This week I share 13 reasons why I love WordPress! Happy Birthday WordPress!
Upcoming Events
Segment 1: In the News
Segment 2: In celebration of WordPress turning 13 my list of 13 reasons why I love WordPress
Segment 3: Tool of the Week
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Adam:
This is the Kitchen Sink WP Podcast Episode 118. [Opening Sequence]
Why hello there. This is Adam Silver. The host of the Kitchen Sink WP Podcast. Thanks for being here. Let's get started. All right. Upcoming events. Next weekend is a big weekend. There are four WordCamps. There's WordCamp Asheville, North Carolina and it's June 4th and 5th. Apparently it is sold out but again, social media can do wonders for you. There's WordCamp Antwerp. Nine tickets were left as of recording this. Actually, let me double check that real quick for you here because I did these notes a little earlier. Are there tickets left right now? Let's see. There were 9 tickets when I did the notes. There are still 9 tickets. Okay. There's WordCamp Belgrade. There's 55 tickets left there and WordCamp Hamilton. It's a 1 day event, $20 and I believe there were tickets available. I have an accent. Anyway, WordCamp Asheville, North Carolina, Antwerp, Belgrade and Hamilton and up in Ontario and there were tickets for those. Check them out. If you're in the area, go to a WordCamp some time this almost summer. Actually the officially day of summer I think that we start touching … This comes out on Memorial Day in the states here. It's the official start of summer. There you go. Check it out. Go to a WordCamp. All right.
In the news, not a whole lot in the news. Well, kind of sort of and it relates to today's topic but one of the articles that I read this last week was an article over on Codeable about the price for an eCommerce WordPress website. Check that out. I'll put a link in the show notes. It's really interesting about what it takes to do a website eCommerce wise by yourself versus a team, et cetera. Really well written actually so check that out.
Actually this past weekend as well was WordPress' birthday which I'm going to talk about right now in the segment 2. We move right along to the segment 2. No sponsor this week. Regarding the birthday so 13. WordPress is now 13 years old. It's a teenager and that is crazy that it's been around this long. Matt actually did a little post on his website. I'll link to that as well. Segment 2 is 13 reasons why I love WordPress. There's a lot more I'm sure but I went and dug around and what do I love about WordPress and there's 13 things I came up with. Here we go. I'll just kind of … No specific true order necessarily. They're rearrangeable to some extent but here's 13 reasons why I love it.
Okay. We'll start with number 1.
It's free and it's cost effective. Okay yes. It's open source technology. It's completely free. Anyone can use it. Anyone can customize it. Of course and there's no annual license, right? There are some other costs out there for hosting, for premium plugins, et cetera, we'll get to that as well but it's free. That's awesome. That's number 1.
Number 2, it's user friendly. It really is. Adding content and images and going back to democratizing publishing what Matt Mullenweg had said about what the reason behind WordPress is to democratize publishing. It's done that. It's user friendly. It's fairly straightforward as far as interface goes. It's getting better with every revision. Posts and pages. It's simple. For example, even dragging images now to a post. It's just drag and drop. It's user friendly.
Number 3, it's become a standard in the industry. It really has. Twenty-five percent if not more now, 26% of all websites are powered by WordPress. Some big companies out there. Sony, New Yorker, Fortune. It's a big standard in industry, you know, makes the target for some naysayers but it's a standard so I think it's a good thing. Okay.
Number 4, it's challenging and this is odd to think as why I love it but I do love it for this. It's so many levels of challenging. You could become an implementer, you could be a troubleshooter, you could be a deep coder, you pick what you want to learn and there's always something to learn in how you want to help the community of people. There's always something to do and learn and grow within WordPress so it's challenging.
Number 5, longevity. Now, WordPress is very … Has long potential here of longevity for who knows how long. We hope another 10 years, 20, 30 years? I don't see it going away anytime soon. It's scalable for businesses. It's just going to be around for a bit so the longevity's there to add more features, to keep up with security changes, et cetera.
Number 6, support is literally a click away. It really is. You start working in WordPress. You need help. You have a question. You're not alone. Okay? There's tons of information out in the web. There's website that have video. There's online courses. There's WordCamps and meetups, right? There's podcasts like this one where I'm here to help answer questions when you have questions. Support is a click away.
Number 7. Plugins. Plugins are awesome. Now, it adds a functionality to the core. Core can only do so much. We can't appease 85 million websites, right, with everything otherwise you become a big company or big piece of the software bloated like I don't know. I won't even say any other companies. I won't pick on anyone because I want this to be a happy birthday. Okay? Plugins add functionality to the core. If you can't find what you want, you can make it by yourself because it's open source or you could hire somebody.
