It’s true, and I was ashamed about this for awhile, but WordPress is my favorite tool upon which to develop websites. While WordPress started out as just a blogger’s data entry platform, it has grown into an extremely powerful content management system, partly because of the enormous open source community that has grown behind it.

For me, it began back in 2006 (all the way back there, yes) with my first “website” on Blogger. That began as a joke as my brother Ryan decided that “Justin Wayne” was a good name for me as I had moved out to Montana and had rode a few horses, worn a few cowboy hats and even had a tight-fitting pair of Wranglers. I then followed his joke by creating thejustinwayneshow.blogspot.com and the name stuck. (That’s actually the story of how “The Justin Wayne Show” came to be.)

When my internet radio show turned into a podcast in January of 2007 (for those of you keeping a timeline) I taught myself how to write XML in order to podcast the show. That was my first foray into actually writing code in a text editor, and I’ve never really gone back.

Aside: that’s a bit of a lie as I had taken a class in junior high school on how to build a website. We did some coding and stuck things on Geocities… I had also built my dad a website using some ancient version of Dreamweaver for his carpet cleaning company (see image right) not long before this Blogger experience. 

At any rate, I had recently joined the Association of Music Podcasting and many of them were using WordPress to not only run their blog, but also to power their podcasts. I wouldn’t do it any other way nowadays, but then I was shocked this was possible, as I had been hand-coding every update to my podcast up to this point, and was extremely excited at the prospect of not ever having to do that again as long as I should live. I dove into WordPress to build the site I had always dreamed of.

In order to do this I took a few days off of work, cleared myself a spot near the large window in the house we were house-sitting and got to work. In those few days, with no lack of sweat, tears, swears and coffee I was able to piece together the first Justin Wayne Show proper website. I used a long forgotten free theme called Atahualpa which is still available for free and it wasn’t bad. It gave me the creative control I wanted while not dumbing down anything. I had to learn a lot in those few days to get it done, but I did.

…Here’s me wishing I still had a screen shot. It was black, and not unlike the look of the original Blogger site that still (sort of) remains today.

“Hey Justin, wasn’t this supposed to be a post about what you love about WordPress?”

Oh yeah, my apologies. I did hit the main points in the first paragraph – it’s free, easy to use, quite powerful, and has lots of support from other open-source developers around the world.

A great thing to do if you’re a budding web developer is to get your hands on a halfway decent premium theme like No Coward’s Foxy from Elegant Themes (affiliate link) which cost me $39 bucks, and do your best to tweak it to get what you want. There’s quite a bit of tweaking I did on here but to save myself time and money, I started with this template and built the site from there. I got my $40 bucks back on time I didn’t spend building it from scratch and I ended up with a fantastic site, if I do say so myself.

What do you think? Do you agree that WordPress is a great tool for building websites? Is there another content management system you like better? Why?

Let’s have a content management system deathmatch in the comments below… DING! DING!

~JW