Why is WordPress such a powerful tool? It was first released in May 2003 and has seen constant improvements resulting in it being on 2.6 since July 2008. It has become more and more relevant to a publishing company as the WordPress software has developed and is now able to support ‘magazine‘ themes. This has led to a buzz around WordPress now being called a CMS (content management system) as opposed to just a blogging tool.
A number of agencies have sprung up offering ‘premium’ themes that offer a wide range of functionality and, through enhanced admin panels, the editor has a truly flexible publishing platform. Currently WyntonMagazine is catching my attention as it’s a free theme. But some tasty looking premium themes are Revolution and Mimbo.
As a designer, the amazing number of ‘themes’ show the real strength of WordPress. The simple use of stylesheets has allowed thousands and thousands of ‘themes’ to be created by web developers and designers. So as a web publishing platform it’s becoming a designer’s best friend in that it’s simple and appears to be able to present content any which way you want. There are many resources highlighting the ‘themes’. A personal favourite is smashing magazine. It’s also newbie proof.
‘Newbie proof’ – by this I mean usability. It’s been given a very simple set of interfaces which, after the initial phase of being a new user getting used to it, you will soon be admiring for their effectiveness. If you do come up against any problems the WordPress codex will help you out. Also as the WordPress community is a real community there are loads of people publishing hints tips and tricks, not to mention the whole range of plug-ins that enhance the core functionality.
So I think the numbers speak for themselves, if you want to mess around on the web, then wordpress could be for you. Quoting from their about page:
“After 1.5 we seemed to have something people really liked and we’ve experienced some fairly rapid growth. Here are some metrics for 2006 and 2007.
“In 2006 we had 1,545,703 downloads, in 2007 we had 3,816,965!”