I design websites using WordPress. I’ve been working exclusively with it now for almost 3 years. To say it’s just a “blogging” platform is doing the entire WordPress community a disservice. Because it’s open source there is a robust community of developers who’ve contributed to the WordPress core, making it the most stable and well-documented content management system used today.
WordPress cannot only handle full scale news sites like Tech Crunch, People Magazine, and Mashable but it also can be extended for: portfolio sites, news aggregators, online stores, and brick and mortar businesses.
Why build a site using WordPress?
Usability. If you’ve had a website designed before you know the pitfalls of relying on a developer every time you need a change, even if it’s just a word, changing your address, or removing a certain page. This is inconvenient and can get expensive. A lot of business owners are hesitant to even start websites because they don’t want to deal with the recurring costs of keeping a web designer around. You don’t need to know HTML, CSS, or any other coding language to edit a site built with WordPress. Editing and adding pages is easy.
I could teach my grandmother how to use WordPress.
The backend is extremely user friendly. You can login and and see all of the site pages and edit them as you would an email. There’s even an option to copy and paste a word document and publish with one click. In the past, a website could only be edited by using an FTP client and adjusting the HTML code. You need the ability to change your website on the fly when something comes up.
Scalability
If you plan to continually add content to your website WordPress is the most reasonable choice. Content can be in the form of new blog posts, pictures, real estate listings, products, videos, and more. WordPress enables you to setup categories for new content so every time you add something it’s organized into neat little folders. It lets the website visitor know that they’re in the right place. It’s also best practice in the eyes of popular search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
SEO-Friendly
Search engines love WordPress because of it’s out-of-the-box readiness to ping and interact with other websites. Every time you publish a page it “pings” other sites to let them know you’ve added something new, also telling Google crawlers to index your site’s new content. Another SEO-friendly principal of WordPress is the ability to rewrite the URL structure of each page, so instead of seeing something like www.yoursite.com/p?=344543t-shirts.html you can instead have a cleaner URL I.E.- www.yoursite.com/products/t-shirts.
Flexibility
WordPress can be bended, stretched, and customized to be anything you want. Because of the unique way in which WP dynamically fetches content you can setup multiple page templates and custom post types to display cool things like calendars, videos, weather stats, an much more. There’s nothing WordPress can’t do at this point. It even has a robust backend that can function as a CRM. With custom post types, you’re also able to setup a WP site to function as a real estate listings directory or web shop complete with payment gateways and credit card processing. This can be especially useful if you ever plan on selling physical products for your website. It’s an easier and more affordable solution than having a full-scale e commerce website built.
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I could go on and on, listing the infinite benefits of having a site built with WordPress. Other things like social media integration, remote publishing (from your iPhone or iPad), and flexible grid layouts are among the other features that make WordPress a gem. Many developers who were once hesitant to build with WordPress are coming onboard. WP has made dramatic strides in the past two years to emerge as the King Kong of CMSs.
