Does Everyone Just Use Wordpress?

No, you don't need to be highly skilled in webdesign and other technical aspects of running a site. You can always outsource your shortcomings. Wordpress is the primary script used by most bloggers and Internet marketers but there are also other options like plain html pages and other custom squeeze pages.

So do I. Because that's what a lot of people make out of it.

But that's hardly a reason not to use it? That logic's like not shopping at Marks & Spencer just because one or two cardiac patients happened to drop dead there from coronary artery disease last month. It doesn't make it any more likely that you will. You can make whatever you want to make, from Wordpress, or from just about any other content management system you choose to use.

The hosted variety, at wordpress.com, is for "hobby bloggers only". No form of monetization is allowed there at all. So it isn't an option for marketers. It's no safer than Blogspot/Blogger, in that regard: monetized/commercial sites can just disappear in the night.

I would always recommend newbies to using WordPress - but not without explaining to them all the benefits of it. The reason that there are such crappy websites is normally because people just want to use WordPress because it's "easy" - which causes them to be lazy. If they actually utilized all the features of WordPress, they could have an awesome website and with an awesome design.

The other train of thought is to put up a wordpress site, be done with it, and get to marketing and making money.

Or spend even more days, weeks, months tweaking or getting things buttoned up on your own version, and making NOTHING.

If it servers your purposes and makes money, does it really matter if it's "wordpress"?

There are just as many great Wordpress sites as there are crappy ones. It totally depends on the skill of the developer(s). Wordpress is a great CMS because of its simplicity of use. You don't need to know coding at all to use it. There are also tons of plugins to choose from for just about everything.

I started with developing my own sites from notepad and dreamweaver before falling in love with wordpress, i think I can share some input about this.

You really need to see more wordpress sites. Here are some big brands that uses wordpress:

• 21 Popular Brands That Are Using WordPress
• WordPress › Showcase

To see some quality wordpress themes go to themforest: Premium WordPress Themes & WordPress Templates | ThemeForest

Plus wordpress' codes are clean and search engines tend to like clean & tidy codes. Always go with self hosted.

Also, from a business perspective, you should spend more time trying to make money rather than the technical nitty gritty aspects of making a website. Perhaps u can outsource the work.

The reason that there are so many crappy Wordpress sites out there is precisely because of it's ease of use, and so literally anyone can have a site up and running in no time.

Wordpress' ease of use shouldn't count against it, should it?

Wordpress is just a CMS, but it is very versatile and you can create fantastic looking sites on it, and once you're up and running it's a dream to use, at least IMO.

While I love getting my hands dirty with CSS and HTML, I still use Wordpress for my site because it's so much easier to maintain and I just tinker around the edges.

Definitely use the self hosted option and don't use Wordpress.com which is actually a whole different kettle of fish, and you'll pay around the same amount anyway if you want to get any real customization abilities.

I've been building websites for myself and others for 15 years. For the last 4 or 5, I've almost always used WordPress. That's because I can make an excellent quality site in 1/2 the time for 1/2 the money with WordPress. I also recommend the commercial WordPress framework and themes from StudioPress, for the best SEO and the most design flexibility.

Don't believe what you read about not needing any coding at all to create your own WordPress content though. Even the best themes benefit from a bit of hacking, to fine-tune the look. And without knowing a bit of HTML and Inline CSS, it's hard to format your pages for a truly professional Look & Feel. A lot of WordPress users don't care about that, but that extra effort can make a difference in your online marketing results.

Another important point with WordPress is to become familiar with the best WordPress plugins. There are plugins (usually free) that extend WordPress to do a great many useful things.

Knowing Photoshop or the free GIMP image editor is another very useful skill for WordPress (or any website). Of course these things can be delegated to others, for a price. I just like to be in personal control of as much of my product as possible.

Thanks,

I did use Wordpress for around two years but I got a virus in my server which caused me huge amounts of hassle.

With my self built site I have a product data feed however I dont know how I would use this inside Wordpress. Would I publish it to a page?

I have tried to outsource some of the coding by placing adverts on PeoplePerHour but on one seems to be able to fix the problems I have.

I switched to Wordpress about 5 years ago and have never looked back. The beauty of the plugins is that if you cant do something yourself, you will more than likely find a plugin that can. It is simply a wonderful platform to work with. I have managed to rank each of my sites in the top 5 within a month of going live.

Wordpress all the way

You simply cannot beat the time-to-live, simplicity, flexibility of a wordpress installation.

But remember to use some quality backup service to backup your entire site regularly. Wordpress installs with many plugins are prone to sudden crashes.

Good third-party backup services: www.codeguard.com or VaultPress - WordPress Backup and Security

Having used a bunch of different platforms I often prefer Wordpress when I want to get a site up quick and cheap. I've noticed two problems with Wordpress though:

1. Security - getting hacked sucks and no platform gets hacked as much as Wordpress so take some time to secure your site properly

2. Large scalability - Wordpress is great for most sites but if you want something incredibly complex you're probably better off building on another platform, my designers tell me Zend is one such platform but I usually let them make that decision

WordPress is probably still fine for blogs. That is precisely what it was designed for.

Don't bend it into a full scale CMS though. That isn't optimal. Spend a weekend planning and coding your own CMS. The difference in speed, resources and security make it a no-brainer.

WP is nice, you just be careful with the security. I used to have hard time with viruses coming out from WP.

Thanks, I did have real problems with viruses.

How do I display my products from a feed on WordPress?

Although many designers would recommend you take on Wordpress for simplicity and easy installation. I still think that anyone can learn a bit of HTML and work on beautiful sites without Wordpress. May be it is old book but I still like normal webdesign to wordpress. Just my own thoughts...

