Why WordPress is Good For Business
WordPress is universally seen as one of the most powerful blogging cms’ available today. As a blogging cms WordPress really has no equal but what most don’t realize is that WordPress is a powerful site framework as well. We can take WordPress beyond its abilities as a blogging cms and use it to power much larger and more dynamic sites. The best part about it is that it’ll save us money, time and brain cells.
WordPress, Save Me Money!
WordPress has huge money saving potential, whether you’re looking for a blog to be built, a small business website or a large dynamic website with a boat load of features. WordPress will eliminate a lot of the cost heavy pieces of the project.
Five Things WordPress Has Already Done So You Don’t Have Too
- Content Management System so you don’t have to pay someone to update or create content
- SEO, WordPress was built with SEO in mind so your sites start off more likely to rank better
- Media gallery so you can manage all your images in one place and when you upload new ones you don’t have to pay someone to resize it, it’s done automatically
- Social Media integration, there are countless easy to install plugins that will integrate your site or blog with twitter, Facebook and other accounts
- Themes are often free but even the premium themes are relatively inexpensive. You can upload a theme and have a finished site in no time (if you aren’t looking for a custom solution
WordPress, Save Me Time!
Today there really isn’t much of a reason to build a website without a cms. Whether you’re using joomla, drupal or WordPress the money and time saving opportunity is too great to go without a prebuilt cms. However, WordPress really shines because of its 10′s of thousands of free themes, plugins and support docs. It also makes sense for the web firm or agency to use a cms because when they do it right, it saves them time and money too.
Since time = money we can refer to the above list for more time saving features of WordPress. However you should note that the resources available to WordPress really put it over the top. The themes are great if you aren’t in need of custom design. The support is amazing, this is important because if you’re requesting something unusual your developer may need help and in that case there is a huge community of active developers eager to answer WordPress related questions. The biggest selling point is WordPress plugins. The same developers above often create awesome plugins to do everything from adding a twitter stream to your homepage, to allowing rating of posts, to comment systems for better community driven talk to search engine optimization tools. This is a huge time saver because without WordPress these plugins would be useless and in fact would require custom development and many more hours.
WordPress, Save Me Brain Cells
WordPress is so easy to use it almost causes confusion (haha I know what I said). When I’m training clients on how to add, remove or edit content on their site we start in the WordPress dashboard. This is the hub of your WordPress site. It shows numbers on posts, pages, comments and more. It also updates you on news and answers simple questions like “What Theme Am I Using?”.
The funny thing is that training is so fast and so simple that clients often say “That’s it? Wait, there must have been something I’ve missed, this is too easy”. At this point we often run through the creation of a new post or the editing of an old one again just to be sure. It’s common for my clients to be surprised at how easy it is to work with.
Aside from that if you are a developer or designer you will have an easy time with development as well. The crew at Automattic did a spectacular job creating WordPress but more importantly creating it in a way that will make development a breeze. Whether you’re in need of support or just want to use the codex for a quick function look up, endless programming info is at your fingertips. There is also a huge community available to help you.