Why I Like WordPress.Org

Being world’s most popular content management system, The possibilities are virtually endless…

First, there are two sites that call themselves “WordPress”

WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

Both sites offer FREE themes.

WP.com only has around 100 themes to choose from. (Usually about the same number you find with the free website offers floating around.)

WP.com does not allow you to run ads on your site, has no additional plugins – wizards – or add-ons, and attaches your blog name to there own so it looks something like http://bwsites.wordpress.com/

The rest of this article is devoted to WP.org…

WP.org has around 3,000 + themes available for customizing any website created with WordPress. Many of these themes are free, some range in price from about $20.00 on up to a couple hundred.

WordPress.org is more than just a blogging platform. If wanted, one can also create a full fledged website.

Some of the themes are designed around specific business categories like schools, real estate, car sales, bloggers, and there are even themes built specifically for selling products on line. (e commerce)

Most themes these days are built to be responsive so they work correctly on mobile phones and tablets.

At the time of writing this article, there are more than 55,000+ free plugins available in the WordPress.org plugin directory alone. Not to mention, premium plugins available on other marketplaces. Some of these include;

• Newsletter
• Calendars
• Forums
• Content management
• Business specific forms
• Social media sharing
• E commerce
• Real Estate
• Car Dealership
• improved photo galleries and slide shows
• Registry Submissions 
• Pop Out Messages  
• Upcoming Events
• Email Capture 
• News Feed From Your Site 
• News Feed To Your Site
• Email Auto-Responder Campaign 
• Google Maps (Or Similar)
• Google Analytics
  
• YouTube Videos (Or Similar) 
• Multilingual Content Management 
• Visitor Center
• CSS Editors
• Site Builder (Add “Drag n Drop” Functionality to your site )
• SEO Help
• Security
• Many More

Most of the basic WP.org platform is built much like “Microsoft Word” making it easy to add photos, and videos and change font family, size and color, along with the possibility to use html and css to make absolutely any change desired..

Because WP sites start with pre-designed themes, you can change your entire website theme and the pages remain intact. Not sure you like what you have, test a new theme and see how it will look before committing to it and change it back if you want to.

Most WP themes are “responsive”. That is they dynamically change based on the device, so iPhones and tablets will display a mobile friendly website automatically.

WP Themes can use “Javascript” which allows for some cool things that most free website builders don’t offer.

As mentioned above, there are even free plugins available to give you a “drag n drop” platform, in case a theme you like does not offer it up front.

Most of the plugins that are available can even be added to themes that may seem to be very sophisticated and up-to-date, making them even more functional.

This website is built using a theme called Parallax. It has many, many options built into it including the “drag n drop” feature, just like many of the so-called free website builders offered elsewhere. 

Visit this blog post to see some of the many ways themes can easily be modified.