I spent a decent amount of time tinkering around with WordPress. There’s a lot of components to it, so here are some of the pros and cons I discovered along the way.

Pros

• Price: many small business or individualized website development platforms (like WordPress) can be deceptively expensive. WordPress can be used completely free of charge, and even if you want to use it without the .wordpress, the price is reasonable.
• Blogs: WordPress is great for individual bloggers, especially if they aren’t particularly tech-savvy. The features are straightforward, and writing/editing a new post is pretty straightforward.
• Google Analytics: Setup for this was pretty simple, and it can really add a lot of value to determining what your target demographic is and how to best capture that audience.
• Spam: Without even realizing it, WordPress automatically protected my posts from spam comments. This is a really nice feature, especially for someone just starting out. No one wants their brand new blog to be flooded with spam.

Cons

• Broad, not deep: While the dashboard appears to be loaded and there’s plenty of sub-menus, actually clicking on these reveals very minimal editing capabilities. This is especially true if working with a theme. While they make the design process much easier, they greatly hinder customization.
• Usability: I know that there are ways to get around the previous con, but they required pretty extensive researching to discover. Not every can or wants to put in that kind of time just to change the background color of their page.
• Picky: Uploading media (mainly images) can be a giant headache. WordPress will often require specific image dimensions, but provides minimal tools to help the user get there.

Summary

For the purpose of creating a blog (like with this class), WordPress is a solid, affordable option. Beyond this basic usage, WordPress lacks accessibility to the vast customization it claims to provide, putting up a barrier for many users who may feel the struggle isn’t worth the reward.