Most people i have a professional relationship with know that i nurture an almost passionate hate for Wordpress. Sometimes even other people ask me for my opinion, hence this blog post.

So, the answer to "Can I use wordpress?", seems to be other questions:

You run your won company, wanna create a quick site yourself, and don't wanna pay a consultant/agency?

YESSS!!! Actually you SHOULD use wordpress. And you should use a *.wordpress.com-hosted blog, and have a friend setting up a custom domain name for you. It will be limited, but it will always be better and more hassle-free than any self-hosted wordpress installation with all the fancy functionality you can dream of. In fact, wordpress.com is the ONLY "create-your-own-website"-service i can recommend.

You want to accept payments on your site?

NO. To accept payments from a wordpress site, it will need to be self-hosted. Getting the security right on a self-hosted Wordpress blog is very hard. Get help. From someone else. I'm not an expert on internet payment systems, unfortunately.

You're looking for an extendable, lightweight, CMS?

NO. Wordpress is very extendable, but the problem is that the plugins are often very low quality, and when you need to upgrade a system, you're likely to end up having a broken website with 15/20 plugins broken because of Wordpress changes, or because they were badly written from the beginning. 

You're looking to have more than 1000 visits/day?

NO. Well i know there's a plugin called WP-Super Cache. Still, every day i see wordpress blogs crumbles under the load of 5-10 000 Hacker News visitors. It's just not easy to get it right. And if you do, you're very likely to break your site's security. The problem, must be admitted though, is also often in Apache settings rather than Wordpress. Did you have better load tolerance with other servers? Please comment!

You already know Wordpress, and want to get started now?

YES. See first question. Use a wordpress.com site and buy a custom domain. When it's time to add payments, bookings and other things, Wordpress has excellent export tools for getting your content out and move it to another system. 

Your question not here? Ask it in the comments! If i have a good answer, i'll add it!

Options to check out:

• Jekyll: Generating static pages from Markdown. For extremely lightweight, fast blogging that can take a hit from reddit, digg or whatever. For self-hosted sites.
• MojoMotor: Small, extendable, lightweight CMS based on the CodeIgniter PHP framework, for self-hosted sites.
• ExpressionEngine: Also based on CodeIgniter. Full blown stuff, extendable for e-commerce, booking, applications etc. Self-hosted.
• BigCartel: E-Commerce as a service. Good templates, they host it = take care of the hassle :)
• Shopify: Same as above. Note that i haven't tried any of these two myself, but that'd be the first place i'd look if i needed to