WordPress is a popular blogging platform for those interested in publishing their blogs and writings on the web, online. “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 hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.” Many users use WordPress because of the ease to use and the options it offers.

To access WordPress go to http://wordpress.org/. The website is fairly intuitive and gives you step by step guidance on how to get started with your blog. The website also provides a comprehensive guide to how to go about blogging or how to get comfortable using WordPress. You will need to download WordPress and in a few easy steps can start blogging immediately. The installation is easy and you will get regular updates. The outstanding features of WordPress make it very popular among the bloggers. So what are those features? Let’s see one by one.

Template: The templates that WordPress offers are extraordinary. The templates are elegant and have features to suit your needs. They have a concept of ‘Wordpress Theme’ which ensures that you can have multiple themes for your blog and can switch on and off from one theme and design with the click of a button.

Instant Update: The updates and changes that you make to your blog are real-time and are immediately reflected on your page.

Pinging: WordPress supports Ping-o-matic, which means every time you update your blog, the search engines are pinged, giving maximum exposure to your blog for the readers.

Password and Spam Protection: You can password protect your posts, restrict people form viewing your posts, blacklist visitors, make use of proxy checkers and manage spam comments in your blog. For a serious blogger, features as this is a boon.

Rich text formatting: Publish your posts in rich text formats, without having to loose any of your original formatting since the publishing tools support almost all formatting features used in other writing tools like Microsoft Word. The Texturize engine is used by WordPress to convert plain ASCII into typographically correct XHTML entities. This includes quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, em and en dashes, multiplication symbols, and ampersands. For a writer this is a boon.

The other highlights are plugin supports, allowing multiple authors, enabling you to store the list of visitors to your blog, and support tagging. WordPress as mentioned above is quite popular among bloggers and is also suggested for those who want to take blogging seriously. All the features are there to ensure that you have a smooth ride in your blogging journey. Remember, though that the success of your blog still primarily depends on how well you can articulate what your knowledge and opinion – if the content is not good, chances are even the best presentation won’t fetch traffic or response from your readers.