WordPress

I started blogging for fun when I was in college and Blogger by Google was very popular back then. Wordpress was just coming up and I didn't pay much attention towards it. In little over a decade, Wordpress was now powering nearly one-fourth of the web. Wordpress is truly a free and open source Content Management System with no hidden agenda. You will not be asked to pay for upgrading to certain features, extra storage or access to the code. If you have ever created a website outside of the CMS using traditional methods, you will know how much time and energy it requires to setup a simple website. With Wordpress, you will be up and running in under 10 minutes. Even a novice who just knows how to browse sites creates a beautiful looking site/blog. The Wordpress backend and core functionality have remained same over the years. You can create pages for your site and posts for your blog. These posts can be categorized and tagged. Widgets can be added to sidebars, header, and footer. All of these come to life by themes and plugins. There are a number of free and paid themes out there which you can pick up and start customizing them to your needs. Plugins allow you to add rich content to your sites like photo galleries, sliders, forums and add more functionalities like managing SEO, spam control and so on. You do not have to worry about SEO of your Wordpress site as these sites always tend to rank higher in Google search results. With plugins like SEO Yoast which give you insight on how SEO friendly your post in, you can be sure of getting that Organic traffic.

Even though Wordpress is quite popular, it's not perfect. At the heart, it was a blogging platform and all the development since has been over the same platform. The plugins and themes are often at times not compatible with each other. Like the theme I'm using for my News Magazine website does not go well with Jetpack and Akismet plugins. These plugins have some features like anti-spam which some may consider vital. Also, plugins tend to interfere with each others functionality and it can be a nightmare trying to find a culprit if something is not working well.

Wordpress is easy to install, to create sites/blogs and lets an end user control the content that is being added to the website without having a need to hire a developer every time. As a developer, you can also move on to next project without worrying about providing support to complete projects. If you were living under a rock and haven't heard about Wordpress, then go check it out.