WordPress: More than Just a Blogging Platform

Adam Robertson - 8.6.2012 12:45 PM

You decided to start a website and asked your tech savvy friend to help, or you scheduled a consultation with Webolutions and someone mentioned something about using WordPress. As far as you knew, WordPress was merely a blogging platform; a kickstart for any and everyone wanting to create their own little piece of the web. You're right--at least up until around 2008. WordPress was originally designed as a platform for blogging, but with the release of version 2.6 in July of 2008, WordPress became a respectable CMS (content management system). Since then, WordPress has taken the web by storm, powering over 60 million websites including everything from small personal blogs to AMC TV's main website. CNN, LIFE by Time Magazine,  and Spotify are a few other major companies using WordPress to power their websites. Furthermore, WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1 million" websites. While not much has been written on our blog about WordPress, 90% of our projects are built on the platform. Here's why:

Ease of Use
Whether you're adding content, uploading videos, or managing navigation, CMS's can be a nightmare. With just a short tutorial, nearly anyone can update and manage their business website in minutes. With the massive amount of documentation and tutorials on the web, you're only a Google search away from finding an easy answer to nearly any question.

SEO
WordPress provides good SEO (search engine optimization) right out of the box. With the addition of several plugins, it provides great SEO. For instance, WordPress forces you to choose a focus keyword when you're writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere. But it also goes beyond that, by automatically optimizing and inserting the meta tags and link elements that Google and other search engines like so much. 

It's Open Source
Open what? WordPress is an Open Source framework, so the core software is built and maintained by hundreds of community volunteers. It is built on PHP / MySQL (which is also Open Source) and licensed under GPL. What does that mean for you? WordPress is free to use for any kind of personal or commercial website and more importantly, updated regularly by a massive community of devoted developers.

Standards Compliant
The developers of WordPress have gone to great lengths to ensure that WordPress generated code is fully compliant with the standards of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). This is especially important for the diversity of modern web browsers. If a website works on Firefox, it should equally work in IE. Also, standards compliant code ensures forward compatibility with the tools and browsers of the next generation.

Themes & Plugins
From a front-end development perspective, WordPress is insanely easy to design for, or theme. A theme is the skin that's applied to WordPress to give a site it's own unique look. It's what separates your site from the rest of the web. With the advanced theming engine included in WordPress, it's easy to achieve almost any style of website. If you need special functionality, it's likely there's a plugin for that too. And if not, it’s easy to build one.

These are the top 5 reasons we use WordPress for business website design. If you are interested in getting a new website for your business, or updating your current website contact Webolutions at 303-300-2640.

0 Responses to "WordPress: More than Just a Blogging Platform"