WordPress is a wonderful publishing platform. If it weren’t for WordPress, a whole lot of folks would’ve found it difficult to blog and share their knowledge with the world. OK. Maybe that’s going a little bit overboard, but there is no question that the good folks at WordPress have helped innovative minds bring their ideas and thoughts to the World, and we are all better for it.
WordPress is a potent content management system. It allows you to manage content on your website easily. You want to create a page, you click on a button. You want to change the look and feel of your site on all the pages, you can do it with WordPress. You want to manage comments, WordPress is your go to software. But it’s amazing how many misconceptions are out there about the platform. Let’s take a look:
- WordPress is a self-publishing platform: it’s true that WordPress allows you to publish your thoughts to the Web, but it is just a tool. It does not write your blogs for you. So if you are looking for a software package that writes your blog, you better look elsewhere.
- WordPress allows you to develop “special” sites: WordPress is flexible. I give you that. But a WordPress site is not different from a non-Wordpress site if you have the same content on it. Content is king not the content manager.
- WordPress helps you forget about SEO: not true. It’s true that the semi-optimized structure of WordPress makes it possible to get indexed quickly on Google, but there is no magic here. WordPress does not do your SEO for you.
- WordPress designs sites for you: WordPress is not a web design application. Having templates and themes makes it easy to change the look and feel of WordPress sites, but that’s all. WordPress doesn’t actually do anything but manage content.
- WordPress is a hackerproof CMS: Not true. In fact, far from it. Internet marketers love paying folks to write scripts that automate commenting on WordPress blogs. There are ways to protect your WordPress blog, but nothing is hackerproof these days.
- WordPress makes you a better blogger: this is somewhat true. It does make you more productive by allowing you time to focus on more important things. But it doesn’t make your grammar or ideas brighter.
- WordPress only manages blogs: WordPress is a blogging platform but you can create real sites with it. Many corporate sites are made with WordPress, so there is no reason to limit yourself to blog when it comes to using WP.
Did I miss anything?