Wordpress is most common because it has less of a learning curve than most but there are plenty of really good sites that use wordpress.
There a many CMS programs that you can use depending on what you want to do.
Joomla, Drupal and many others that you could use.

Wordpress is as good or as bad as you make it. There are a lot of poorly coded themes and plugins and a lot of very well coded themes and plugins. The trick is finding and using the latter.

Just like there are a lot of poorly coded HTML sites and a lot of well coded HTMl sites. The platform doesn't dictate how good your site is, the coding does.

I use Weebly, because Wordpress kind of loads slow for me. Besides, Weebly is a cheaper option.

I use Wordpress mostly for speed, but it is easier to set up custom web apps by designing from scratch.

I have heard good things about wordpress. I'm gonna use word press for my near future blog. And, later will be hosted on wordpress. It is pretty simple to use and has got some nice plugins.

You are not alone. When I design sites, I give a custom made CMS (which is bare bones) to my customers to use. It gives a WYSIWYG editor to ONLY the parts of the page I want them to control. The rest I code in PHP (menus, etc). By the way the customer likes this because its much cleaner and easier to use. I like it because I can control/manipulate things in a clean and easy way. Also it has the HUGE benefit of having WAY less over head and thus serves up the page much quicker.

Also this way gives MUCH more flexibility as far as design and SEO possibilities. Now with all that said... the knowledge required on the programming/design side is greater... but not TOO great by any means. Skills any respectful web programmer or designer SHOULD have if they are selling their services (so yes I'm saying people who ONLY SELL wordpress design sites... are not "real" designers).

Wordpress is great in its own right... but was never intended to be the end all/be all of web sites it has become for some. Its application as an "anything" platform is not how it was intended... and so doesn't lend itself to being the best it can be (in those situations). Otherwise you'd see Micrsoft.com and Nike.com using Wordpress... you dont.

Just from a security standpoint I would limit Wordpress use. Its embarrassing to have to explain to a customer their site is down because it was hacked because you decided to use an open-source blogging tool as the platform for their professional business website.

WordPress is mostly used by bloggers and Internet marketers but there are also other options you can use that means you don't need to be highly skilled in webdesign to do it.
There are many people out there who can help,consider outsourcing for the skills you want.

We highly recommend using Wordpress for website design. It is simply the best Content Management System out there.

Not to mention that with Wordpress, you can install various great plugins (free & paid) to enhance the productivity and operation of your Wordpress site.

We have been using Wordpress for many years and we have nothing but praise about the efficiency of Wordpress. Two thumbs up.

I am a big fan of SquareSpace. Amazing designs and very easy to use.

I'm totally new to the venture of building my own website. I did a bit of research and finally settled on Wordpress for a few reasons. First it was the easiest for me to get started, kind of just followed a simple set of instructions and I was done. Second, I found a set of themes that I just loved and in order to use any of them Wordpress it was. Third, I have a number of good friends who have successful businesses and do their own websites. They all seem to use Wordpress and were all willing to help me out when I had questions. Knowing I could call them and ask stupid questions kind of swayed me .

I'm concerned about page load speed for any commercial website (as is Google). So I test page load speeds at tools.pingdom.com. I find that the "Use Google Libraries" WordPress plugin provides good speed improvements.

Good advice above about WordPress backup plugins and security plugins. There are excellent plugins available for both purposes. You do need them.

I have a friend that has his website on a wordpress page, but he has some kind of BizOp software that allows his to tag his keywords than a normal Wordpress site.

Wordpress is good if you want to get things done rapidly, but there are other options there as well. A little bit of html knowledge is always useful.

Using a professional wp theme can help build a good image. It's better to use self-hosted.

I like wordpress because it's easy and quick to create decent looking sites. There is the risk of getting caught up in the design and coding side, which technical people might enjoy, and not working on the traffic side of things.

Use the Wordpress self hosted option, there are so many awesome sites that are made with wordpress and it's really simple to use.

No, everyone doesn't use WordPress, but it's the easiest one out there and since we're mostly Internet marketers and not programming geeks, it's the most viable solution.

Wordpress is kinda all you need when it comes to website creation.. and on top of that, the updates make it so hard to get it hacked.. so I`ll stick to wordpress until I get pro html skills

I've used Wordpress and HTML. Normally the HTML would be for sales based websites (for selling my products as sometimes WP is a bit restrictive. I normally use WP for authority blogs as they seem to rank really well. I don't build cr*ppy little WP sites I build in lots and lots of content (unique).

I'm also starting to use WP for video sales pages now as lots of the themes are mobile responsive and allow easy integration of video in different formats.

I like WordPress due to its ease of use. I agree with all of the comments here related to core competency: what is your core competency? Is it web design or Internet marketing? If it's web design, then you should spend at least part of your days studying the latest shiny new technology that everyone thinks is da bee's knees. If your core competency is not web design--if this is not how you are making your money--it's better to just put up a site and be done with it, even if the site is quite simple.

Fancy websites with all manner of dancing things hopping all over the place isn't going to sell your product or service. Your content will...and lots of times, all those fancy, dancing things just slow down your site and get in the way of what it is you are attempting to sell.

As a friend of mine likes to say, the most popular website in the world consists of little more than a white background, a logo, and a search box.

I work on Wordpress and its an open source platform and has an almost endless variety of layouts and offerings and devices and widgets, as people use to design and write often , usually totally free. The plugins make more fancy stuffs on the weblog like the schedules, the hyperlinks to tweets, facebook or other public networking and the slideshows. And the beauty of the Wordpress platforms layouts is that when you get fed up with your old look, you just modify the style and you have a product new web page. For SEO I think WordPress would be best.

Wordpress rules. This little masterpiece has killed a once promising career of creating simple websites for others, for money. Now you can fire up a website using Wordpress, literally under 5 minutes.