“WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.”

That’s how the system is described at WordPress.org, and it’s basically accurate. The .org site is the hub of the Open source community around the WordPress software. WordPress.com it the WordPress-based blog service offered as one of the products of Automattic, the company that drives much of the WordPress project and a lot of other interesting related and unrelated things.

So even just starting to describe the ecosystem that the WordPress software comes from gives a sense of how much activity there is around it. It’s a bit like Wikipedia in this respect. Wikipedia has the Wikimedia foundation as well as all its contributors and the community they compose. Just as that community is what populates Wikipedia with the content that makes it valuable, it’s the unbelievable number of contributors to WordPress that make it such an amazing tool. People contribute by creating and sharing custom themes (designs), plugins (add-ons that introduce new functions to the platform), and just offering advice on blogs and message boards all across the Web.

WordPress is often, and not inaccurately, described as a blogging tool. The fact that WordPress.com is explicitly a free blogging solution for individuals gives people a good reason for having that impression. However, it can be so much more.

WordPress can be used as the basis for entire Web sites, offering a content management solution, significant design flexibility, and an elegant way to incorporate many of the best social media and search optimization tactics all at the same time.

Because, as everyone knows, the Internet loves lists, here is a list of three of the big reasons we love WordPress and use it for often for sites we build (including our own):

1. Accessibility

We recently had a client who was shocked when he was told that he could make changes to the content on his own Web site. Not just add new blog posts on the blog page, but alter the material on existing static pages as well!

WordPress is a blogging tool by default. However, it can also manage static pages (called, appropriately, “pages”). These can include practically anything and can be organized however one chooses. There’s nothing to prevent a WordPress site having dozens or even hundreds of pages organized hierarchically with an elegantly designed but self-generating navigation system. Once someone arranges all that on the back-end, anyone comfortable with basic what-you-see-is-what-you-get Web publishing tools can contribute and edit content anywhere on the site.

There are some limits to this: Sidebars and intricately formatted pages are bit more tricky and force decisions about how to configure things optimally for a particular situation. Of course, the simplest thing in all this is the basic blogging function, which anyone can learn to take full advantage of if they have the patience to be talked through it.

But with WordPress’s easy interface and support for many authors and even many administrators, it’s easy for people with different levels of technical knowledge to all contribute equally to generating content for a site.

2. Content mobility

Content is great, but it’s got to get somewhere. This is where WordPress plugins start to become a really big advantage. There are plugins for auto-generating sitemaps so search engines crawl your site effectively, for managing meta-data and SEO tricks for all elements of a site, and all sorts of other things to attract visitors through search (provided there’s content there).

But the real question is whether those visitors bring more visitors with them or just go away. That’s what makes the difference between a Web presence the builds momentum based on its own success and one that just sort of keeps trudging along slowly and ineffectively. Great plugins like Sociable help make content move around the Web fast by making it easier for users to share it with others. It tells visitors to share the content they’re looking at with friends and even prompts them to do so with little logos.

There are several plugins or tools that do similar things but this one is our favorite because it’s so simple. Having to click a button that just says “share this” and then select the network you want to use from a tabbed menu that suddenly pops up is really quite different from just getting to the bottom of a post and seeing a Twitter button and thinking “hey, I use Twitter!” Sound silly? Even if that only makes the difference once in a hundred times that’s a tick in the right direction at the margin and the tipping point between self-sustaining momentum and eventual insignificance is somewhere—is someone. Each little bit helps.

Using Sociable or another tool to offer an “email this” option is another great way to get content moving. The Web 2.0 crowd might be all set to submit everything the see to digg or delicious, but plenty of potential “influencers” have no idea what those things are. And who knows? That un-websavy user who can only manage to share content if given a button to press that creates an email with the URL already in the message body might be Matt Drudge’s best friend!

Even if not, making it easy for content to get spread around doesn’t just increase visitors, it increases inbound links as people post links to that content to their own blog or twitter or wherever they do that sort of thing. Those links translate into higher search rankings, which are layered with the benefits of the search-oriented plugins listed above, and the cycle (hopefully) goes on.

Handling all this with fabulous little pieces of Web application that can be added to WordPress in a snap can be a lot better and easier (not to mention cheaper) than doing so some other way.

3. Customizability

WordPress is a CMS (content management system), not a collection of fixed Web pages. All the content is stored in a database on a Web host. The WordPress software is stored in the normal file structure on the host (much like it would be on one’s own computer). The software allows users to manipulate and add content to the database and also generates the Web pages that visitors see. The pages are generated from the content in the database and the templates stored along with the WordPress software that tell the software how to present that content. These templates and their associated files taken together constitute a theme. Above we mentioned that there are a lot of freely available themes out there but creating a new one is, relatively speaking, a rather manageable amount of HTML and CSS work.

Custom themes can display featured posts on a homepage or show the most recent comments visitors have left or manipulate all the content for that WordPress site in a thousand other ways.

But what really matters is that the theme is independent of the content. The appearance of a site can be lightly tweaked or totally overhauled without disturbing the integrity or continuity of all the accumulated material in that database (especially important for keeping URLs the same to avoid broken links).

All this means that a WordPress site can be made to look how one wants it to quickly and efficiently. If all the text on a site is contained in nested tables deep within different HTML files (as is not infreuently the case) written by a designer who has since found another calling the process of getting what one wants can take much, much longer.

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I could go on, but probably shouldn’t. The benefits of using WordPress are huge but it’s just one example of a larger point about Open source, light-weight solutions: “Free and priceless” isn’t some ridiculous overstatement. It’s true that everything described above costs nothing but can also make the difference between success or failure on the Web. All you need is a little experience with these tools and a sense of where they fit in a larger Web strategy. Maybe one consequence of the current economic troubles will be to force people to reconsider their five-figure super sleek flash-based site and look carefully at the benefits of going with what the crowd built.

When’s the last time you heard of anyone paying for an encyclopedia, anyway?