generation.
Great Marketing Platform
Mark shares a similar view to me that WordPress is a great marketing platform:
Although you could use it for just creating a blog, you would be wasting a lot of its huge potential.
Because in truth, WordPress is without a doubt one of the finest marketing tools available to the Internet marketer today.
Actually this is where I differ with Mark. It’s not a great marketing tool just for internet marketers - it’s a great marketing tool for any type of business. It’s flexibility and easy-of-use make it perfect for establishing an effective marketing presence. And we haven’t even mentioned its SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits.
Sometimes You Need To Go With Your Instincts
Back in 2005 I had some tough choices. Tie my future to websites based on an open source blog platform, or refine our ASP.Net development skills.
Had I listened to my developer, we would still have been wrestling with ASP.Net applications. We would also have been restricted to the local small business market. Fortunately common sense told me that WordPress was going to be an attractive option for many individuals and businesses. There was of course just one minor detail - at the time my PHP and MySQL skills were zero …
I’m glad I chose the initially tougher option. It took lots of late nights learning WordPress and the new languages.
In the end, though, it’s been worth it.
My business options have broadened tremendously. I now clients all around the world. New opportunities are emerging for 2007. And a final benefit - I can even consider relocating without any loss of income.
