Six Reasons To Trust Your Website To Wordpress

I’ve been reading some real touchy-feely articles lately about why business owners should use Wordpress for their websites. I like Wordpress (we use it here) but touchy feely doesn’t help anybody. Here are some real benefits of using Wordpress for your website, instead of paying for a custom web development job.

Image via Wikipedia

Credibility

Nothing beats a blog as a platform for establishing your expertise. Twitter is great for what it does, but blog posts give you the room to fully explain your thoughts on topics near and dear to your customers’ hearts. A blog also lets you educate your customers in a no-pressure scenario they’ll appreciate. Best of all, it doesn’t take many posts to prove to your customers that you know what you’re talking about, before they even come to your store/office. That sort of credibility is hard to buy otherwise, and will help you close more sales for your business.

Design Flexibility

The architecture of the core Wordpress application (code-monkeys call it “Model View Controller”) separates the part of the software that does stuff from the part that shows stuff on screen. This means that you can totally change the look of your site by downloading a new Wordpress theme and turning it on. (Literally a few clicks.) There are tons of themes available to choose from, many of which are free. For the more resourceful, this flexibility also means you can create your very own unique theme, or adapt an existing theme to make it more unique.

Say you already have a website that you’re happy with, but you want to add blogging capability. You can install Wordpress right alongside your existing site and change its appearance (”skin it”) to look like the rest of your existing site. We did that very thing with this Smartacus website, operating both a custom-developed part and a Wordpress blog part, until eventually we merged the custom site pages into Wordpress.

Functional Flexibility

Wordpress has a broad set of built-in functionality that covers blog posting, comments, static pages, and more. It also supports what they call plugins, which provide additional functionality you can incorporate as easily as a new theme. Like themes, there are tons of free plugins available – so many, in fact, that if you can think of something you’d like a plugin to do, chances are several people have created the plugin already. The neat thing about plugins is that they let you add new capabilities to your site without touching the core Wordpress functions, so when you upgrade to the latest Wordpress version you don’t lose your work. Some examples of great plugins include:

• Akismet - a great spam fighter that comes with the default Wordpress install
• Add to Any – we use this plugin to make it easy for readers to share our posts
• Zemanta – this makes suggestions on content, tags, and images while you write your posts and pages

Besides plugins, you can get a code-monkey to create a template page for you that contains the specialized code you need. You can then create new pages using these template pages to get the new functionality. These template pages are associated with the theme you’re using, so if you decide to upgrade the version of Wordpress you won’t lose your custom work. As an example, the egrips price quote page on this site was done using a template page.

Wordpress also has a sister product called Wordpress MU that lets you set up multiple blogs with a single Wordpress install. There are many uses for this product, including our own college e-learning site College-Cram.com

Content Flexibility

With traditional custom websites, changing or adding pages means another meeting with the web developers, a hefty invoice to pay, and a week to a month of waiting before you get what you want. Wordpress site owners can change their own pages as easily as changing a Word document, or create new ones as easily as writing an email message. This ease of entry makes it much easier to be a prolific writer and keep your company (and your message) in front of your target market.

(This is not a trivial consideration. I once had a vendor that took a bath on the initial development – they underestimated what needed to be done and ended up losing money on the project. When we came back later for some changes, they took that opportunity to recoup their losses by way overcharging for relatively simple fixes. Do you want to get stuck with a $1,000 invoice for replacing a couple of images? Me neither.)

Social Media Integration

Participating in social media is all the rage, and blogging is a key piece of your social media strategy. With Wordpress, you can use plugins like Add to Any to make it easy for readers to post your content to their social media sites like Facebook, Digg, and such. Also, there are plugins like Twitter Tools that will automatically create a tweet every time you create a new blog post, or compile your daily tweets into a single blog post. Other plugins let you show your Facebook friends list or place a running twitter commentary on your site.

Automating these aspects of social media let you focus your efforts on more personal and personable social media interactions, in addition to your blogging. This human interaction positions you as more than just a mindless linking machine, and makes it easier for your friends/followers to connect with you. Personal connections plus useful content will make you a valuable social media contact.

Support Flexibility

Pretty much wherever you live, there is a sizable local Wordpress user group full of code-monkeys and bloggers eager to share their knowledge. If you don’t like the developer you’re working with, or want to explore other options, you can tap into this resource pool and not feel stuck with any one developer. Plus, since Wordpress is pretty consistently organized, your new developer won’t have to burn alot of money and time trying to figure out how you’re old developer was doing things. (Believe me, this is not a trivial concern – I once had a project where 80% of the cost was in deciphering the old developer’s code and only 20% was fixing the problems.)

Sure, there are lots of reasons for getting a website created for your business. For the money, Wordpress is among the most effective for helping you grow your business.