Working with Wordpress | 0 comments
Everybody who’s anybody has a website these days. If you’re running any kind of a business from a one-man show to a multi-level corporation, if you don’t have a website that helps draw potential customers and clients in, it’s hurting you.
So, you need to get started and you need a great website tool to help you get there. But there are so many options out there for building beautiful websites – Weebly, Squarespace, Wix, WordPress and more. With all of these options, why should you choose WordPress as the platform for your website? Here are 7 pretty fantastic reasons that should win you over.
You’ve got too much going on in your life to have to worry about crazy amounts of formatting, updating the same information across multiple locations on your site and so much more. WordPress makes your life easier in so many ways.
Install WordPress with One Click. Long gone are the days of downloading the WordPress .zip file to your computer, uploading it to your server, extracting the contents, blah blah blah. One-click installs of the WordPress platform through domain/hosting providers such as 1and1, BlueHost, DreamHost, HostGator, GoDaddy and many others turn a process that used to take hours of your time into minutes of computer processing with just a few clicks.
Update your entire website like posting to a blog. You don’t have to double-click this text field, move that one, adjust your font coloring and format all the images to be just right. WordPress takes care of your overall design for you so you can update your website easier and faster than ever before. Can you type a document in Microsoft Word? Awesome! You can update your website beautifully. Take a look at how easy it is for us to update our About page – and look at how pretty it is when you see it. Piece of cake.
Technology isn’t everyone’s strong-suit, and web design and terminology shouldn’t be a requirement to run your own business. With certain website builders, you feel like if you click the wrong place or delete the wrong thing that you’re going to screw up the entire website and nothing will work (and with most website builders, this is highly possible). With WordPress, it’s pretty hard to mess things up and take your whole site down in flames just by trying to update information on one of your pages or blog posts. The user interface that WordPress offers allows you to feel comfortable and confident with updating your own website knowing that it will take care of the hard work for you.
Do you have multiple people who need to update the website? Good for you! You can create different users and grant different rights to each of them – this way, you can retain full control and insight over what’s being done, who does what, and you can even set things up to where your approval is needed before anything is posted live.
A lot of site builders out there have a pretty strict framework. WordPress is one of the largest, most flexible web design platform available. With thousands of plugins, widgets and Themes to choose from, chances are if there’s something you’re trying to do on your website, “there’s an app for that” – well, a plugin, widget or Theme for that. Want to sell merchandise on your website? There’s an eCommerce plugin or Theme for that. Want to have clients schedule appointments on your website? There’s a plugin for that. Want to make your website more social? There’s a plugin or widget for that. Want to accept donations or take payments online? Oh, there is so a plugin for that. If you want to have it done on your website, there will most likely be a way to do that on WordPress.
You can use WordPress for Photography portfolios, News sites, Political campaigns, Non-profit organizations, Clothing stores, Musician/Artist galleries, School scheduling, and so much more. Sometimes it’s hard to believe or fathom the amount of things that are possible with WordPress, but the best way to put it is if you can dream it, we’re pretty sure WordPress can do it.
Everyone and their cousin has a smartphone or tablet these days, and most of them are searching for businesses just like yours straight from their mobile device. It can be a bit frustrating and discouraging to be looking for a local salon in a new town, click on a website that looks appealing and then not have it load because you are on a mobile device. More often than not, anyone who tries to view a website for the first time on a mobile device only to find that the site won’t load properly will move on to another business and forget all about that first one. You don’t want to be left behind in this mobile age, and WordPress won’t leave you hanging there! WordPress websites are viewable on any device, and to make the deal sweeter, there are thousands of Responsive WordPress Themes that change their formatting for an even more beautiful experience on each type of device, such as the example below.
How could we not talk about the benefits of WordPress without mentioning that it is a 100% free platform?! Sure, you are responsible for purchasing a domain name and hosting service, but WordPress is free to download, free to use and there are no fees that pop up around any corners. Ever. Even WordPress Themes (the design-styles that you can choose to put on your website like different outfits of clothing) are available for free, though there are paid Premium Themes which allow for more design flexibility and pre-made bits of awesome. You don’t have to purchase paid Premium Themes – you can still have a beautiful site on a free Theme. As a matter of fact, our website was actually based off of a free Theme that we customized.
You want to make sure your website is searchable, right? You need to make sure that when folks go to their search engine of choice and type in “old fashioned store in New Hampshire” that your store shows up in the search results if in fact you are an old fashioned store in New Hampshire. This is what is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). WordPress is SEO-friendly by nature, and there are even some additional plugins to help increase your SEO even further.
WordPress isn’t just a design platform – it’s a community. As open-source software, users and developers from all different backgrounds are continually working together to improve the WordPress platform, share their knowledge, fix bugs and provide solutions for and problems that arise. Trying to figure out why you can’t do something in WordPress? Google it! Chances are there are other folks just like you trying to do the same thing, and you can find your answer through one of the various WordPress support forums.
Since the WordPress community is so active, there are regular improvements and updates made to the software to fix bugs, allow new content and more flexibility. And the best part? Updating to the latest version of WordPress is so simple! When you are logged into your WordPress administrative dashboard, there is a section right at the top for Updates. When there is a new update for WordPress, you can click right underneath it to update to the latest version. Badabing, badaboom.
There are plenty more reasons to choose and love WordPress for your website and there’s so much more we could say, but these 7 reasons are what we feel are the most important and highlight the best features WordPress has to offer. WordPress allows you to create beautiful, powerful and yet simple websites that will be easier to update than anything you’ve ever encountered.
Easy and simple without sacrificing beauty or power? Sold.
