Why we moved our company's blog to WordPress

We needed a new blogging platform to replace the rudimentary in-house system we've used to publish the Making Wave blog for the last few years.  ImportGenius.com's team of rockstar programmers needs to be 100% focused on building world-class web applications for the import-export industry. We simply don't have time to create all the cool features we'd like in our blog. And besides, plenty of others have gone before, so why re-invent the wheel?  We only really looked at Tumblr and WordPress, both of which offer very refined, elegant platforms to publish the kind of awesome blog we want to engage with our industry.  What really put us over the edge and onto the WordPress platform was the "Canvas" theme from Woothemes.  Unlike most wordpress themes, Canvas isn't really about the look of the site, but rather, about giving you the tools to totally customize that look while also providing access to Woothemes' awesome array of widgets, formatting tools, contact forms, and other custom add-ons they created on top of the WordPress platform.  Nothing against Tumblr, we're sure it's great, but here's what we love about WordPress:  Plugins - There's a huge ecosystem of free plugins that improve the wordpress experience. Whether you want to upgrade the platform's tools for SEO, Analytics, Social Media Sharing, Contact Forms, or almost anything else, you're sure to find an existing plugin that does just what you want.  Widgets - We love the way widgets give you the flexibility to change your blog's look by adding new content sections in various parts of the layout.  For example, we're using a twitter widget from Woothemes that let's us display the ImportGenius.com twitter feed throughout the blog.  Rich Media - It was insane using a blog platform that required us to use raw HTML to insert images and embed videos.  WordPress supports that natively, as well as with plugins for slideshows, embedded documents, gallery lightboxes and more. Expect to see a lot more infographics, videos, slideshows and other rich media now that we've migrated.  Categories - Finally we can organize our content into useful categories. This will let us produce lots more content without worry about whether its really worthy of hitting the homepage of the blog, much less the homepage of ImportGenius.com. That doesn't mean we'll be running a content farm or even that the content will be lower quality. Rather, it will let us create more niche content about the import-export business, the economics of international trade, b2b marketplaces, customs brokerages and adjacent markets that may appeal to some of our visitors, but not all. Creating categories on the blog will let people interested in those areas access them, without forcing that niche content on all our visitors.  Tags - Like categories, tags will provide a new way to navigate our blog's content. Tags let you cross-post an article across several categories, however, so visitors can find relevant content wherever it may live on the blog.  Customization - Because WordPress is open source and written in PHP, the same language we use for our own web site and applications, our team of designers was able to customize the look and feel to exactly match our old blog. You might not even notice the difference.  Part of the reason that was so easy is that we have guys who live and breath CSS, the web's formatting language.  Commenting - We're going to open our blog to comments for the first time, although we'll be moderating them carefully to make sure the discourse remains professional and useful for our visitors.  So, with that, welcome to the new ImportGenius.com Blog. We can't wait to hear from you!