I’ve been using Wordpress now since the inception of this blog and used it for several other blogs as well. I haven’t been recommending Wordpress mainly because it has needed a lot of care and loving from an administrator. No longer. Wordpress can now update itself with the click of a button by its administrator. This totally changes the game and gets us closer to a Web publishing model that more or less removes the need for a techie on a daily or weekly basis.
If you’re a nonprofit that has less than 5 people on their Web team, I suggest you consider Wordpress 2.7. It has an all-new administrator UI to boot. There are so many things you can do with Wordpress it would be a shame not to use it.
Here’s a quick list:
- Killer SEO strategy with All-in-One SEO plugin. I was brought in to help with asianamericansforobama.com and they had a lousy pagerank (big fat zero) being hosted on Typepad. I told all the posters to start filling in the necessary SEO fields on All-in-One SEO and to start adding tags. Their pagerank now is (5/10). Traffic hit nearly 40,000 viewers in November and holding steady at around 20k viewers this month. You can check out our stats at Quantcast.
- Easy to add Google ads. It’s as easy as pie to add Google ads. This means you can get a decent job of monetizing your traffic when you’ve got a little bit of traffic going.
- Remarkably easy to train people how to post. The only major problem is when people try to cut and paste Word documents into Wordpress but you’ll see this problem from everyone who is a Word user. They just have to be taught to use the special Word to Wordpress button on the Wordpress editor to remove the extra HTML fluff that Word adds.
- Tons of Wordpress themes out there and I mean a TON. You can pay or not pay. You can go halfsies on the customization and pick an existing theme and alter it.
- Support for all the latest standards. If you pick the right theme, it can be all tricked out with SEO goodness as well as with the latest semantic Web standards.
- Runs in PHP and is easy to code. If anything, Wordpress is still kind of the Wild West in the way it’s programmed. It’s not particularly object-oriented in its thinking so it can lend itself to spaghetti code. On the other hand, even programming novices can kick ass in Wordpress.
- You can create pages instead of posts. Pages are how you make a Wordpress site look like any other site. A page is basically a post that shows up on your menu and never is subject to being shown in chronological order on the front page of your site.
- Long, long lists of plugins that work with everything. Wordpress is pretty much the standard for first-cut attempts at a plugin with whatever new standard comes along. Those of you trying to integrate fundraising with a Wordpress plugin will find it ridiculously easy to find a plugin that works with your payment processor and your e-mail list software.
Totally excited, now? You can download Wordpress for free at http://wordpress.org/download/. Be aware that you should probably have an ISP. I heartily recommend Nexcess.net. I use them for this blog and for asianamericansforobama.com. For most small orgs, the mini-me package is great. However, asianamericansforobama.com is running the Gettin’ Hits service plan and running over 35 GB a month. I assume that if your nonprofit is getting that much traffic that you’ll be more than happy to pay 
.
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