@arty My key reasons for using it are as follows.

• Best platform for SEO.  Matt Cutts from Google uses it himself and says so in this presentation (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-for-bloggers/ - start with slide #10).
• Most widely used platform.  You can see stats here - http://trends.builtwith.com/cms/WordPress.  This means you’ll likely find the most support for it.  There are very few problems I run into with WordPress that don’t have answers somewhere out on the Internet, either in the support forums or elsewhere.
• Most plugins & themes.  Need some additional functionality or a better design?  You’re more likely to find options using WordPress than with other platforms.  

@arty How the website looks is based on the theme you choose. There are lots of themes that are built for businesses to use so their homepage looks more like a  commercial, static website and they can have a blog on the side.  Is it a learning curve?  Yes, unless you want to find someone to help you design.  But there really aren’t any platforms (that I know of) which will allow you a good design without having to get into the coding somehow.  I know someone who buys Flash templates for websites not built on any platform, and even she had to learn some basic HTML, how to use FTP, and so forth to get it going.

Let’s see … here are my reasons

• It’s EASY to set up — easy install, tweak your settings and start blogging … it really is that easy
• there’s no hard coding — in other words, it’s okay if you don’t know what HTML or CSS is
• easy to customize — upload your own header, background and change the link color (of course there are those of us that do A LOT more than that with themes, but for someone who doesn’t know html and/or CSS … again, that okay
• My blog is always fresh in the search engines when I post something new .. it isn’t a static site, it’s very dynamic — SEO is so easy with WP, like @kristi-hines says … and you can do this with plugins as well as themes (free or premium) 
• I can have my blog connected to EVERY social network I am involved with
• there is such a wide range of available themes and plugins for WP both free and premium
• one of my favorite reasons is I can use WP for just a website and not have the blog part. 

The title of this post is why I like WordPress, @Art Bitch, not why I don’t like WordPress.Different strokes for different Folks. Try out some of the others Drupal, Joomla, to name two. Do a search on Google(Or Bing,) or your favorite search Engine for CMS.

@Robert Nelson

Thank you for your reply.

My question is to you, and I guess to many others, is why create a ‘website’, pay for a domain and hosting service if you are just going to use a standard ‘blogging’ template from Wordpress?

Sure the back-end management through your dashboard is easy, and I can see that for great big websites with lots and lots of stuff to manage would benefit here, I am more concerned with the ‘look’ of the webpage/interface.

How people view and interact with you. Wordpress, so far at least, has not been easy to customize in this way, themes or not.

Surely there is an easier way of ‘managing’ the look of your website.

Am still working on this…

*)

AB

@arty besides being the most used blogging platform. Wordpress has excelled as a very good CMS surpassing Joomla (my take) due in part to its being Open Source. 

The shear number of contributors has surpassed any proprietary software out there very hard to duplicate the support documentation something that lacks in the competition.

Custom themes are affordable and for the most part work out-of-the-box however, I recommend that you do have someone with Wordpress knowledge get you up and running. Or, as in anything else be prepared to go through a learning curve.

Oh the WordPress love!

Cost – Free themes (although when I use a good theme I always send a donation to the theme creator) My 2 latest WP sites where for a company I consult for. I set up and had fully functional WP sites, complete with posts, in under a week at a tenth of what it’s cost them to set up and launch their traditional site. Not to mention that it took them months to code the new site. 

Easy install – All major hosting companies have Fantastico or some other one click install option.

Variety of Themes – Although to get some of the really unique ones you do have to pay but even they are inexpensive, as in less than I spend on coffee outings in a month

SEO – No brainer there, easy SEO

Support – I had a problem installing WP on a new host over the weekend and I sent a tweet out. Within minutes I was Skyping with a fellow from Ireland who helped my fix the problem in no time at all. That has happened to me on several occasions.Plus WP TV and the WP forums of course and random YouTube how to videos. Size does have it’s advantages.

Scales well – For those like me who can’t code past Hello World it just works. For those who do know what they’re doing..  well they can do some amazing things.Same for small simple blog to fully functional website. Your site can grow.

Portability – I love that I can completely change my theme and focus without losing my posts. Over the years I’ve bounced between Blogger, Edublogs and WordPress more than a few times. All my posts are still available.

Plugins - I swear there as many plugins for WP as there are app for the iPhone.

Thanks everyone!

Appreciate you taking the time to post here.

I am still a bit stuck needless to say, most of this information above I kind of already know, and it is more to do with the functionality of the thing so to speak.

I am concerned with the look of the thing.

Themes just aren’t working out, and there is a BIG problem with the guzillion themes out there on the web, and that come up in searches, all being the same boring, crappy, blogging-style, easy to download kinda themes.

Hence our problem with proliferation of boring, crappy Wordpress themes.

I don’t want them or to be like everyone else. This is a big problem i can see with Wordpress which no-one is really talking about.

All I can read here is money. It is goig to cost me money to get Wordpress to do what I want it to and look like I want it to. Sigh.

Still trying though am onto my third video tutorial now, SEO.

*)

AB

@Kristi Hines yep true, true.

I am slowly resigning to the fact that I may have to pay someone to make an AMAZING website which is, of course, what I want here.

The biggest, bestest website EVER. *)

This is hard for me to accept of course as I like to make sure I do everything myself including designing the website.

Am still looking to it, I’m sure there are other ways to do this, maybe I can take a Wordpress theme and manually adjust it in Dreamweaver or something am not sure. I guess one of the following questions will be ‘how much does an AMAZING Wordpress website cost?’.

*)

AB