What’s the big deal about WordPress? Why is everyone talking about WordPress like it’s the bee’s knees? Well, to be honest, it kind of is. Sure there are other options out there but when it comes to a user-friendly, highly adaptable/customizable website development option, WordPress is a rock star.
If the time has come for your business to launch a new website or your current site is in need of makeover, WordPress is the best website platform around.
Let’s start with the fact that WordPress is the most popular website platform in the world. While statistics once reflected blogging-only sites, with the advances and options now available on WordPress, these figures speak to the growing number of full websites running on the WordPress platform.
According to w3Techs, WordPress is used by 22.0% of all the websites worldwide, which equals a content management system market share of 60.5% For comparison, the platform in second place, Joomla, is used by just 3.1% of all websites, which represents just 8.5% of content management software (cms) market share.
To put it simply, here are 5 reasons why we build all of our websites in WordPress:
WordPress is easy to use, even easy for the non-technical among us, and you don’t have to know a thing about coding.We believe in empowering our clients to be able to update content on their own websites. You shouldn’t have to call your web developer every time you want to change a product description or add a blog post. If you are comfortable with making edits in Pages or Microsoft Word, you will have no problem using the WordPress web page content editor.
If your target market can’t find your website then no amount of fabulous content or beautiful design elements really matter. The reality is the higher up your site ranks when a potential customer is searching for what you offer, the more likely it is that person will stop, click and read.
Optimizing your website for search engines is critical and technically this means putting code in the right place so search engines, like Google and Bing, know what to look for. The good thing about WordPress is that it does the heavy SEO lifting for you. Simply choose the right plugin (see point 4 below) to assist with your page titles, Meta descriptions, tags and keywords and WordPress will put the right information in the right place so the bots can read it.
The theme you choose provides the overall look (design) of your site including the general layout and placement of the various sections (blog, sidebar, etc.), the colors, navigation and, depending on the theme, special features like built in portfolios and galleries. There are literally thousands of available themes so finding a theme that matches your needs just requires a little time to search through all the options. While there are many free themes, you can now purchase a robust, highly functional premium theme from places like Theme Forest for anywhere from $35 to $75. We really like what Theme Forest has to offer and often use their themes when building out client sites.
The WordPress platform has an extremely high level of functionality built-in. However, sometimes you might need a few special features such as an e-commerce solution, a calendar, scheduling tool or other design features that are not part of the WordPress platform or your chosen theme. That’s where plug-ins come in.
As with the themes, there are both free and for-fee plugins that help you customize your site and upgrade the functionality for your site visitors.
There’s a reason coffee table books are so popular. They are generally filled with pretty pictures. Books without images can be a tad boring. The same applies to your website. Pages and pages of text are likely to lose visitors pretty quickly. It is highly recommended that you utilize images, graphics, podcasts, and videos as they boost conversion rates. WordPress has an extremely robust built-in Media Library so uploading and using various media is a breeze.
You may think we’ve been drinking the WordPress Kool-aid and you’d be partly right. Through years of trial and error we’ve come to believe that WordPress is a powerful yet easy-to-use website platform. If your current website is not generating the traffic you desire, making even small updates requires a call to your web developer or you’re not getting enough engagement or conversion from site visitors, it may be time for a WordPress website makeover.
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