Use WordPress for your blog

I have used different content management and blogging tools to host the articles that I have written during the spare time. So far, I love the features that WordPress provided. Here are the reasons why I chose to use WordPress:

1. Great themes for selection – I am a programmer but not a graphical designer. However, I have good judgement on what gives a clean look to my readers to promote stickiness to my site.  I believe the themes that WordPress community provided is great. 
2. Easy framework to extend – Again I am a programmer. So, I am looking for an easy way to extend the features provided by framework. With the 5 mins walk through video provided by Mark, I am impressed by how easy to write a plugin in WordPress.
3. Rich SEO tools – a site without traffics is no good, especially you want to get some returns on your investment via ads. To make a site ranked high in organic search via SEO (ie. a free way to market), you need both on-page and off-page optimization. For on-page optimization, you need to make your site both search engine and user friendly via doing the followings:
   • Make your posts serving with meaningful permalinks (Built-in. Configure it under Options > Permalinks).
   • Create sitemap (Plugin: Sitemap Generator, Google Sitemap Generator)
   • Make it easy for readers to advertise your posts via digg, delicious and many other social networks. (Plugin: Sociable)
   • Make it easy for readers to tell their friends about your posts via “Email Your Friend”. (Plugin: WP-Email)
   • Make it easy for readers to add more values to your posts like comments and rating. (Plugin: Akismet is used to prevent the comment spam).
   • Generate RSS feeds for your posts (Built-in). And make it easy for readers to subscribe your feeds (Plugin: Chicklet Creator).
   • Let readers to subscribe the comments of your posts.  
   • Categorize and tag your posts with search features for readers to locate the posts they are interested quickly.

All the stuffs I mentioned above are not related to the content of your post. However, they are very critical for you to win the heart of your readers. Although I am a programmer, I would not want to write all the codes to enable these on my site. I am glad to find WordPress that saves me tons of hours and many thanks to the contributors for the awesome plugins, so I can spend more time to research on the subjects that I am interested.

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