There are so many solutions to membership software out there that it’s just plain confusing. But personally, I prefer to use WordPress to hold my membership site for a variety of reasons. WordPress has many excellent, free themes or designs and almost endless directory of plugins or add-ons to extend the functionality of the blogging software and it is search engine friendly.
A theme is a design for your blog. The great thing about WordPress is there are literally thousands and thousands of themes that are just sitting there waiting for you to plug in to your blog for free. Because WordPress separates out things like the users, the content and the design, you could pile up your blog with hundreds of articles worth of content and change the entire design of the whole blog with just a few clicks and keep all of your content, all of your comments, all of your users completely untouched.
Many of these themes look fantastic. Many of these themes look better than professional looking websites that cost thousands of dollars and they’re all for free.
WordPress also has many, many, many plugins to make writing your post easier, to make your visitors’ commenting easier, to integrate with social networks and more. No other blogging software on the planet has as many plugins as WordPress.
That is just a simple fact. That alone should get you to convert to WordPress because there is a plugin for everything a plugin for a calendar, a plugin to charge access to your blog and make it a membership site, a plugin to add your Flickr photos, a plugin to show your Twitter updates, a plugin to even take your new blog post and update on your Twitter account for you. It solves everything.
The final reason you should use WordPress to run your membership site is that Google loves blogs. With most membership site software, it is possible to show part of a blog post and protect the rest for paying members. This way, you can get hundreds and hundreds of pages listed in Google and ranked highly because Google ranks blogs more higher than regular webpages and because it’s a blog, you spent less time and effort getting the content on your site than the average person.
Plus, there are lots of hidden goodies within WordPress such as the blog and ping concept which means that in the past, people had to wait for their pages to be spidered. But when they post to a blog, it’s listed on google in a matter of minutes.
Those are the reasons why you should use WordPress to run your very own membership site the themes, the plugins and the search engine advantages.