Lori Rasmussen

There are definitely pros and cons to working with WordPress as a blogging tool. I’ll start with

the negative – WordPress is not compatible with all browsers. It seems to work best with Chrome. This may not seem like a big deal, I should just get Chrome, right? Well no. For reasons of logistics, I must do most of my school work on a loaned laptop, and for reasons too complicated to explain here, I am barred from putting Chrome on it. So I have to use a different computer for any assignments involving WordPress and that turns into a giant pain in the butt. I can totally work around it, but it’s my biggest issue and one I simply have to deal with.

However, what I like about WordPress is its ease of use and very intuitive functionality. I have never considered myself a super techie person, but with WordPress, I just find myself somehow knowing exactly what to do, at least when using the blogging tools. The term I once learned for this kind of tool is “WYSIWYG,” or “what you see is what you get.” I don’t have to know HTML. I just type what I want to say and it’s done. BAZINGA! Thanks for making my life easy, WordPress!

I also like the easy-to-understand analytics tools as well. In fact, the accessing the analytics may be the easiest part of the whole system.

One of the sites I read regularly, Oklahoma’s The Lost Ogle, started out using WordPress and did well with it for years and gained a huge following. I believe they have gotten so big that they now pay a third party to manage their site, so I’m uncertain as to whether they still use WordPress as a CMS, but they developed a huge audience while using it. Their site always looked nice and clean.

I am hearing more and more about WordPress plugins that incorporate really cool interactive tools and make large websites easier to maintain. I have not yet built and launched a website myself, so I can only speak about what I have heard anecdotally. But if this is the case, then large enterprise sites should absolutely use this free, off-the-shelf tool. When it comes time for me to build a site for my capstone project, I am planning to use WordPress to do it, based on my own experience and its reputation among my web developer friends.