Why WordPress?
WordPress is an open-source CMS (Content Management System). Open source simply means that it’s free and supported by thousands of developers who continue to improve upon it. It is also the most popular website platform in use today. Over 7.5 million websites were built with WordPress and 1.2 million of them are the most popular and most visited sites in the world.
Here are some very good reasons to consider WordPress as a platform for your website design.
Multimedia
A text-only website can be very boring. It is important to engage your visitors with relevant photos, maps, and videos. All of these are easy to manage with WordPress’s impressive Media Library.
Plugins
WordPress has a great amount of functionality right out of the box but you may have more specific needs. Plugins, which are simply packaged lines of code, can help make your site more functional. There are hundreds of plugins that can provide all the advanced programming you need.
Powerful Blogging Tool
WordPress started as a blogging platform. Although it has grown into a fully functional website platform, it hasn’t forgotten where it started. Your website needs to have content that is fresh and relevant. The blogging engine built into WordPress allows you to easily update your company’s blog so that your customers are always kept informed.
Social Networking Friendly
With a WordPress website you can automatically integrate your blog posts with social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. What a time saver!
Google Loves WordPress
A website is only relevant if it can be found by your target audience. The higher your site ranks when someone searches for it, the more likely it will be read. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), involves properly coding your website so that search engines like Google and Bing can find it easier, and rank it higher. The code generated by WordPress has been engineered to give you the best SEO possible. Matt Cutts, the head of Google\’s Webspam team, has even mentioned WordPress specifically as being capable of ranking higher in search results.
Mobile Readiness
No need to produce a second website just for mobile users. WordPress automatically recognizes if a person is viewing the site through a web browser or mobile device and configures the content to be viewed appropriately on either.
Your Site Can Grow With Your Business
When you add up a lot of these features, you find that your WordPress site can grow with you over the years. You can easily upgrade it for new features and security. You can add a new theme (change how it looks) without redoing all the content on your site. You can also add new plugins to increase the functionality (e-commerce, online event registration, store locator) as the need arises.
It\’s User Friendly
WordPress is a powerful website platform with an intuitive, user-friendly backend made to be as easy as possible to use (anyone with a little training can make blog posts or changes to the page content). If your current website is difficult (or impossible) to update by yourself you may want to switch to a WordPress site.