If anyone comes to me wanting a personal web site, I try to convince them they should have a blog, specifically, a WordPress blog. I’m doing several web sites for clients that use WordPress. The more I work with this platform, the more I come to love it. WordPress is free, hacker-friendly and supported by an enthusiastic community. It represents everything good about the web right now.
There are two different ways to make yourself a WordPress blog. There’s the more advanced method, which offers you full functionality, and the easy method, which is a little limited but is, like I said, easy.
The advanced method
You can download the software and set it up yourself, which is how my blog works. To do so, you need a web host, a place for your blog to live. People have generally good things to say about Bluehost. My business uses Apollo Hosting. I also know a lot of people and organizations that use GoDaddy, but I’m put off by their sleazy branding.
Once you have your hosting set up, getting WordPress installed requires a small amount of fairly scary technical business, best handled by a web geek like me. WordPress brags about having a five minute installation, and it’s true, but it can be a hairy five minutes if you’re a web novice. Some hosting companies make it easier by offering an automated installation system.
The easy way
If you want a gentler introduction, you can sign up for a free blog on wordpress.com. If you set up your blog there, all the behind-the-scenes admin is handled magically by the elves of WordPress’ parent company Automattic. Having a blog hosted on wordpress.com requires no web savvy and minimal fuss. The only downside is that blogs hosted by WordPress don’t give you access to the full range of plugins and other tools. A good option for novices is to start out with a WordPress.com hosted blog, and then as they develop more confidence, move into a full-blown self-hosted blog. Fortunately, it’s easy to export posts from one WP blog and import them into another one.
Reasons to love WordPress
Geeks like to make a distinction between free as in speech and free as in beer. WordPress is free as in speech and free as in beer. The basic code is open-source. You’re welcome to explore its innards, hacking to the fullest extent of your courage. If, like me, you know some HTML and CSS, you have complete control over how your blog looks. If you know PHP, Ajax and JavaScript, you can create your own plugins and custom add-ons. You’re free to give away or sell any of your additions to the WordPress ecosystem.
You might wonder why Automattic is so generous as to give away blog software and server space to host it. What’s in it for them? According to their web site, they make money from optional paid upgrades to wordpress.com blogs, consulting services, anti-spam technology, and affiliate deals.
WP’s open-sourceness can be a mixed blessing. The user interface doesn’t have the glossy polish of a Google or Apple product. But for me, the rough edges are a small price to pay. Google’s and Apple’s own blog products are excellent inadvertent advertisements for WordPress. They work fine as far as they go, but they’re severely limited in their feature sets and aren’t easily extensible. For example, in WordPress you can easily insert “Click here to read more” links into longer posts. Google’s Blogger system only lets you perform this useful function through an awkward and lengthy workaround.
The WordPress community is fiddling with the code day and night, adding new features and hunting down bugs. Users of Blogger are at the mercy of Google’s priorities, and right now it doesn’t seem like Blogger is very high on their list. Also, Google has been known to take down blogs for hosting copyrighted material like mp3s. I’ve never heard of Automattic taking a blog down for any reason.
WordPress in the wild
- Gawker Media.
- The New York Times blogs.
- Jay-Z’s official web site. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man.
- Smashing Magazine, a great web design resource.
- WordPress.com is itself a humungous multi-user WordPress blog. Recursive!
WordPress does have some time costs. The user experience can be a challenge. You sometimes get exposed to frightening strings of PHP. But the community has got your back. The ever-growing list of free plugins handles all kinds of advanced functionality that used to require heavy-duty coding. For instance, a simple plugin makes your blog renders attractively on iPhones and other mobile devices. Here’s how mine looks on the phone:
The less attractive side of the open-source coin is the official WordPress iPhone/iPad app. In theory, it’s pretty rad. You can write posts from the phone, edit and upload them, with a lot of the same functionality you get on the full web version. Unfortunately, the app is buggy and unreliable. It’s failed to save my work and has even eaten a few posts. I hope it receives some more developer attention. Being able to write posts while I wait for the train or stand in line at the grocery store is a miraculous thing. It makes me feel like I’m living in the future — when it works. I guess this aspect of the future hasn’t fully arrived yet.
Like all open-source entities, WordPress evolves quickly. It gets hacked easily and often, but it bounces back robustly. Last year a malicious virus broke every single link in my blog, incoming and internal. But a patch was released immediately and I had my site back to normal in a matter of minutes. It was a scary couple of minutes, but no harm befell me.
WordPress isn’t the best tool for every situation. If you’re a bigger company or organization, you might want a more robust content management system like Joomla or Drupal. A former employer of mine and my old high school both use Moodle, though no one at either of those institutions has much love for it. There are some commercial products that perform WordPress-like functions with a much more polished user experience. A nonprofit I’ve done some volunteer work for uses Squarespace, which is reasonably inexpensive and quite approachable.
Handy WordPress tips
The Lost In Translation blog has a handy setup guide for a new WP installation, including initial configuration tips and a list of recommended plugins. It makes a great preflight checklist.
Even if you plan to extensively hand-code a customized look for your WP site, starting with the right theme can save you a lot of effort. I use a modified version of the veryplaintxt theme, which replicates the look and feel of McSweeney’s. I like the serif fonts and lots of white space, but I made all the centered text left-aligned, since I don’t like hourglass-shaped text columns.
I have a bunch of nice WordPress themes bookmarked on Delicious. Happy designing!