Okay? Along with the plugins you also have themes. Number 8, Themes that you have your website looked the way you want to look. If you can imagine it, it can be built. You can start with something basic and then you can modify from there. If you can't figure it out, again, you go back to the fact that support is a click away. You can get help online. Okay. We have tons of themes to choose from. I think as of this recording there were something like 25, 2,600 themes out there in free repository that you can go and use any way you want.
Number 9, entirely customizable. It really is. It's very flexible. You can have it be a basic blog. You can have it be a membership site. You can have WordPress do eCommerce. It's open source and you can build what you needed to do for what you needed to do it. You can grow with that. You're not stuck to the one thing that it's only going to do for you. You can have it do all 3 of those things in 1 area so you really could have it be all inclusive. Now, keep that in mind, the learning curve to do these little things, it ramps up a little bit but it takes some time. Keep in mind it's highly customizable.
Number 10, it's SEO ready. Out of the box, WordPress can and does handle basic SEO functions. I suggest using a good plugin like Yoast SEO or SEO by Yoast, either way. Yoast makes a great SEO plugin. I'm not an SEO expert. I'm a firm believer that it's a moving target at best. Not only that but I often tell my students, “You know you want to write relevant content in your niche consistently. If you're going to blog weekly, blog weekly. People become accustomed to getting their content when they want it, where they want it, how they want it. They want that consistency.” My show, this podcast, comes out every Monday because people expect it. That being said, SEO is a combination of the key words, the right content but I think it's also consistency.
Number 11, we're almost done here. A couple more. Create roles … Yeah. Okay. How do I word this? You can restrict access, right, which seems odd. Why would you want to? Well, you can create roles and restrict the access easily versus other platforms meaning if I want to work with their company or company wants to have access limits, who can log in, who can't log in, who's an admin, who is a contributor, supporter, built in you can create roles and restrict that access. It's really simple to do. Okay. Of course, you can make a membership site and have a pay wall. That's a whole separate level by using the awesomeness of number 7 which is a plugin. For example, Restrict Content Pro. I mean just as an example but you can create roles and restrict the access to the content and who could update that content.
Okay. Number 12, this a little bit newer one but mobile readiness. There's no need anymore to have a second website for mobile users. WordPress now automatically recognizes if a person's on a site through the web browser or mobile device and base … Hopefully in this case on the theme and the theme needs to be mobile ready as well but most of them are these days.
It'll configure the content to be viewed on either desktop or mobile. They're mobile ready.
Okay. Finally number 13, my favorite of course, the amazing, amazing community. Yes, the community consists of you, me, us. I said it before I'll say it again, I love it. I do. I also believe there's probably just as many people that don't know anything about the community which amazes me but then again, that's fine. There's a big world out there. My goal here is to help share what I can to who wants to hear it when they want to hear it. It's about timing as well. The community is awesome. For that, happy birthday to WordPress. Thank you Matt Mullenweg and team for coming up with this 13 years ago. It's impressive. It really is and I'm looking forward to the next 13, 15, 20 years. There you have it. My 13 reasons why I love WordPress. Happy birthday. I'm not going to sing. I will spare you that.
All right. Moving right along is here segment 3, tip of the week. This week I'm going to talk briefly about GravityView. GravityView is a plugin that works with Gravity Forms and I'm a big fan of Gravity Forms.
I use it for the last couple of years. I was working with a client. They wanted an easier way to display content that was captured from a form. I knew about GravityView. I looked into briefly. It makes it really easy to display Gravity Forms content. Check it out. It's a paid product and I don't … Right now, we're trying it out. What's the cost here? I think it costs, just to share with you, $59 for 1 site, $120 for 3 and $250 for 100. It lets you really customize how you want your data that you've captured to look and what you can do with it after that. Check it out. It's over at GravityView.co. Okay. I have no connection to them. Just wanted to share it with you. Pretty cool if you use Gravity Forms and you need a better way to present your data that you've captured, check out GravityView. All right. That is it this week. If you have any questions, go ahead and send it in via email at adam@kitchensinkwp.com or use the speak pipe functionality of the website. Thanks for listening. See you next week. Go out and do some awesome things with WordPress and again, happy birthday. Bye bye.
You still there? Just want to say hi to Nicole and Lorie. Thanks for listening. Okay. Bye bye.
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