WordPress logoToday marks a new phase in the history of my website.

For the past few days I have been experimenting with WordPress as a blogging tool. Version 2.5.1 was recently released and I thought I’d give it a try.

Having spent some time years ago with much earlier (and more raw) versions of WordPress and other blogging platforms, I was pleasantly impressed with the ease of use, plugin/widget extensibility and most of all, the SEO-savvy features of WordPress 2.5.1.

For the past 10 years or so I’ve stayed away from all blogging software and content management systems (CMS), largely because I felt that (i) they were not customisable enough for my needs and (ii) I could do better SEO through hand-coding pages and sites myself.

In fact, I ran many sites purely through bespoke CMSs that I had written myself. For me, that was the ultimate in control, flexibility and SEO - I could do sit there for hours in front of the computer and do whatever I wanted with my sites without the contraints of a CMS.

With blogging and CMSs in their infancy, I could be more productive with software I had written myself. The downside however, is that it was extremely time-consuming and labour-intensive.

Today I concede that all that has changed! For the better. (Thank God!)

With WordPress 2.5.1, I can consign to history the days when I would have to design a CMS for a new website. WordPress is powerful, flexible, highly customisable, SEO’d, and free. It has everything that previous versions lacked. This is an amazing product.

I have recently launched a new site called EMEDology.com running purely on WordPress 2.5.1.

As a testamony to how impressed I am with WordPress 2.5.1, I have today migrated my home page to WordPress.

You can still see the old home page and all of the older content will be left untouched.

But from now on, for the foreseeable future, it is WordPress all the way on this site!