How is wordpress?
WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS, powering over 60 million websites and 22% of the top 10 million websites. There’s an amazingly-huge community, over 30,000 free plugins in the WP directory, thousands of premium themes, SEO advantages, eCommerce abilities, and it’s plenty easy to use for those technologically challenged. Not to mention a number of brands whose businesses are built around WordPress.Many large (and small) companies trust WordPress to power their websites including, The New Yorker, Quartz, TechCrunch, Time, Fortune, NASA, IFC, and even Beyoncé. If you want to hear more opinions about WordPress from Internet marketers and web developers, then you should check why choose WordPress?
Are there any .gov American websites built with WordPress?
Yes.The U.S. government uses a variety of content management systems (you can see a list of several at Content Management Systems Used by Government Agencies | DigitalGov).Here are a few of those built in WordPress.U.S. Embassy & Consulates in the United KingdomCIO Council - Chief Information Officers CouncilShareAmerica | Connect with AmericaLibrary of Congress BlogSites - this seems to be a site to allow U.S. govt. agencies to build WordPress sites on a shared platformDigitalGov - Building the 21st Century Digital GovernmentNASA GRC WordPress | Glenn Research Center - page with guides for using WordPress on NASA Glenn Research Center sites. (The main NASA site is built in Drupal, but some of the secondary sites are WordPress.)US Mission GenevaArmy Live (this is .mil rather than .gov)
What are some high-traffic websites built with Drupal?
There are many popular websites built with Drupal, I would only state a few here.NVIDIA GeForceThe White HouseCERN | Accelerating scienceNational Aeronautics and Space Administration - NASASecure Content & Online File Sharing for Businesses - BOXHarvard UniversityAlso , have a look at this - Top Drupal Websites
As someone who wants to be a freelance web developer, how can I determine whether to use a CMS (Wordpress, for instance) or to program a website?
A website is much more than just the content and graphic design. Meta tags, SEO, and loading scripts at the right time are imperative to the success of a website.Programming a successful website from scratch, requires the knowledge of each one of these components. WordPress handles most of this for you without limiting capability. Even some of NASA's websites are built on the WordPress platform.Keep in mind, as a freelance developer, your time and resources are limited. Don't spend all of this time working on a product of lesser value, that will be difficult for your clients to manage.Go with Worpress org, hosted by with BlueHost or HostGator.Just start building and get as much practice in as possible. If you get stuck, contact me through my website and I'll help out however possible. Goodluck!HOME | ChrisKitchens