6 reasons why we chose WordPress

6 reasons why we chose WordPress

6 reasons why we chose WordPress

In late March, we’re scheduled to launch our new website. (Can’t wait!) We chose WordPress as the content management system in which to develop the site, and we think our reasons for doing so can be relevant to you, our clients, as well.

1. It’s open-ended.

Note we did not say “open source,” which is what you so often hear first about WordPress. Yes, it is open source, which means that it was not created as a product and sold by a single company but developed through the collaboration of individuals worldwide who offer it free for use and further improvement. But it’s the open-ended aspect of WordPress that we like so much. Because the community of people using it and contributing to the further development and improvement of it is so extensive, it’s getting better all the time and at a very fast pace. And it’s built to accommodate the expansion of capabilities.

One of our biggest challenges developing websites for our clients, as well as ourselves, is anticipating the features a site will require years down the road when the technology might be capable of doing things we haven’t even thought of yet. The average lifespan of a website these days is 2 to 3 years, if that. For branding reasons, we want our site and our clients’ sites to last, and remain relevant and in-vogue much longer than that. With WordPress, the expandability is open-ended.

2. The plug-ins.

There are many advanced and specialized functions available for WordPress as plug-ins, which are small applications you can load with one click into your site. Because they, too, were developed open-source, they are free. Which means we can experiment freely with them until we find just the right one for what we are trying to do. It doesn’t necessarily mean that what we are looking for is always available, but there is nearly always something close that we can alter or customize. And that saves time and money on what we would otherwise have to code or program from scratch.

3. It offers great SEO tools.

The focus on search engine optimization in WordPress is extensive. Even before you do anything like put in keywords and alt tags, WordPress is built with search engines in mind. It’s working structure organizes content into pages, posts and categories, which helps search engines crawl a site and organize its content in a way that will make sense and result in accurate categorizing.

It also provides easy ways to add keywords and alt tags to images so we can inform search engines what our images show or say. When we design sites, we express a lot in our images. They are a very important vehicle for communicating effectively to the customer or site visitor. But search engines don’t “see” a site. They can only “read” a site. WordPress offers a lot of features that make both images and words readable and meaningful for search engine rankings.

4. Easy to use.

WordPress is very easy to use. For client sites, it requires a very small learning curve. Notice, we said small, not none — there are things to learn. But WordPress is good at making them logical and easy to make sense out of. With a little bit of instruction and some practice, our clients master adding and editing content in their sites easily and quickly. And, although, we are always happy to help them, they often are able to do things in their sites on their own — things they would otherwise have to have us do for them. For our own site, this meant that everyone in the firm could contribute, which we think makes for a more well-rounded and robust site overall.

5. It’s versatile.

We know from our work with advisory businesses and nonprofits that businesses change and evolve, and sometimes drastically. And although we’ve been working with advisory businesses and nonprofits since our inception, their needs and the services they require from us have changed, evolved and expanded through the years. And we wanted to be poised for more change in the future. With WordPress we know we can not only edit our content but we can also alter our site’s design more easily to focus our message differently if we need to. With WordPress, our site can evolve and change with us.

6. Blog capabilities and much more.

WordPress was first known as a blogging platform, and while it has moved beyond just being the preferred “blogging” platform, it is because of that fact, that it offers some compelling advantages for business websites like ours.

There is no escaping that producing great content, particularly for those businesses that sell the intangible, is crucial to staying competitive and getting found. WordPress makes it easy for us to not only add, but organize lots of information that is current, unique and useful to our clients and prospects. The process of publishing such content and then promoting it in our emailers to drive traffic back to our site is easy to do.

Does this mean we think WordPress is right for everyone and every site we do? No. Any site that has significantly more than 100 pages is probably a better candidate for Drupal. And a site that requires extensive e-commerce with over 100 products or more is probably a better candidate for an e-commerce platform like Shopify. But that’s a whole other can of worms to reserve for another article.  🙂

~ Chris Quinn, principal and brand strategist

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