We proudly built our website with WordPress. We use WordPress because we believe it is the best platform for small businesses with the most customization and flexibility. Because WordPress is an open source platform, we can fully customize a website to our liking, while using the powerful, self hosted WordPress content management system.
WordPress is the most popular platform right now with over 20 percent of all website on the internet built with WordPress. The WordPress developer community is the largest of its kind. Users are constantly improving the site software as well as constantly creating and revising custom plug-ins for various uses. One of the most amazing things about WordPress, is that anyone can contribute to the source code that makes the platform better.
Although WordPress has a steeper learning curve than most website platforms, with so many people using WordPress constantly, there’s a how-to, tutorial, support forum or guide for almost anything you want to do. Whether it’s a step-by-step guide to adding an image to a blog post, or disabling comments – it’s all there for you to learn and access from the WordPress codex.
When we help our clients give their website a makeover, we recommend using WordPress because of its reliability, customization and integration with so many tools on the web. Because WordPress is such a popular platform to use, there are plugins to integrate almost every other web app. Currently there are more than 37,000 plugins available on WordPress both for free and premium.
The real power of WordPress is in its extensibility. There are thousands of free and paid WordPress plugins which you can use on your site to add new features. Ranging from simple social sharing plugins to robust membership site plugins, you can create almost any kind of website to fit your needs with WordPress.
The WordPress admin dashboard is very simple and takes hardly any time to learn how to use. This makes content updates or additions easy for our clients who publish a blog or a news section. With some simple training, they can update their blog independently.
Although its not optimized for SEO out of the box, with the installation of some SEO plugins, better results can be achieved fairly simply. We use the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin.
WordPress also has great options to create an ecommerce store with trusted plugins that allow for cart processing, ordering, and shipping. In contrast to some other platforms, WordPress allows you to use any payment processor or platform you want such as Paypal, Stripe, etc. Its also possible to create large and complex websites that go well beyond the original purpose of WordPress, which was a blogging platform.
When it comes to mobile friendliness, many of WordPress’ templates are responsive and its easy to search for and find ones that are.
WordPress is free to download and use however you will need to buy both a domain and a hosting plan. The cost of web hosting and domain name vary depending on which hosting provider you go with. You are in charge of how much resources you need for your website, and how much you will pay for it.
Everything that you create on WordPress is yours and you can back up everything on your website and move it elsewhere if you choose. You can backup your content and images, your themes, plugins, and the entire database. This means that your content is safe if you do choose to backup your site and you always own it.