I’m sure that there are more that 9 reasons to love WordPress as a blogging platform, but here’s the ones that stand out for me:

#9 – Free Themes Galore!
I built my own theme from scratch but I’m not exactly your average blogger either. Do a quick search and you’ll uncover thousands of free themes that can be downloaded and quickly applied to any WordPress Blog. If you’re not a designer, or don’t know how to PHP, then you have a lot of options. If you want to build your own them then there is no shortage of downloadable source code to peruse. Theme Viewer is a great place to start if you’re looking for some inspiration or to download a new theme.

#8 – A Pre-installed anti-SPAM Plugin That Actually Works
I realize that Akismet is available on a wide variety of blogging platforms, and you do have to register for an API key to enable it, but Akismet was originally designed for WordPress and it works really well. Comment SPAM has not been an issue for me since enabling Akismet.

#7 – Hackable by Mere Mortals
It is actually possible to wade into WordPress theme code without a computer science degree. I was looking for a plugin that would generate custom <title>tags for every page on my site but couldn’t find one that was quite right. The solution? A few simple conditional PHP statements, mix in a couple of WordPress template tags, and some simple XHTML. Customizing your templates requires very rudimentary PHP knowledge and there are “WordPress recipes” all over the net. Hack away!

#6 – A Plethora of Plugins
There is a HUGE collection of community contributed WordPress plugins that provide virtually every type of functionality under the sun. Its hard to imagine a blogging requirement that hasn’t already been addressed by more than one plugin. I’ve almost settled on all my plugins are will be covering them in a future post (stay tuned).

#5 – W3C Standards Compliance
XHTML/HTML Code generated by template tags is easy to customize and the all the default code is W3C valid (as far as I’ve seen). Have you seen some of the code that is generated by some of the other popular CMS and blogging platforms? Not pretty.

#4 – Search Engine Optimization
There is always something more that can be done to optimize your blog for the search engines. Having said that, the default template for WordPress is “pretty good” right out of the gate. There are lots of great plugins for customizing page titles, tagging posts, setting meta tags, creating Google Sitemaps, etc. Overall, WordPress has to be the easiest blogging platform that I’m aware of when it comes to optimizing for search.

#3 – I Know What Sucks… And It is Not the Admin Interface
The backend of WordPress is intuitive and easy to use. Unlike some other blogging and CMS tools, the admin interface in WordPress doesn’t have that “after thought” feel about it. Granted, not everyone loves the text editor, but then it isn’t really designed for “everyone” so that is easy to look past. The interface is sophisticated enough to give power users control, but still usable by neophytes. Hooks have been provided to allow plugin developers to easily create plugin configuration pages which keeps text configuration files to a minimum. You don’t have to be a geek to use WordPress effectively and that is a very good thing.

#2 – The Documentation
No documentation is perfect, but the WordPress Codex is pretty darn good. There is nothing worse than an open source project that is impossible to use because of non-existent or stale dated documentation! If you can’t find the answer in the Codex then a quick Google search is likely to find you all kinds of answers on the numerous blogs dedicated to WordPress.

#1 – The WordPress Community
Wordpress should be the poster child for helpful and active open source projects. People who use WordPress love WordPress and it shows. The support forums are very active, helpful, and safe for WordPress newbies.

What Do You Think?
Did I miss anything? Am I out to lunch? Please feel free to post a relevant/intelligent/witty comment or trackback in my nofollow-free comments section.