I’m boring anyone in sight at the moment with tales of the wonder of Wordpress. I just cannot see what’s going to stop it from taking over the world, or at least the world of website design (not just the blogging world for which it is best known). Anyone without a clue as to what I am talking about, this offers a neat summary.

The blank stares I receive when mentioning Wordpress to people at networking events and the like tells me that while it is of course known and loved among the tech-community, it has yet to infiltrate more widely. Allow me however to list a few reasons why I believe it soon will.

1. You don’t have to employ expensive web designers - Wordpress gives non-techies a bridge across the world of code that can seem so impenetrable. With the quality of themes or templates (such as Woo Themes) available out there currently, you can put together a great-looking, well-optimized site from your own desktop.
2. It’s constantly getting better - Wordpress is open source, which means that anyone on earth has access to the nuts and bolts that make it happen, and can thus improve and polish it ad infinitum. Better still, it’s unbelievably easy (indeed it can be an automatic process) for your site to update to the latest version of Wordpress, with all its refinements.
3. Wordpress sites are optimized to the eyeballs - Search engine optimization is still criminally ignored by most businesses, or is at least conducted ineffectively or based on fatal misunderstanding about what it actually is. Ranking well for your business’s keywords can be the key to a sales boost that no other form of marketing could deliver, and Wordpress makes it easy. What’s more, search engines love regularly updated, relevant content, and adding new content to your Wordpress site is the work of an instant. Want proof? Well, Google insider Matt Cutts says if he were starting a business today and wanted to drive traffic to his website, he would install a WordPress blog. Enough said.
4. It’s very easy to use - Once you get to grips with the basic mechanics of the Wordpress administration panel (see right) and with the whole process of uploading files via a File Transfer Protocol, you’ll find it quickly becomes second nature.
5. Your sites can be anything you want them to be - One of the great things about Wordpress sites is their customability. Apart from the plethora of themes, there are scores of widgets and plugins you can add to ensure your site does what you want it to do.
6. The actual set-up process is straightforward - I host my sites with Dreamhost, who boast a one-click install for Wordpress. There’s a bit more to it than that, but there are plenty of tutorials on the web to guide you through the process, such as this one.
7. Business sites need to be updated regularly - Quite a few business sites have blogs these days, but what about the other pages on your site? There’s the people page that’s needs updating whenever a member of staff moves on. There’s the testimonials or services page you need to keep from getting old or tired. There are, in other words, many other pages on your typical business website that need regular updating in order to remain current and fresh. Wordpress makes this straightforward, without the need for the costly engagement of professional designers.

I’m no great expert on the programming side of Wordpress, but I think I know enough to say it is being hugely underused by the business community. For businesses of any size, you can turn your stale, dated, unoptimized site into a real, living, breathing reflection of your business that stands a far better chance of showing up for your keywords and phrases. Particularly when money is tight, it’s a huge opportunity being missed.