Building niche sites - usings wordpress?

[wade_watson]

The reason 1. WordPress is free, 2. It's very easy for non-programming savvy newbies to set up and 3. There's a vast amount of themes, plug-ins, and tutorials available for it. I haven't used Joomla, but as I understand it, it's more of full-fledged content manager with greater potential capability than WordPress, but it requires a good bit of code work to get it set up.

You just need to assess your needs and pick what will work best for you. There's no need in using anything more complicated than what will do the job. If all you need is a landing page, WordPress is even overkill. If you need a multifaceted site integrating databases, forums, order processing and so forth, a full content manager is probably best.

I find installing WordPress satisfies my IM needs well enough, but sometimes for something quick and short-term, I'll just set up a little Blogger page. It all depends on what you need to do.

Wade Watson

[Rick Olsen]

I've used both wordpress and joomla. In my opinion wordpress is much easier to learn and use. With so many plugins you can build just about any kind of site you want and have it up and running quickly.

[DianaWalker]

I don't know about Joomla - but I LOVE WordPress.

I had 2 of my html/Front Page sites transferred over to WordPress a year ago, and find them so easy to work in, and have 4 WordPress Blogs in total now.

I am in the process of having my http://www.cravingsecrets.com transferred over from being a long-time Front Page website/sales page to now being a WordPress Blog by next week...

As my Webmaster said to me last week "WordPress is like Catnip to Google".

And I have found that to be true.
Love WordPress!
Diana

[retta719]

Free + Easy = awesome That's really all it is, there's no magical reason for choosing WordPress over other things. A lot of people say it's easier to get the search engine to index and crawl your site with WordPress, because it's standards make it easy for the search engines to read.

[yuri21]

Joomla = a very extensive Content Management System. It's much more suitable for sites very heavy on content and admin management as it comes with tons of tools like forums, games, newsletter tools, support for third-party tools like bug trackers, etc., etc. It's used by portals, programmers, medium to large companies for managing large-scale projects, etc., etc..

Wordpress = a simplified form of a CMS. Yes, it's a blog but it can also be customised to do much more. Frankly, a blog is better than an extensive CMS for newbie IMers(like me) because you don't want to spend precious hours grappling with code , just so as to be able to publish articles... yikes. And frankly, it can be used by just about anyone... just click and go!

[NicoleDean]

As far as outsourcing goes, it's very affordable and easy to find a helper to do just about anything in WordPress. - In fact, we have several people here who can do whatever you need for much less money than you'd think.

[constance]

Yeah, I played around with Drupal and Joomla and was going batty from the horrible templates around. Theoretically, those apps should be better Content Management Systems that WP, but it's actually easier to make workarounds and hacks in WordPress than to wrestle those bloated tools into shape, especially if your time is limited. The plugins in WordPress are super powerful and give you way more flexibility than you might think.