Wordpress was started by Matt Mullenweg in 2003. What started off as a standard blogging and CMS (content management system) has come a long ways in its short life, primarily in its effects on the web design world. Wordpress is now a full featured web site creation tool. It truly ranges from standard blogs to professional looking websites, and everything in between. Wordpress functions sort of like the backbone of your website due to the fact it is an open-source software. This means that the code and files on wordpress are open to the user to customize and enhance to the user's liking.
The meat behind Wordpress is its extensive template and plugin system. These hundreds of themes and plugins allow for almost unlimited creativiy and customization. This link from tripwire magazine highlights 35 plugins they consider crucial for a succesful blog or website.
TripWire Plugin Article
One obvious disadvantage to Wordpress and to a web designer/developer is that if you use wordpress alone you do not own your domain name. What I mean by this is that if you were to create a site on Wordpress the URL to your site would be something like 'jordanmarshallwebdesign.wordress.com'. Now Wordpress does offer you the option to purchase a unique domain name, and I believe the cost on this was something around 12-20 dollars per year, which isn't terribly expensive.
I have only done minimal research on Wordpress as of right now and I have some questions regarding how it really stands up against traditional professional web design/developing standards using Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and NotePad. It does sound like an exciting service though does have a ton of real world value, it's just that it feels like creating something on Wordpress has less luster than creating a visually stunning website from scratch and giving the creator the peace of mind knowing they did everything on their own and didn't have to use any pre-built templates or things of that nature.
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