For those of you that don’t know, Wordpress is a free, featured-filled content management system (CMS).  Wordpress is especially beneficial for individuals and organizations that are looking to quickly roll out a highly functional, aesthetically pleasing website that is also easy to maintain.  In addition, through the use of easy-to-install plug-ins, Wordpress offers integration with a tremendous number of other sites and services and provides a variety of useful tools for webmasters.  For example, plug-ins can be used to give Wordpress the ability to perform automatic search engine optimization (SEO) and report usage data to Google Analytics.

Over the past few months, I have moved many of the projects that I am responsible for over to Wordpress.  This includes my personal website, as well as the Magazine of IST website and IST2U.  My experience with Wordpress has been overwhelmingly positive, and using this system has been highly beneficial to all three projects.  While each site has a different purpose and audience, the flexibility of the CMS has allowed me to fulfill each site’s unique requirements appropriately.

Working with IST2U has been a particularly positive experience.  By installing a few plug-ins, I have been able to integrate new features in real time as students, faculty, and administrators have requested them.  The traffic at IST2U has also grown by approximately 200% since it was re-launched using the Wordpress system.  The previous CMS, Drupal, was much more “clunky” and difficult to manage.  It also included a significantly smaller pool of attractive themes and useful plug-ins.

I have adamantly recommended Wordpress to friends and fellow organization leaders who are looking to launch new sites or revitalize existing ones.  In particular, the All-In-One SEO add-on, coupled with “pretty URLs,” (which allow Wordpress to rewrite URLs in order to include each post’s title), can dramatically improve search engine placement and your users’ ability to locate content using search engines such as Google.  The number of tutorials and forum posts regarding the configuration and optimization of Wordpress continues to grow, allowing some people to make a living deploying Wordpress sites alone.  Without a doubt, the Wordpress system has helped all of my projects to grow and better serve their respective user groups.