The VHS of the Internet
I have to admit that I am a big user of WordPress. As a former amateur developer, especially one that played with enterprise level software in the Microsoft technologies, this is bordering on heresy.
Please believe me that this is not just a C# verses pHp thing. Those of you that have had a dig inside the inner workings of WordPress will find a slightly cranky, gradually evolved blogging system that is beginning to show it’s age. If you have ever had to use the XMLRPC interface, conduct a manual backup or, god forbid, deal with the aftermath of a Headway upgrade then you will know what I am talking about.
That is not to say that WordPress is bad. It is not. It just does what it needs to well, even if there are solutions out there that do it better.
So why do we still use it?
Well one of the big factors is Yoast, the fantastic Google tuning plugin that turns any WordPress site in to a Google friendly asset. You may get a more reliable or user friendly system by using Drupal, Joomla or one of the other CMS platforms but try to make them Google friendly and you are in to the mirky world of HTML tag tuning and the black art that is optimisation. If you use WordPress with Yoast you really dont need to bother.
The real reason I use WordPress so extensively, however, is what we call the VHS factor. WordPress has become the defacto VHS of the internet.
Blast from the Past
Now for all you youngsters out there who have never heard of the Six Million Dollar man I feel it is time for a history lesson. You know who you are – anyone that has never had to arrange to actually ‘meet someone’ at a place and time because you never existed before the invention of the mobile phone. Look, I’ll just call you, ok?
Back in the 1980’s there was a war. It was a brutal war conducted in the realm of Videotape (like a Bluray disk but with similar characteristics to a shoebox). Ask your dad.
On one side stood VHS, a technology rooted in cheap nastyness. On the other stood the mighty BetaMax, flying the flag for all audio visual connoseurs everywhere.
There really was no comparison. BetaMax had better video quality (vastly better in the early days), better sound, better quality machines that didn’t chew tape, even a more stable image that didn’t make you think you were watching some awful US daytime soap.
It may seem strange in the age of surround sound and 4K televisions to find out that VHS won. Not only did it win, it wiped the floor with BetaMax.
The reason? Acceptance.
What started out as a battle was over the moment the video rental stores stopped stocking BetaMax tapes. Whether it was the more expensive machines, the marketing, the distribution, the availability, it doesn’t matter. The moment VHS became so big that it came to dominate the industry it was curtains for poor old BetaMax.
WordPress
It is much the same with WordPress.
The reality of the modern Internet is that WordPress is now so big as a platform that no search engine can ignore it. Dont believe me? Just ask Google.
Any search engine, Google or otherwise, ignores WordPress at it’s peril as the majority of good content out there on the Internet lives in a WordPress site. By having WordPress as a content platform, irrespective of the technical benefits or pitfalls, means that you are part of the mainstream. There is never any danger of Google ignoring you, at least for technical reasons.
Your content and who links to that content, well that’s another story.
Sure you could build you a site in Angular JS or Aurelia JS and layer on some fantastic looking custom CSS implementation with a state of the art Big Data backend but the reality is that no-one will ever find you so what is the point.
I continually see fantastic sites that get completely ignored by Google because they create circular links that cause the Google crawler to go in circles, meaning it never comes back. It might be missing canonical tags, client executed Javascript, an incorrect sitemap, a missing robots.txt or one of the many traps detailed by Google themselves.
By using WordPress I know that will never happen to me. Hopefully. Even if there is a technical bug in WordPress I know with reasonable certainty that it will be fixed promptly or at the very least the search engineers will adjust their crawlers to deal with the anomaly. They just cannot afford not to.
Couple that with a vast community offering plugins, fixes and themes for almost every eventuallity and you really cant go wrong.
So rest assured WordPress users. Your proverbial site will be stacked neatly alongside the rest of those VHS tapes in every video rental store up and down the country. The good news is that many of your competitors sites are languishing in the bargain bucket in the charity shop.
As always the commercial reality always comes first.
*Please note that WordPress is both a blogging site and a piece of CMS software. What I am talking about is the CMS software that you can run on your own site. Some people only know about the blogging platform.