WordPress: Web Design’s Weapon of Choice

When it comes to web design and Content Management Systems (CMS), The Friday Agency has the expertise to work with everything from Drupal, to Joomla and the daddy of them all  – WordPress. One in every six websites uses WordPress – it is the CMS of choice for the majority of our client websites. It’s used by some of the biggest websites in the world including Sony Music, BBC and The Wall Street Journal. But what makes WordPress so popular?

Powerful for developers, intuitive for the client.

The obvious advantage of creating a website with a CMS is the ease with which users can create and edit content. WordPress’s core functionality allows users to add new pages, make blog posts and upload images without any knowledge of coding. On top of that, WordPress is flexible enough that any bespoke features requested by the client can be developed to be used within it.

The support within the WordPress community means that the CMS is constantly updated and worked on by the developers allowing for more features with each release. There is a large Plugin Directory which hosts thousands of ‘plug-in’ tools that can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine on your site.

Want specific functionality? There’s a plugin for that!

Every website we create has different criteria and requirements which are expected by our client. This can vary from an event calendar to a live weather widget, a donation form or even to something as simple as a photo gallery. Plugins are what make that functionality come to life and thanks to the great developer community behind WordPress, there is a plethora of plugins available that aid in the development of your website and the realisation of the final user experience and vision. If you can think of it, there is probably a plugin for that.

SEO

Another of the benefits of using WordPress is that Google finds it easy to crawl and index. This is because it has the ability to generate search-friendly URLs and Google XML Site Maps. With good SEO plugins such as Yoast at the backend, great content can get to the top of Google search rankings more easily.

Scalability with WordPress

With WordPress as the foundation, it is easy to scale your website as your business grows. The addition of plugins for new features or the development of a new web design theme can all be made while keeping your content intact.

Powerful features

With WordPress CMS you have a blogging and news system straight out of the box so, without any extra features being requested for the website, you already have the ability to create Pages and Posts for a news section.

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

A point of confusion arises when people mix up wordpress.com (the hosted blogging platform) vs wordpress.org (the CMS software). With wordpress.com, one can create a blog with some control over functionality. But there are key disadvantages, the main one being that your website will have the domain extension of wordpress.com (www.mywebsite.wordpress.com).

At Friday, every website we create is custom designed and tailored specifically to meet client requirements. With this in mind, we recommend the most suitable weapon for the job. Much of the time, that weapon of choice will be WordPress.

To find out if it is right for your web project, drops us a line, we’ll help advise you.