Unless you have been living under a rock, you would have heard of the most popular and widely used CMS on the planet – WordPress. According to Opensource CMS, over 34% of all live websites in the world, are built on WordPress.
Now, let’s get down to business and discuss why you should be using WordPress for your website.
What is CMS you say? CMS is a Content Management System, which is basically a way to manage your content on your website. It allows you to take the hard coding work out of running a website and let you get back to what you know best which is running your business. It becomes a place not for the code but for ideas to form and information to be easily shared within a few clicks.
1. Easy to Use
WordPress is designed with the end-user in mind. With features such as the dashboard to helps you see an overview of your site in one nice and convenient place.
The media library lets you store all your images, documents and other uploads for quick access.
The side panel gives you quick access to everything on your website.
For example pages and posts allow you to see what you have published and provide an overview of everything on your site. It even allows you to schedule posts to be published at a later stage and will show you all your revisions since the page was created.
The main goal of WordPress is to be something that is familiar, is not complicated for you to publish on your site and, is an easy and fast program that you can deploy to get content up quickly.
2. Themes
Themes are what make WordPress really come to life. They are the styles that determine what the front end (customer-facing) side of your website will look like and how it will function. The WordPress theme library is an expansive ever-growing place that has thousands, if not millions of different looks that you can use on your website! I would definitely recommend a check out of that.
Paid vs Free
With a very large theme library, you would expect that not all themes are created equally. You have to be careful about what were you are planning to take your website when you make your choice of theme.
Paid Themes
Paid themes are usually the better option of the two as you have support from the developer if an issue was to occur. Be warned, do your research before you buy your theme. One thing to look out for is, what does the theme actually do and what is its main features. A really good place to go looking for themes is ThemeForest. It has hundreds of verified developers that have great themes for you to choose from.
Free Themes
On the other hand, there are a number of free themes. However, they are very limited to what you get in them. They usually offer little to no support. And, some of the time you might get a theme that is not optimised for web standards of today. This means that your website could potentially lose its Google ranking due to poorly written code.
3. Plugins
WordPress plugins are a very handy feature. With a library of both paid and free plugins that just keep expanding their value is priceless when you’re building your website. They allow you to add additional functionally to your website in ways that a theme simply can’t do. The plugin could range from a variety of types and uses. Some of the common ones are:
- Data collection types
- Members plugins
- E-commerce
- Forms
- Adding social media
- Page builders
- Sliders
- Image galleries
- Security
- SEO optimisation
There are so many it is can be hard sometimes to know where to start and what plugin is going to be right for you and your website.
4. Customisation
As you can see from the above information there is an abundance of features, themes and plugins that you can use with your WordPress site. WordPress is so easy to tailor to the needs of your business. WordPress’s platform is the structure that allows developers to add or change anything they like to enhance the user experience for your customers. It is a custom solution, for a fraction of the cost.
5. Support
Being that WordPress is an open-source platform means that there are hundreds of thousands of users out there. With the largest community of users, there is always someone who is not too far away that has experienced the same problem that you have and will have a solution ready to go.
Support is not only for the WordPress platform its self, but the plugins and themes that are used within it. My advice would be to stick to the paid plugins and themes because of the level of support in which you will get and the speed in which you will get it.
All in all, WordPress is a great flexible platform that allows you to do any number of things. Patorama Studios are your local WordPress experts that can sit down, have a chat and really work out all your website needs. We focused on ticking your website goals and bring customers to your site rather than just another website company/developer.
Contact us today to have a chat about how we can help you.