Mr. Tech

Ok I’m going to get right down to it and tell you why I gave this software 5 stars. First off, don’t think you are going to see 5 star ratings on this site very often because the bottom line is nothing usually comes close to being good enough to get this kind of rating. On other sites and even movie ratings all you ever see is 4 or 5 stars out of 5 and you can’t take reviews seriously when they are so eager to give high marks to even mediocre products.

When I first started building website in 1994 I used a free program called Notepad and then soon upgraded to software that wanted to make me pull my hair out like Front Page so I moved over to Dreamweaver and never looked back. But Dreamweaver is expensive and getting my customers to buy it was counter-productive to making money selling them websites and webmaster services and a solution had to be found. I started looking for software that would allow me to build websites using online software so my customers could login and update the site themselves. That’s when the word CMS became all the rage and we had found what we were looking for or so we thought. CMS is just a fancy way of saying you can manage your own website but not all of them were built the same. We used many different ones such as Drupal, Joomla, the list goes on and finally settled on a small simple CMS called Etomite. It did what we needed and was easy to customize for all the different needs our different customers would have. We even wrote a manual for our users with pictures and everything, people just didn’t get it!? So the fact that we loved it and thought it was the next best thing, normal everyday people didn’t get it nor did they have the patience or the funds to pay me to teach them.

We had to find something else and that’s when we decided to take another look at WordPress.

WordPress has become the software my company has always been looking for and even though it isn’t perfect the fact remains that it’s a very actively developed product and that counts for a lot these days. The community forum is so busy a person could hardly keep up with the daily happenings. Updates happen often, security information is easy to come by and you can use it a blog, website, CMS, shopping cart or anything else you can imagine at this point. What makes it so versatile and worth the 5 out of 5 star rating is that you install the software and can easily back up your files as well as update from withing the admin panel…can’t beat that right? Wait there is more! You can make your own themes quite easily or download right from within the admin panel a ton of great looking, free themes to make your site look exactly the way you want them. But you are not limited to those themes as a quick Google search will show you that there are hundreds of sites making free themes for WordPress. You can also upgrade the look of your site by seeking it premium themes, usually available at a great price so your options are limitless.

The best part we think is the fact that independent folks can program little bits of greatness and make them available you guessed it…for free download right within the WordPress admin panel. What’s a bit of greatness you say? Well, if you wanted to add a newsletter you would need software to do that and WordPress has dozens of little bits of great newsletter plugins that you can easily and freely add to your website in seconds. In the old days, we’d have to manually enter all the code to do this and depending on what you wanted accomplished, it could take minutes, hours, days and even weeks to get it to work correctly.

If you aren’t a computer geek like me but what you have read is something you want to get in on, consider hiring someone like me to install the basic program for you with all the plugins you require and then you can manage and update the site yourself. The WordPress website has great information on how you can find nice folks that are more than willing to take your money in exchange for their WordPress skills.