It’s no secret anymore that Wordpress CMS is becoming the industry standard for businesses and organizations of all sizes who need to manage their own websites. A recent iMedia Connection article reports that of the the leading 500 companies on the internet, all of them use an open source publishing platform for some aspect of their web presence…and Wordpress CMS leads the way.

The Wordpress CMS (Content Management System) has proven itself to be a reliable publishing platform and is used to power millions of business websites, online portfolios, ecommerce sites, social communities, directories, multimedia entertainment, blogs, and countless other web solutions, limited only by the imagination of the publisher or webmaster.

There are many reasons that so many businesses and organization have turned to using Wordpress.

• Flexibility

Wordpress is a highly flexible publishing platform, with thousands of design, function, and modification options that fit the needs and personality of almost any and every use on the world wide web. Odds are you have been to hundreds of websites that use Wordpress and never even knew it. It is the most widely used publishing platform on the web and is used by thousands of well known companies such as NASA, M.I.T., Stanford University, Xerox, Harvard University, Dartmouth, Texas Tech, Cornell, Ford Motor Company, The New York Times, CNN Political Ticker, Nike, Ben and Jerry’s, Open I.D., People Magazine, MTV Newsroom, G.E. Reports, many U.S. Congressman and Senators , and many more (see notable users). You can customize your Worpdress website to look however you want.

• Open Source

The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, Wordpress is released under the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software–to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation’s software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it. (Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by the GNU Library General Public License instead.) You can apply it to your programs, too.

In other words..there is no license to use Wordpress, it is free to use,  and you are free to make modifications (or have them made for you)  as you see to fit suit your needs.

By using an open source platform, your website will benefit from the support and knowledge of thousands of programmers around the world who continue to dedicate countless man hours to the improvement and  development of the industry standard in Web 2.0 publishing, and free you and your company from proprietary licensing restrictions.

• Support

The Wordpress community of users and developers is one of the largest on the web. Frequent updates for the continuing enhancement of the platform are readily available to all and there are many online resources, communities, and forums that provide a knowledge base of information and help. Even if having a full time Wordpress specialist on call is not in the budget, it is possible for the average person to administer their own Wordpress website on their own, or in-house.

• Website Administration

Wordpress is one of the only platforms with a user friendly back end that allows publishers to actually administer their own websites without the constant need to pay a web developer to make subtle changes or content additions. While it is no exactly “plug and play”, the average person can learn to be their own website administrator with a little instruction from an experienced user, or by accessing the thousands of tutorials and support readily available on the web.

Although the platform itself is based on PHP, CSS, and HTML, the average user need not be versed in any programing or design language to administer their own site which makes Wordpress an attractive and economical solution for businesses of all sizes.

• About Wordpress

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. More than most commercial platforms. It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 500 web site without paying anyone a license fee and a number of other important freedoms.

• About WordPress.org

On this site you can download and install a software script called WordPress. To do this you need a web host who meets the minimum requirements and a little time. WordPress is completely customizable and can be used for almost anything.

• A Little History

WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there.- Source