WordPress evolved from simple blog software into a very large open project that many programmers have contributed to. With it you can create article sites, membership sites, news sites, photo galleries, and even your own business website.
It's a great system, and it's very cheap to buy into.
However, there are major drawbacks to using WordPress. Here are a few:
1. Most WordPress websites look and function the same.
2. It's not free; you still need a hosting account.
3. It's not free; you will need to pay someone to set it up if you are non-website savvy.
4. It's not free; all the best features need to be paid for.
5. There's no guarantee that a WordPress website will be found by Google; standard SEO still applies.
Number 1 is one of our biggest gripes here at jWAG. We hear so many jewelry stores say "I want my website to be unique" and yet so many people will slap up a WordPress site and it looks exactly like millions of other sites that are using the same theme. Why do you want your jewelry store website to have the same design theme as someone else who sells knitting patterns?
Several of the WordPress features are free, but the best ones are not. WordPress is designed to be "everything for everyone," which means there are tons of features built in that you need to learn to ignore and navigate through. It's not easy to learn, and confusion abounds.
Setting up a "free" WordPress blog using www.wordpress.org is absolutely easy, and great for simple blogging websites. It doesn't become confusing until you try to set up your own site.
Many of the proponents of WordPress also claim that "WordPress is great for SEO," when in fact that's no more true than any other content management system. There are built in SEO features, but again, no better than any other high tech SEO driven content management system.
The reason people say WordPress is great as a website is because of a built in feature called a Ping. Whenever you add a new pages to WordPress, it triggers a request for GoogleBlogBot to crawl your website within 5 minutes, but that does not mean the page you add will be indexed in the web search database.
Note that we said "GoogleBlogBot" and not the normal "GoogleBot," as there is a difference. The BlogBot's job is to find new blog posts that might be relevant to current events. The web pages absorbed by BlogBot are treated differently than pages found on the normal web. You would still need the normal GoogleBot to read your website, and for that you have to rely on good old fashion SEO.
However, we've noticed that websites crawled by the BlogBot don't seem to show up well in regular web searches. This indicates that once the BlogBot reads the site, it's likely to be ignored by the normal GoogleBot.
Another quick point about the BlogBot that you need to think about: Ask yourself if your jewelry product catalog has any relevance to the blog search of Google. That's where it will be initially placed, and primarily stuck.
Not only will your product catalog get stuck in the blog search results, but your entire website will be.
What's the bottom line of this Daily Gold Nugget? Don't use WordPress for your company website. The money you spend setting it up will be wasted once you realize you have to start all over again.
