Yesterday I had a good friend and sometimes client email me and ask me about the new Hart Voice Overs website.  He said:

“I’m curious to know about the blog that you have been doing.  Was that a free application and did it integrate with your existing website?  How has it been?  You like?”

I’ve had a few other people ask so I thought I would share some of my response:

That my friend is WordPress and it is awesome.  Go to www.wordpress.com to check it out. And yes it’s free.

I really can’t say enough good things about it.  It originally started as blogging software but has really evolved into a complete content management system.  Originally I was just going to use it for my blog but I’ve now decided to build my whole site with it.  Brian Hart Productions needs a redo and even though I’m not planning to use a blog there I think I might use wordpress anyway.  It’s very intuitive, very easy to use even with multiple users, and there’s a ton of great support documentation on the web.

They have two options.  You can host a blog on their site – for example mine would be something like hartvoiceovers.wordpress.com or you can download the software and put it on your domain which is what I have done.

It’s highly customizable, there are tons of free templates to choose from or your can make your own.  It’s very configurable and easy to deal with things like SEO and subscriptions etc with the help of available (and again free) plugins.

Just a few examples of plugins I use – but I have a ton:  I have one that turns my site into a mobile version for use with blackberrys and iphones, ones that automatically post to twitter and facebook when I make a new post, one that lets commenters subscribe to see additional comments (and drive them back to the site), one that automatically generates an XML sitemap so the search engines can index the site easier, and one that displays my twitter posts on the side, one that finds photos with a creative commons license so I can use them legally and for free in my blog.  There are others that allow for payments, ad banner rotation and on and on and on.  Another plug in I installed automatically creates a database backup and emails it to my gmail account as often as I specify.

This is getting long I know but here’s another other cool thing.  With an app I downloaded I can create, edit and publish posts from my iphone and moderate comments.

So yeah, as you can tell I love it.

Brian Hart
Tel:  251.752.9221
Hart Voice Overs

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