Best Software for Hyperlocal Blogs
I began building websites in the late 90’s. Over the past ten years I have seen alot of things grow and change around the technology for community portals.
Recently a hot topic which I have been asked is what platform should be build our community portal or hyperlocal blog on. Many communities and newspapers are looking at many hybrid soultuions from total 100% custom inhouse jobs to building
hyperlocal blogs off of platforms such as joomla, drupal, phpfox, social engine, wordpress and more.
Obviously alot of details come into play when choosing a platform on which to build your hyperlocal blog or deliver your hyperlocal news, but I will keep this straight forward and easy for you.
Use the Wordpress platform to build your hyperlocal blog and here’s why:
1. IT’S FREE
First of all wordpress is a free platform and by building your site with wordpress you are becoming a part of an open source movement which is huge. The software is simple, robust and will index all of your hyperlocal blogs, news and articles in search engines like google effortlessly and quickly.
2. FREE PLUGINS
Wordpress has an enormous amount of community support for building your hyperlocal blog. From rating scripts, comment posts, tags, related articles, categories and more… the features don’t stop and chances are that if you wanted to have something made you could have it done affordably and quickly.
3. AMAZING TEMPLATES
The look and fee of your hyperlocal site is important and wordpress can accomodate you in accomplishing this. Not only this, but if you are 1/2 way understanding of html code you can make edits and changes to your own templates which will customize your sites even more. Either way take your pick from over 100,000 free designs.
4. WORDPRESS MU
Wordpress Mu was built for large scale operations and is currently running some of the most successful online newspaper platforms in the world. So even if your launching a potentially huge hyperlocal site for say a city. Wordpress MU could fit the bill.
5. BUDDYPRESS – SOCIAL ENGINE
Another neat option which can be thrown into the list of why to use wordpress for your hyperlocal blog platform is because of the buddypress social engine. Want to add a social network to your hyperlocal site, want everyone to have their own media machine and ability to blog. You’ve come to the right place. I also should mention Facebook Connect comes with Buddypress another big bonus.
6. TIME TESTED – SUCCESS
Don’t waste your time reinventing the wheel. Wordpress is being used by nearly 1 million different websites and has lasted the test of time.
7. EASY AND QUICK TO SETUP – On top of being free wordpress is both quick and easy to setup. If you are hosting your domains with Godaddy.com you can even have your blogs automatically setup for you. If you seek an even more simple solution try Wordpress.com where you can setup a free blog online in a matter of minutes.
8. WORDPRESS IS EASY TO USE
Wordpress is also very easy to use and understand.
Summary:
Wordpress makes sense.
Popularity: 52%
