WordPress websites
What is WordPress?
WordPress is an open source (free) website and blog creation platform. It’s known as a CMS or Content Management System. Essentially, WordPress allows you to create a website or blog without really knowing the standard coding languages of the internet. Namely HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Who uses WordPress?
WordPress supports building the simplest of websites with only one or two pages. It just as easily allows the biggest multinational companies to create world class mega-sites built and maintained by scores of administrators and designers. So WordPress is a universal web solution.
Today, Word Press is by far the most popular CMS in the world. At the time of writing this, WordPress drives over 60 million websites worldwide with hundreds to thousands of new websites appearing daily.
If it's free and easy to use, surely I can build my own website?
Absolutely! WordPress provides all the tools required to do this. The need for a web designer or developer is not essential.
Here’s the ‘but’
Although WordPress doesn’t require any coding knowledge, it does have a relatively steep learning curve for someone who has had no experience with using a CMS. Working with databases and editing and optimising media files are skilled actions. There are some other considerations when developing with Word Press too.
As mentioned above, Word Press is incredibly popular for websites and blogs and with over 60 million users out there. Because of this, it’s no wonder that WordPress website have become the most hacked, spammed and abused. It’s important that your WordPress website is secure and invulnerable to monthly, daily and even hourly attacks by spambots or worse.
You can do it yourself
Building your own website requires an element of planning. The framework of the website needs to be imagined. How many pages do I need, what I want to say, what do I need to say and what content is required? How do I choose the best way to write the content and what do I need? Should my logo be this or that? … and so on.
If you feel you are able to deal with even half of the questions listed above then your are more than capable of building your own website using WordPress. You will need to learn a little about installing a CMS on your hosts server and a little about the MySQL database WordPress uses. However, it’s all within your reach.
That said, many small businesses simply don’t have the time to dedicate to this task. Or they don’t have the confidence in their abilities to construct a website that will produce the results they need. This is where a web development company who has years of experience constructing good looking, feature rich and secure WordPress websites can be useful.
Are WordPress websites cheaper for you to build?
In theory, yes… But it’s a little more complex in reality. Actually, build time for a WordPress Website can take the same time or longer than an ‘old fashioned’ hand coded website. This is due to a number of factors. The WordPress administration runs at the speed of the hosting server.This can make relatively simple changes incur a waiting time whilst the system catches up with itself.
A hand coded website can be updated instantly, usually allowing for a developer to make 3-5 changes in the same time it takes to make one change on a remotely hosted WordPress website.
WordPress is feature rich
Generally WordPress websites offer a wealth of rich, dynamic and interactive technologies via the huge library of add ons. these are known as plug-ins. Also, graphical looks and styles, known as themes. Naturally one should exploit these feature benefits offered up by the WordPress platform.However, this all adds extra development time to the WordPress build.
Such features may be difficult or impossible to implement on a hand codes website and are never considered from the beginning. This reduces development time in the long run.
So, is WordPress for you?
Choosing Word Press for web development can provide your business with a website that looks great, is usable, is optimised for SEO. wordPress has some great features and technologies simply not possible with a bespoke hand coded website. It can also provide this at a very competitive price due to reduced development time to hand coding.
I price each commission on the size and scope of the project and choose, with your backing what we think is the best framework for your requirements.
