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What’s so good about WordPress?

  • September 27, 2012

If you’ve been having a look around my website, particularly on the Clients page, you will have noticed multiple references to something called WordPress. In case you’ve never heard of it or want to know more, here is a brief explanation and some reasons for why I like it so much.

WordPress is a Content Management System, or CMS. This is a fancy way of saying that it lets you have a website where non-technical people can update content themselves, without having to pay your website company each time you change phone numbers or opening hours or want to add/change/remove some information. It’s also an excellent blog management tool, and allows you to very easily include a blog within your business website, or have a website that is a well-managed blog in itself.

Here are my top 10 reasons for using and loving WordPress:

  1. It’s free!
  2. It’s so easy for business owners and non-technical people to administer their own website and make changes themselves. This helps to ensure that the information on your website is accurate and up to date, which is vital if you want people to rely on it and clients to do business with you.
  3. It is simple and quick (and therefore much cheaper!) to create a new website and get it to a useful and functional stage for publishing. Additional features can also be easily added in later.
  4. There are loads of excellent plugins available to give your website all sorts of extra functionality super quickly, from image galleries to ecommerce to SEO to social media integration and much much more.
  5. There are great quality existing themes available, both free and premium, to instantly give your website a professional look. I often take an existing theme which has the basic structure and features that a client is after, and then tweak it to ensure that the website conveys the individual branding and look required.
  6. It’s easy to customise to give your website a completely unique look. Custom menus, widgets, plugins and theme modifications done in PHP make it fairly simple to make your WordPress website look different to any other.
  7. Excellent blog support is and always has been an integral feature of WordPress. Writing blog posts and publishing them, then allowing users to find them via archives, categories, tags, search and RSS feeds is done intuitively and seamlessly, but not at the expense of page-based business websites or even those that don’t use a blog at all.
  8. It has great out of the box support for SEO through easily customisable permalinks and headings, and of course through allowing content to be easily modified. Additional plugins increase this support even further.
  9. Since so many other people love and use it, if you have an issue it’s almost certain that someone has already figured out how to solve it and has tested and documented it to save you the time.
  10. As an Open Source project, it’s constantly being worked on and improved by hundreds of people all over the world, and is super easy to upgrade.

Take a look at WordPress.org to find out more, or check out examples of WordPress sites that JebWeb Solutions has implemented to see how it can work in action.