Transitioning from Blogger to WordPress would have been impossible for me without the help of Lara Kulpa, an incredibly talented WordPress developer I met through my blogging friend Liz Strauss. (Thank you, Liz!)

Lara and I are teaming up to help companies build Web sites and/or blogs in WordPress. From my point of view as a sales and marketing strategist, I can see enormous sales and marketing value in the WordPress approach. For a look at the technical benefits of WordPress, here are insights from Lara.

Interview with Lara Kulpa, Anubis Marketing.

1. How long have you been working with WordPress?
I discovered it back in 2005 when a friend of mine was using it for her
freelancing website. She showed me how to get it and where I could go for
help with it, and after playing with it for a weekend, I was hooked! I have
since built all my client websites with it, regardless of the nature of
their business.

2. What are 3 or 4 standout features of WordPress?
Only 3 or 4? (laugh) What I love about WordPress is the customization
capabilities that can be done with it. It can be a standard website, it can
be just a blog. It can be both. It’s easy to create fluid, clean websites
with super easy manageability for the client. If you can write an email, you
can use the administrative back-end of the software. There’s pretty much a
plugin (extention) that can be used to just about anything, like for
monetizing the site (showing ads), giving readers a chance to subscribe to
posts and comments, and other ways of organizing the layout of the site. To
summarize, it’s nice, clean software with great functionality, potential,
and support from the community.

3. Why would a business want to build its Web site on WordPress?
WordPress creates search engine friendly sites pretty much out of the box.
If you have a knowledgeable developer working on it, you’ll be up and
running in no time with a site that YOU will be in control of once the
initial build is done. Business owners are busy people, and no longer have
to pay an in-house person to hold the sole job of working on the site. It
requires little to no knowledge of programming or code to use once your site
is built, and makes it super easy to make changes to the site in seconds.

4. Is WordPress practical for companies with 500+ page sites and interactive
applications?
It depends on the applications, but in terms of pages, the capabilities are
pretty enormous. I think the largest site I’ve seen in terms of pages
reached over 3000. Shopping carts exist for WordPress in the form of
plugins, and you can run podcasts, video, and pretty much any other type of
interactive thing you can think of. One of the things I love about WordPress
is that it’s not too friendly with flash. (Flash is bad for SEO!)

5. How does WordPress compare with other platforms for SEO?
Well as I said, it’s search engine friendly out of the box. It offers
customized URLs, where you can use your page titles or other keywords
instead of things like “?p=137″, the navigation is pretty basic but
well-structured and easy to follow, pages load quickly because they’re
stored on a database and not in your files, and there are tons of great
plugins out there to maximize your SEO efforts.

6. How does WordPress compare with other platforms in terms of design?
Well in terms of the backend design, it’s gorgeous! Nice and clean, easy for
any level user to navigate, and very straightforward. You want to write a
new page? You click on “Write” and then on “Page”. Want to add a new link?
Click on “Links” and then on “Add New”. Can’t get much simpler than that! In
terms of the visible site, the design capabilities are nearly limitless.
It’s entirely possible to take an existing website’s design and clean it up
for WordPress. By it’s general nature, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have
a site that’s fluid and looks “connected” across the pages, since you only
have to do the design work once and not every time you create a new page.

7. How do you see WordPress changing over the next 12-24 months?
I can only see it becoming more powerful and more in demand. There is a
large number of people who devote their time to continuing to develop the
software, the plugins, and showing off the design capabilities of the
program for free, every day, and that number is growing! I feel it will
always remain the least complicated to use and the best performing site
creation software out there.