The web design requirements for small and medium business differ hugely, and this means choosing the right web development tool can be difficult. Your business may need something highly specialized, or just a basic off the rack design. Finding a web development tool that’s fits perfectly is hard, but we believe that there’s one product on the market that is adaptable enough to meet all the needs of the small and medium business. Here are a few reasons why we think WordPress is the best web development tool available to the small and medium business.
1. Open Source Software
Open Source software, in simple terms, is computer software with its source code made available by the copyright holder to the public, to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. What this means in regards to a web development tool is that it’s highly editable. In the case of WordPress, this has led to the creation of modifications to the base software that can meet almost any user’s demands. The ability to edit the source code allows web developers to create unique solutions the fit their clients like a glove.
Another advantage of Open Source software is that anyone can work on it. Since you don’t need a license to use the software, any web developer you work with will be able to make changes to your website. So if you decide to change developers after your site had been created, or during the process, you will be able to take your finished or half-finished website to another company. WordPress is one of the most successful open source softwares, and it derives many of its benefits because of its open source nature.
2. Highly Customizable
Thanks to WordPress’ software’s open source nature, it can be highly customized. These customization can meet almost any needs. WordPress creates things called widgets that are designed to add extra features to your website. This is the simplest way to customize your website, and the official widgets available are highly effective and well-designed. Because WordPress is open source they aren’t the only ones designing widgets, the WordPress community are constantly designing new widgets that do great things. With the imagination of hundreds of talented developers working for you, you’ll always be able to find the feature your business needs.
WordPress websites are designed around things called themes. Themes control the appearance and basic settings of your website. WordPress has thousands of available themes that you can use to design your website, and the community has produced a thousand more. It’s also possible to design your own theme to fit your business perfectly.
3. Easy to Use
WordPress is designed to be as simple to use as possible. With very limited technical knowledge, it is possible to design a basic website. This is something that very few web development programs can claim. With the basics so easy to do, and online tutorials available, if you have the time, you can teach yourself to be a WordPress expert.
If you get a web development company to create your website, WordPress makes a great CMS (content management system). While it’s quite easy to create a basic website on WordPress, it is even easier to edit one that’s been made by professionals. The screen that controls editing your website’s pages and posts is similar to a word document, and just as easy to edit and create. This is one of the major reasons we are in favor of WordPress as a web development tool. Once we have created a website for a client, WordPress enables them to make changes themselves. This saves our clients’ money because they don’t have to keep coming to us for every change they make. WordPress empowers businesses to take control of their website.
4. Google Likes It
Google is the behemoth of the web world. It’s the unquestioned number one search engine in the world, and the main tool used by customers searching for businesses. This means having a website built on a platform that is Google friendly, is essential if you want to get the most out of it.
When we say WordPress is Google friendly, what we mean is that it was designed to be easily understood by the Google search engines. Basically, the base WordPress code is written in a simple way that the Google Algorithms can understand. This means it is far easier to rise in the Google rankings, and possibly get on the front page of relevant Google searches.
5. Digital marketing ready
There are four types of basic digital marketing that all businesses should consider using for their websites, and WordPress was designed with all of them in mind.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization is a fairly simple concept but much harder to implement properly. SEO is the act of optimizing your website so it is more visible to search engines, and therefore increase your page rank. If you use SEO correctly, when someone searches for the keywords that you are targeting your website will show up on the left hand side of Google (the natural / organic results) as highly positioned as possible. WordPress has been designed with SEO in mind. It is very easy to edit the key SEO sections of your website for maximum optimization. It is simple to insert the correct keywords into the page URL’s, Meta Titles and Tags, photo descriptions and throughout the content.
PPC
Pay Per Click is quite simply, online advertising. Your ad targets certain keywords relevant to your business (e.g. for a florist, keywords could be: online florist, buy flowers online or flower delivery). When someone searches one of those keywords, Google either places your ad in the top 3 results (usually in a light yellow box) or in the results on the right-hand side. This is one of the most directed forms of marketing available online and will quickly bring attention to your website (if it’s done right). With in-built analytics, it’s quite easy to see just how effective your PPC marketing campaigns are, as WordPress shows where your visitors are coming from.
Copywriting
Copywriting is great when done right. Good copy makes your website stand out, and it can lead to greater conversions from visitors. The professional feeling from well written copy cannot be underestimated. If you create SEO content as well, then the extra keyword targeting can drive your business by creating improved search rankings on Google. WordPress makes adding new content easy, through blog posts and new pages.
Social Media
Social media marketing is another form of online advertising, one that has amazing reach. Social Media can (for marketing purposes) be used in four distinct ways. These include driving online sales, driving local sales, collecting demographic information and raising brand awareness. All of these elements rely on the billions of people who are glued onto their social media, whether at home or on the mobile, on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. WordPress is designed to allow interaction with all the different social media platforms through easy to use widgets and basic theme settings. This makes engaging with the wider community easy.
6. Huge Community
The WordPress community is perhaps the largest surrounding any web development tool. This community is a mixture of users, some professional web developers with years of knowledge, and others completely inexperienced and non-tech savvy users. What this fantastic range of users means is that any new user will have access to a range of advice aimed at all levels of technical understanding.
This community actively engages with WordPress by creating widgets, themes and instruction videos, much of which is free to access. This community support surpasses anything offered by the creators of any other web development software. Having access to these kind of resources makes using WordPress that much easier.
7. Cheap
The base level of WordPress is free, how great is that? WordPress offers extra features, storage space, and basic hosting at steadily higher costs. Even the highest level of these packages is not a huge expense though. There are options to purchase both WordPress and community designed themes and widgets for increased usability and functionality. In most case these add ons are very cheap, and in some cases completely free.
WordPress is the web development tool you need.
8. Readily Available Support
As we’ve already said WordPress has an amazing and friendly community ready to help other WordPress users. This community is full of knowledgeable people that will help you through any of your basic problems.
WordPress also offers great support, through video tutorials and manuals that can help you understand everything from the basics, to the most complicated features. All this combines to equal the best web development support available for any development software.
9. Highly Functional
Functionality is one of the major needs for any small or medium business. Depending on what you need the site to do, you could require an incredibly high level of customization. This can include member’s areas, store functionality, auto-emails, contact forms and any number of other things.
The great thing about WordPress is that it is a true industry leader in functionality. If you can think of it, there’s a fair chance someone has tried to build it on WordPress, and if they haven’t, someone will be able to. The combination of the Open Source nature of WordPress’ software, dedicated community developers and a highly customizable design has turned WordPress into a highly functional web development platform. If you need functionality, WordPress is your answer.
10. Constantly Upgrading
Web development platforms can’t sit still. Web design needs and trends move faster than most tech industries, and this leads to a lightening pace of innovation. Any good software needs to be constantly updating itself, to ensure it can meet user needs. So, how do web development software companies keep up? Well in most case they don’t. Proprietary software (not open source), will tend to struggle to keep their product up to date, because they only have their internal developers working to ensure their software is cutting edge. Open source software instead has hundreds of professional web developers who use the software working on it.
WordPress is in the great position of having a huge community constantly working to improve their software, as well as a talented internal development team. This has led to WordPress steadily improving, and it is now at the point of being the dominant web development tool.
The combination of affordability, functionality, customization and support is why we recommend WordPress for small and medium businesses. It is simply the only web development tool available that can consistently meet any web development need.
