Wordpress Blogging Software Review

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Product Name: Wordpress
Website: www.wordpress.com
Price: Free
Overall Grade: B
Recommendation: Even though this isn't a great product, I recommend it because I don't know of anything better.

Note: This review is only covering Wordpress blogs that are hosted on Wordpress.com (even if they use a different domain name). It's possible to install Wordpress on your server, but I'm not getting into that with this review.

Overview
Wordpress is by far the most popular blogging platform. It has grown into an incredibly powerful product that can be used to host anything from a basic blog to a full website. When we talk about blogging software, Wordpress is definitely the standard.

The Good

The best thing about Wordpress is that it's incredibly customizable. You can do pretty much anything you want with it which is great for serious bloggers. You can easily manage multiple blogs, create pages that are independent from the blog, and even allow other people to submit content which you can review and publish.

Wordpress is also appealing because of how popular it is. There is a huge community of Wordpress users out there which means if you run into a problem, you can be sure there are online resources that will help you out.

The Bad

The best thing about Wordpress is also the worst thing. Because of all the customization options, the software is incredibly complicated and bloated. You should be able to figure it out on your own, but there are definitely easier options out there.

Another problem is that Wordpress just doesn't feel particularly inspired. The designers clearly spent a lot of time making things look clean and smooth, but the overall experience is...plain. The product could be greatly improved if they put more thought into the flow of the user experience.

Finally, I really don't like the text editor. It seems like all blogging software has this problem, but that doesn't mean that it should go unmentioned. Formatting blog posts in Wordpress is pretty clunky and the HTML editor is pretty worthless because much of the manual HTML I tried to enter was automatically changed by Wordpress. Also, the formatting in the text editor doesn't match the formatting of the actual blog, so it's really hard to get a feel for how things will look while you're writing.

Conclusion

Wordpress is a lot like the Microsoft Windows of blogging software. Like Windows, Wordpress dominates the market and it can do absolutely everything you need, but it feels clunky and uninspired. To continue the Microsoft analogy, I have to recommend using Wordpress because I don't know of any better alternatives, but that doesn't mean that I think it's a great product. It's just the best option that I know of.

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