Sweet! You’ve decided to take the plunge and build your first website, or re-design your old site.
Small businesses and web designers “in the know” have been making the switch from old static HTML web designs to more modern, mobile-friendly layouts, platforms, and content management systems (CMS).
WordPress represents a diverse array of industries on the web, including many recent Microsoft website conversions. (CMS Usage Statistics.) As of 2020, more than 39.6% of all websites use WordPress, including many famous brands, making it the most popular blogging system on the Internet.
What are some of the benefits of using WordPress?
Own Your Data!
Hosted services, such as “do-it-yourself” platforms can be frustrating and unavailable. If you’ve ever used a service that disappeared or that started charging you a LOT more as time goes by, you know how traumatic that can be. If you’ve ever seen ads appear on your website, you’ve probably been pretty annoyed. Using a self-hosted WordPress website means no one controls or owns your content and data but YOU.
Own your data, all of it — your website, your content, your data.
Flexibility
With WordPress, you can create any type of website you want: a personal blog or website, a photo blog, a business website, a professional portfolio, a government website, a magazine or news website, an online community, an eCommerce website – even a network of websites. You can make your website beautiful with themes, and extend it with plugins.
Publish with Ease
If you’ve ever created a document, you’re already a whizz at creating content with WordPress. You can create Posts and Pages, format them easily, insert YouTube videos and other media, and with the click of a button your content is live and on the web
Manage your Content
WordPress makes it easy for you to manage your content. Create drafts, schedule publication, and look at your post revisions. Make your content public or private, and secure posts and pages with a password.
Images and Media Management
They say a picture says a thousand words, which is why it’s important for you to be able to quickly and easily upload images, create YouTube playlists, and add other media. WordPress makes it easy. Drag and drop your media into the uploader to add it to your website. Add alt text, captions, and titles, and insert images and galleries into your content.
User Management
Not everyone requires the same access to your website. Administrators manage the site, editors work with content, authors and contributors write that content, and subscribers have a profile that they can manage. This lets you have a variety of contributors to your website, and lets others simply be part of your community.
Full Standards Compliance
Every piece of WordPress generated code is in full compliance with the standards set by the W3C. This means that your website will work in today’s browsers, while maintaining forward compatibility with the next generation of browsers.
Your website is a beautiful thing, now and in the future.
Blog Importers
Using blog or website software that you aren’t happy with? Running your blog on a hosted service that’s about to shut down? Want to move your website blog? WordPress comes with importers for Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, TypePad, Tumblr, and WordPress.
Extend with Plugins
WordPress comes packed full of features for every user, for every other feature there’s a plugin directory with thousands of plugins. Add complex galleries, social networking, forums, social media widgets, spam protection, calendars, fine-tune controls for search engine optimization, and forms.
Many Famous Brands Use WordPress
Here’s 42 of the most famous brands using WordPress in one infographic courtesy of themeisle:
WordPress is Always Fresh
Starting as just a blogging system, WordPress has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more through the thousands of plugins and widgets and themes.
WordPress is always fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product limited only by your imagination. (And tech chops – we can help!)
Cheers!
Stacy Layman
Director, eCommerce Development
Jacksonville, Florida