LinkedIn Publishing Platform vs. WordPress

It seems like a great tool to offer valuable content and increase the visibility of my brand. I've learned it's not a good tool to try to sell directly

Incentivized

In my opinion, smaller organizations with simpler layouts would be well suited to use WordPress, however, larger organizations with more advanced website feature needs may need another product. We found the website to be great at first, but as we grew, we needed more options that were not fitting for the product we had with WordPress and had to look at alternatives.

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• It allows a direct line of communication to professionals that follow your business online.
• Gives a company a dedicated space for their company to display whom they are, and what they do.
• Contributes to keeping your company relevant by posting content.

• Easy to use User Interface
• Coding / Plugin Implementation is awesome
• There's always a solution available for the platform
• Security is easy to use and robust
• Implementation with 3rd party platforms, such as Google's variety of tools
• Can download and host on your own server or use their hosted servers

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• As LinkedIn rolls out its new interface, the Publishing Platform is losing some of what made it awesome before. Especially re: images. I've lost the ability to resize my graphic by clicking the resizing arrows that appear on the border of most applications. Now I'm stuck with the default size of the image, and all I can do is select whether it's left-aligned, right-aligned or centered.
• Another thing that seems to be getting worse is my ability to quickly see who's viewed, liked, shared and commented on a blog post. This inhibits my ability to engage with my readers. I had a client express surprise that I hadn't acknowledged her reaction to my article. The weird way it's set up now, I can't even see her comment.
• I used to be able to click "My articles" and see a checkerboard with tiles of a summary of my articles: Images + headlines + # of views/likes/shares. This checkerboard showed 3 - 4 of my article tiles per row. This was something I used regularly before publishing a new blog. It let me scan quickly to make sure I wasn't going to use the same image or headline as in a previous post. Now, when I go to view my articles, I have to slowly scroll though a long list that shows 1 image headline at a time, and doesn't let me see my analytics. It takes a lot longer to scroll through my 90+ articles. #Frustrating
• For some reason, I get a lot fewer views than I used to. On average, I used to get between 50 - 80 views per article. I even have one post that's grand [total is] 140,000+ views. Sadly, my most recent posts have gotten 8 - 20 views. My writing's gotten better over time, and I follow the guidelines LinkedIn offers in its Help section. And last year I aligned some of my content with LinkedIn's editorial calendar. I wish I knew what's driving the reduction in views. Is it me? Is it LinkedIn's new approach to Pulse and the Publishing platform? I'm starting to question whether publishing here is a good use of my time.
• It would be great if LinkedIn could give us a roadmap of what's changing and why - BEFORE & DURING the change. A few years ago, LinkedIn did a lot to encourage people to use the Publishing Platform. So I did what they asked, and got into the habit of publishing an article almost every week. With all its capabilities, I'd think LinkedIn could do an analysis of who's used the Publishing Platform seriously, frequently and ethically -- and communicate directly to us to let us know what's working well (and not-so-well) for them - and ask us what's working well (and not-so-well) for us. That could lead to some mutually-beneficial brainstorming of how to optimize things for everybody.

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• WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money.
• Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder.
• WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure.

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As time goes on, websites will become less focused on paged content and more immersive. At the same time, the need for security will only go up. While WordPress has served the web community well for over 11 years, it's probably time to look for other better platforms.

You can use your own profile and it is intuitive, easy to manage with good headings and tools.

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WordPress has excellent UX/UI, mainly because it's familiar. The platform is still a bit dated on the back end, but it has improved from the past. I wouldn't give it a 10 in this area because it does require some coding and development knowledge. You can't just jump in and create a website with confidence, like you would with Jimdo, Squarespace or similar tools.

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Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.

Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.

WordPress itself only has community service so your experience will depend on where you turn. Online, through forums and community boards, support is rudimentary but effective. You can easily turn to your local community and find exceptional individuals who know and use WordPress regularly for more advanced, inexpensive, support. I'm rating this less than 10 because of the lack of any formal support provided by a company.

Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.

It is very easy to find online resources to learn how to do just about anything with WordPress.

WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution

The problem with Facebook for Business is that it is on Facebook. Facebook is a great way for a company to brand themselves. However a companies content is surround by other content that is often not professional. For example, if someone follows my company on Facebook and scrolls down their timeline and sees my post, it is intertwined in their feed with their Facebook friends. This could lead to your content being mixed in with others. With Linkedin, it is solely supposed to be used for professionals. People are not supposed to (even though some do) post things that may be deemed offensive. That is not the case with Facebook.

There are no other site builders/platforms that stand up to the ease and versatility (heavy custom coding and customizations included) as Wordpress. Drupal is clunky and outdated, as is Joomla, and while Wix or Squarespace may be sufficient for someone with very low web needs, much like Shopify, it's incredibly limiting and either requires hitting it with a hammer and hacking code together to do what you want, or relying on often shoddily-built third party themes and liquid scripts.

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WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.

• Positive: top choice for extending reach for awareness campaigns and delivery of time sensitive information
• Positive: a must have tool to follow other competitors and influencers in a sector

Incentivized

• Allowed us to being all websites under a single umbrella, saving costs on similar products.
• It's increased our website turn time and made us faster and more efficient at launching websites.
• Edits and tweaks happen much faster as we have a customized environment.

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