The first cut is the deepest, and it’s time for DavidKuhta.com to break ground by looking at WordPress, the puppet-master behind the scenes. With over 18 million WordPress installations web wide, chances are you’ve probably encountered a Blog run on the WordPress platform at least once in your life. So what’s different about WordPress anyhow? In one word, Simplicity…oh and Intuitive Functionality…and Highly Extensible as well. horse

Simplicity: WordPress removes numerous complications of Blogging

• Hosting – Don’t have a web host? WordPress will set you up with a free blog on their own servers.
• Installation – A 5 minute install…yeah you have to see it to believe it.
• Content Generation – A quick links drop-down for new “post, page, comment, draft, and upload” make creation of new content right at your fingertips.WYSIWYG – Post editing is done in a WYSIWYG environment with easy access to buttons for embedding images, text, or music.

Intuitive Functionality: No round pegs shoved in square holes!

• User Interface – WordPress gives publishers the freedom to determine how content should be organized and structured for their viewers.  Is the page content static? Create a page. Dynamic? Create a post.
• Administrative Structure – WordPress provides an impressive dashboard on the backend of the site.  It’s modular structure allows you to dictate what you want displayed and where you want to see it.
• Content Organization – The Post Visual Editor provides a basic a multitude of basic text editing function at first glance but the ‘kitchen sink’ is only a click away providing an array of more complex text and media formatting options.
  
  For the more programming saavy developer, WordPress offers the ability to hardcode html for a post only a tab away.
• User Experience – WordPress blogs are easy to surf. Period. WordPress worked hard to ensure that tagging, post categorization, media galleries, search bars, and themeing capabilities are all available to blog publishers so that they can determine how they wish to showcase their content to the world.

Highly Extensible: Communal Collaboration

• Themeing – Don’t like the way the default WordPress theme looks, change it in the backend. Custom-built, Free, or premium there is definitely a theme that meets your blogging needs and can be easily tweaked for that added element of personalization.
• Plugins – An elegant connection to the WordPress interface, plugins offer blog publishers the ability to add features to WordPress that aren’t necessarily built in.  What’s that translate into…if you can think it, there’s probably already a plugin.  SEO, Web Development, News Tracking, Social Media, and Graphical Design are just a few niche areas which plugins are being created for.  Don’t expect to have to reach in your pocket either, although there are premium plugins available, there are thousands of free ones as well.
• Widgets – A similar idea to plugins, Widgets enable blog publishers to display custom sidebar content and determine their arrangement on the page, without having to delve into all the nitty gritty coding.
• Everything Else -WordPress is Open Source and that means accessible.  Assuming your hosting your own WordPress Blog and not on WordPress.com, you have the ability to edit any and all the WordPress files which construct your blog.  This freedom allows you to change WordPress to meet your needs, conform to your ideas, and remain dynamic.  In addition, the WordPress community collaborates extensively to provide support and ideas, so if you do generate your own WordPress extension see if it’s possible to share some part of the that with the community.

So that’s WordPress, simple, intuitive, and extensible.  Good Luck in your own blogging endeavors and thanks for reading!