Guest Post by Ashvini

Many of us search for a good blogging platform to showcase our ideas and experiences. Blogging has transformed itself from expression of our personal experience to now include providing information, brand building and online collaboration and sharing. Blogging inspite of skepticism has become one of the primary activities happening on the internet. A good blog entices thousands of users to share experiences, get into productive discussions and generally network with each other.That brings us to the question that if we decide to blog today, what blog platform should we use. My opinion is that any blog and its management software should have following features so that it makes blogging a lively experience.

  • Blogging using the software should be easy.
  • The software should have a huge user community.
  • The blogging software should have a lot of plugins to automatize mundane tasks.
  • It should be easy to modify and should support large number of themes.
The list above is not exhaustive but it is what I would be looking for in a blogging platform. When I started blogging, I came across blogging platform known as 'Wordpress'. As I learned more about it, I found that it is indeed one the best blogging platform available on the internet. Below are the reasons for the same :

It is all open source

That means you can have all the source code, modify as you want it and make the site suit your individuality or corporate image. It is written in PHP which is the defacto standard for web development making 'Wordpress' one of the most acceptable platform fro blogging.

It has millions of existing installation

According to wordpress site, "There are 16 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com as of December 2010.". That is a number that speaks volumes about the quality of wordpress software and in my opinion is a good reason to give it a try.

It has got a large user community

What makes Wordpress a great software is a great user community which helps resolve problems, create plugins for free and to improve the software continuously. That means you can get great quality plugins and support for free and authors ask only for donatios and appreciation. Isn't that just great?

It is easy to use and modify

You can create your own look and feel blog or choose from thousands of free themes available online. If you donot like the free themes, you can purchase template of your choice from many sites that are selling them at affordable prices. You can then customize to make them Search engine friendly, put in gadgets ( called as widgets here) and give your users a great web experience.

You can manage your content very easily

Wordpress has all the features of a great content management system. If you want to delay publishing a post you can set it to draft status. You can customize your links as they appear to viewers. You can also add users for guest blogging with varying permissions. Content can be neatly organized using hierarchies of categories and can be indexed by tagging it with appropriate tags. You can also chose to add media such as video, audio files or pictures to your blog post easily.

It is free

A wordpress blog comes free of cost and hence you dont have to spend a dime to get the world class software. Isn't that a great reason to use it?

Till this point, I am learning new things everyday about this great blogging platform and I have never been disappointed. Infact I enjoy creating my own blog themes whenever I am bored of the old ones. So try it out and have fun blogging.
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Ashvini Kumar Saxena is  an entrepreneur and an avid blogger. His website http://aks-blog.com is a resource rich site for wanna be entrepreneurs.