10 Reasons Your Site should be on WordPress
Posted on 17. Feb, 2010 in CMS
Building websites has become significantly easier in the last few years, but it doesn’t seem that way looking at the vast majority of websites of small and medium sized businesses. Stuck in the days of FrontPage and Expression Web, many of these sites have stayed static since they were created, and offer little value to visitors either through content or design.
The good news is that today’s web design tools are leagues ahead, easier to use, and often don’t require any programming whatsoever, though all sites benefit from the occasional code tweaking if you have the resources.
Today’s web site platform of choice is the Content Management System – or CMS – and the most popular ones are open source and therefore free. The choice between Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress is complicated, but in almost every case, WordPress is the platform you should use. Here’s why:
1. It’s not just a blogging platform.
Although WordPress.com gained fame for blogging, the WordPress platform as a whole manages content – some of which may be a blog. You can manage any type of data in WordPress, which means you can set up everything from product catalogs to social networks all within one space. Having a blog on your site is a great idea, but it’s not even required to use standalone WordPress.
2. All the complicated stuff is already done.
You know when you were planning to hire somebody through your creative agency to write the user login system? Or the voting section? Or user polls? Or image handling? Or the Facebook integration in a shopping cart? Or the thing that talk to the search engines when your site changes? Almost anything you can imagine has already been written in the form of plugins, most of which are free, open-source, and install in two clicks.
3. It has better support than most paid software.
Many IT departments drcry open source as having no corporate ‘paid’ support – but I’d take the 100,000-strong community of pro WordPress developers anyday over calling Microsoft’s tech support line. Outside of Linux and Mozilla, WordPress arguably has the best support and development community of any active software project on the planet. If you have a problem, it’s very easy to get high quality responsive help.
4. It’s easy to completely change the look of your site.
If you’ve been through site refreshes that seem more like intricate software upgrades, you won’t believe the simplicity of WordPress, where the appearance is all packaged up into ‘themes’.
You can have multiple themes – regular corporate, holiday season, Patrick’s Day – and switch them at will with two clicks without bringing the site down or needing an army of support staff. There are also thousands of free templates on the web, and many good designers.
If you want to design templates yourself, take a look at the award-winning Artisteer product, which is used by many WordPress designers. Artisteer builds templates with no knowledge of code needed.
5. It’s scalable.
You probably have ambitions of your site one day being mentioned by Oprah, or showing on the first page of Digg, but are wondering if your web server can handle the traffic. WordPress is one of the few CMS platforms that serves trillions of pages daily, and if sites such as CNN, Wall Street Journal and ZDNet are surviving perfectly well with their WordPress engines humming, your site will be fine too. Admittedly, they will be some tweaking, but the core platform is built for your first viral posting.
6. It’s SEO friendly.
Aside from the truly excellent All-in-One SEO pack, WordPress sites are well understand by Googlebot and are one of the easiest types of site to optimize. One of the most arduous parts of SEO is the mechanical, step-by-step routine of getting pages ready, and almost all of this is handled automatically. If every site was built on WordPress, the missing Title and Description attributes that I find on 50% of the sites I analyze would actually be there.
7. You and your team can edit content.
Web designers and home builders have one thing in common: they make more money out of changes you make than the original design. I recently heard from a colleague who paid $1200 to have Twitter and Facebook icons added to their site footer, which is quite frankly just shameful (it’s two lines of code). With WordPress, you can hire a designer and SEO firm, set up the platform, and then make changes to pages, posts and layouts without having to cut checks. Editing WordPress pages is just like editing a Word document.
8. WordPress takes less than a minute to setup.
While this may seem hard to believe, it’s true. The one-click install package, available as a zipped installation for techies or Fantastico script for the rest, sets up the database and program files in seconds. Upgrades are also one-click.
9. You can leave anytime you want.
While it’s unlikely you ever will, I always find it comforting to find that my data is not tied into any one particular piece of software. WordPress offers a simple XML export function, so that you can move to another platform anytime you wish.
10. WordPress makes you focus on content.
The part of my job I most enjoy is providing content. While it’s great to talk to companies about the look and feel of their sites, I consider this more of the ‘setup’ phase, and ultimately successful SEO is always about content. Because WordPress handles so much of the technical side for you, it frees up resources to create news, articles and pages that will keep visitors coming back for more.
Does your company need a website facelift? Are you on the fence about which platform you need? No problem – we can provide a WordPress consulting session! Please contact us at wordpress@oneuproar.com.