BlueHatDesign – Eugene, Oregon Web Design

As an ASP.Net deve­lo­per, my web ser­vers run IIS. Until recently, that has meant that I have been limi­ted to using ASP.Net apps for cus­tom blogs, CMS soft­ware, etc. Now, with the advent of Microsoft’s Web Plat­form Ins­ta­ller, the choi­ces have expan­ded to inc­lude seve­ral PHP/MySql options inc­lu­ding Word­Press. I’ll save dis­cus­sion of the Web Plat­form Ins­ta­ller for another post, but suf­fice to say, it’s won­der­ful to have the option of run­ning something like Word­Press or Dru­pal locally in an IIS server.

I’ve cho­sen to use Word­Press as my blog­ging plat­form. I’ve used Blo­gEn­gine in the past and have a cou­ple of clients using it regu­larly and it really is pretty exce­llent, but it can’t com­pare in terms of user expe­rience, avai­la­ble plug-ins, and com­mu­nity to Word­Press. The one thing that might make me think twice is the abi­lity to cus­to­mize the core code. Since I work in ASP.Net and not PHP, it would be much easier for me to add cus­tom func­tio­na­lity to something like Blo­gEn­gine. Howe­ver, the fact is, there are so many avai­la­ble plug-ins and wid­gets for Word­Press that I don’t fore­see the need to do any cus­tom programming.

The entire inter­face for Word­Press is very user-friendly. I’ve had little or no dif­fi­culty fin­ding my way around the back-end, ins­ta­lling plug-ins and jug­gling wid­gets in my side­bar. There is a huge amount of well-written docu­men­ta­tion, so searching for and fin­ding ans­wers to com­mon ques­tions is a breeze.

Crea­ting a cus­tom theme is actually a little tric­kier in Word­Press than some of the other blog pac­ka­ges, but it is fairly straight for­ward once you get a hold on which file is which. The sys­tem makes it easy to pro­duce a theme that is W3C standards-compliant, and accessible.

I think that a lot of peo­ple make the mis­take of trying to bend Word­Press into a full con­tent mana­ge­ment sys­tem (CMS). It’s not desig­ned to be a CMS, but for a sim­ple web site, depen­ding on what fea­tu­res you need, it can suf­fice very well. It allows you to create sta­tic pages and create a menu for them within your theme as well as in the side­bar via a widget.

The text edi­tor is very easy to use and pro­du­ces light­weight standards-compliant code– no <span style="font-style: italic;"></span>" where sim­ple <em></em>> tags will do! Uploa­ding and mana­ging ima­ges and video is a breeze.

All in all, I’m very happy with Word­Press. I’ve hardly scratched the sur­face of what is avai­la­ble within the Word­Press com­mu­nity in terms of infor­ma­tion and plug-ins. It may well be that as I learn more, I’ll find more that I don’t like, but so far, it’s all good.