LONDON – BUSINESS – Are you a business owner who doesn’t have a website? Believe it or not, you are not alone. However, because online marketing is a growing priority for small businesses everywhere, having a website is vital to the success of your business. Many people assume that they are not technical enough to create their own website and don’t have the financial resources to pay someone to create one for them. This is because they don’t have a good understanding of what WordPress is. Many people think WordPress is only a platform for blogging when it is so much more.
What is WordPress?
It is a free, powerful, and open-source content management system (CMS) that is easily adaptable to all types of websites including business, personal, professional portfolios, and e-commerce sites that anyone can use without having to know how to program. Even some very popular and large brands utilize the WordPress platform to build their websites. Although no platform is perfect, WordPress comes close. A basic introduction to WordPress along with its key benefits can be found here.
Save Money
Hiring a web developer to build you a website varies greatly depending on your needs and can range from $2,000 to $25,000. This does not include maintenance and hosting fees. Even though many major brands decide to build their website using WordPress because of its power and flexibility, if they have a large budget, they can also opt to pay someone to build them a custom HTML website. Smaller businesses with less financial resources can still build an engaging, valuable, and impressive website on the WordPress platform. You don’t need to be a web designer or have programming experience and the WordPress software itself is free to use. There are plenty of free themes and WordPress plugins available to you to help build your site and make it function well. In addition, there are also premium themes and plugins if you are looking for a little more customization and flexibility, but this will still cost you less money than hiring a web developer.
Flexible and Adaptable
There are thousands of themes available to help you change how your site looks by customizing the layout and appearance. For example, if you are building a site for any specific niche like a florist or dentist, you will have a multitude of themes to choose from for your desired niche. There are literally thousands of free themes at WordPress.org and thousands of premium ones from developers and third-party marketplaces.
WordPress plugins are pieces of software that you can install on your site to extend the functionality of your website by adding complex business features without having to hire a coder.There are plugins available for almost everything and anything you want to do on your website including a contact page, adding a layer of security, social media integration, including a checkout system, and improving your SEO.
Before purchasing a theme or plugin, you should start looking through the plugin and theme directories inside your WordPress admin dashboard. These are the free ones, have been vetted, and provide necessary information such as:
- Is the plugin compatible with your current version of WordPress
- A brief and detailed description of the plugin
- The number of active installations
- A star rating system
- When the plugin was last updated
- Theme details
- A live preview of how your site will look with any specific theme
Continuous Support
Unlike other website building tools, WordPress is open source which means that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance it. It is supported by a huge community of millions of users around the world. Open source also means that it is free from commercial limitations and restrictions, meaning you can choose any hosting company and hosting package that you want.
Mobile Responsiveness
The world is going mobile quickly and your website needs to go along with it. Some custom-made HTML websites require that you create a separate version of your site for tablets and smartphones. WordPress themes, on the other hand, are ready for the mobile web. Most WordPress themes (especially premium ones) are designed to scale automatically to be mobile-responsive so that your website looks great on all devices.
What started as a blogging platform has expanded into a full-blown powerful content management system that can be used for any type of website you want to build. Because WordPress is open source and thanks to innovative developers, it will continue to improve with new features that will add even more flexibility and functionality to an already powerful platform.