When WordPress was first launched in 2003 it entered a market already crowded with blogging platforms and there wasn’t any real excitement about it at first, but that quickly changed. Today it’s by far the most popular package for blogging and content creation, and over 23 percent of the top 10 million websites are based on it. Why did it become so popular, and how has it maintained a dominant position in such a fast-changing market?

One obvious reason for WordPress to attract users is its unbeatable price – it’s free. There are plenty of paid extras available but the basic package is available for nothing and that’s enough to let you get a site up and running. This explanation isn’t enough on its own though, because most other blogging platforms are also free.

What makes WordPress stands out is its versatility. It was originally aimed at blogs, but has now spread out far beyond that niche. That’s because unlike most other blog platforms its built-in options go a long way beyond just adding new posts. Other pages can also be added, the landing page can be configured almost endlessly with links to posts and other content, and an almost endless array of plugins let users add more features and a large degree of interactivity to their site. Traditional blogging systems simply lacked the flexibility built into WordPress, but at the same time they were often more difficult to use.

While WordPress has a huge range of capabilities that can be accessed by advanced users, it still offers plenty to those who haven’t learned its coding and markup language. Simple interfaces make it easy to create, organize and manage content without having to learn HTML or any proprietary coding. The results are also impressive – compare the average personal blog or homepage now with the clunky design and primary colors we got used to in the late 1990s, and the contrast is amazing. Some work is needed to make an outstanding site in WordPress, but anyone can make a decent one.

Of course if you want to put in that extra work even more doors open. You can learn some coding and build your own themes, but this can be time-consuming. A quicker alternative for many is to hire a freelancer to design a custom theme for them, or buy one from the vast libraries available online. There’s a vast choice of plugins too, many of them free. Almost any functionality can be added to a WordPress installation, and it’s easy to do; just download and unpack the plugin and it’s ready to go. WordPress has also stayed up to date with the growth of mobile devices. Native applications exist for all the most popular mobile platforms, including Android and iOS, giving a large feature set that’s tailored to the devices instead of relying on a cut-down browser version.

Web technology is a very rapidly evolving field, but for the last decade WordPress has managed to keep up. It’s now built a very solid position for itself through a combination of attractive pricing, simplicity and immense power. That means it’s very likely to hold on to its dominance for a while yet.

In the last few years, WordPress has become one of the most popular and effective platforms for building websites. In fact, webmasters have preferred this platform over every other for building all kinds of websites. The best part is that building a WordPress website is free, and gives you the opportunity to use numerous themes (free or paid) to suit your website, needs, requirements and niche.

WordPress allows you to create polished and powerful websites. Moreover, you don’t even have to learn about a lot of coding. When you’re comfortable with WordPress, you can accomplish some things in a week that could take you more than a month to build from scratch. Once the WordPress software is successfully installed on a server, it offers a wide range of tools for managing and building excellent websites.

It’s important to understand that WordPress works best for some particular types of websites, such as WordPress personal blogs, brochure sites, ecommerce websites and more. Building these websites is easy and quick with WordPress. In addition to this, the well designed WordPress plug-ins can provide your website with more functionalities to build high end social networks, job boards and other customized websites.

Some developers have even been talking about using the WordPress platform for designing and developing applications. However, this may not be possible for the next few months. A better understanding of the different sites you can build with WordPress will give you a better idea about choosing this platform. In this post, we have discussed some website types built with the WordPress platform.

WordPress Personal Blogs 

It’s worth mentioning that personal blogs have always been prominently built with WordPress. Although there are many other options for creating personal blogs, WordPress personal blogs are more versatile. Moreover, WordPress blogs are best supported of all other options for building personal blogs. Mashable.com and Techcrunch.com are two of the more than 50 blogs based on WordPress platform, which appear in the list of Top 100 blogs.

Magazine Style Websites

WordPress platform can even be used to build effective magazine style websites. Such websites don’t have any sort of chronological organizational structure like personal blogs. In fact, they focus on many different articles on the site’s homepage. The highlighting is mostly done through a thumbnail photograph or image.

E-commerce Websites

With a WordPress website, it can be very easy to add ecommerce capability. You can choose from a wide range of ecommerce plugins. While some are available for free, others are paid. There are also premium plugins that need valid licenses.

You can also choose from various WordPress themes. They are specifically designed to support ecommerce activities. Thus, it does not come as a big surprise that WordPress can be used to create ecommerce websites. There are many online companies and home based businesses that use the WordPress platform. inkefx.com and lkbennett.com are two of the millions of ecommerce websites that use WordPress.

Static Websites

It’s worth mentioning that WordPress can provide you with a very dynamic website without any problems. However, you can choose to avoid posts, and easily limit yourself to just static pages. Thus, it’s easy to build a static or flat website with the WordPress platform.

There are many benefits of using the WordPress platform to build static websites. The most important benefit is that you’re able to choose from a wide range of appearance and graphic options. It’s easy to set up static or flat websites for sales pages, online resume websites, business websites for physical stores and more.

Social Networking Websites

These days, social networking websites are quite popular and effective. In case you have an idea for a small social networking site, you can use the WordPress platform to build it. There are many plugins that provide your visitors with the chance to create their profiles, manage accounts, and interact with many other users sharing similar interests.

Most plugins even allow users to offer their social networking members the opportunity to run fully featured WordPress personal blogs directly from the website. This can be an effective strategy to generate more traffic.

There’s no doubt that WordPress is one of the most powerful and flexible website building platforms. Whether you want to build WordPress personal blogs or focus on ecommerce websites, there’s a very good chance that you will be able to build an effective and user friendly website with the WordPress platform. WordPress not only helps you build an excellent website, but also makes sure you’re able to promote it in the best possible manner.