WordPress

History

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform used by more than 23% of the top 10 million websites (as of January 2015). It is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) and is created using PHP and MYSQL.

WordPress is popular among the big brands such as Yahoo, eBay blog, Ford, Samsung, Wired, PlayStation blog, People Magazine, Forbes and many others.

What does it do?

In its basic form, if includes a set of free templates and plugin’s to get a website up and running in just a few minutes with little to no coding knowledge, however, more plugin’s and templates can be installed both free and paid for. These can be acquired from wordpress.org or many third party developers and enthusiasts.

With WordPress, it makes it easy for a website administrator with basic skills to keep content updated and fresh. All the pages can be edited using its inbuilt CMS system, further pages can be added, posts can be easily created, images added, edited and so on, all with no website development or coding knowledge.

SEO and increasing your website’s popularity

Content is one of the biggest drivers when it comes to increasing your SEO rankings, and because WordPress is so easy to use, it makes adding new content and blogging easy to do. By creating a blog post, adding a title with your keyword along with some links and tags, once you hit the publish button you can be confident that you have helped your site’s presence, and by doing this on a regular basis you can draw more people to your site and boost it further.

The WordPress architecture is very SEO – search engine friendly with its clean permalink structure. It has the ability to assign multiple categories to articles and has support for tagging of posts and articles. Sitemaps are taken care of automatically by a plugin and also HTML sitemaps are kept up to date and neatly presented to website users.

With the addition of a plugin, WordPress can very easily manage your Social Media. Once you create a post it can be automatically posted out to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google and so on. This is done by placing a post excerpt with a link back to your site on each social media platform. This assists with driving more traffic to your own website and is hugely powerful in improving your search engine rankings.

Getting help

Occasionally, there may be a requirement to contract the services of a developer but much less likely to than you would need with a bespoke written site. You may want to modify or design a template or change the functionality of a plugin, but generally speaking, among the 21,000 or so available plugin’s, you should be able to find something that closely fits what you need.

You may just require some guidance and support and it’s always useful to have someone who can assist in the more technical aspects when needed. Furthermore and probably the most important point, should you lose contact with your existing developer, there is always plenty more to choose from in addition to the many freely available support forums where you can get to know the WordPress community.

In conclusion

In conclusion. If you have an existing website and are thinking of redeveloping it with a new look and feel, WordPress is certainly worth considering. If after reading this, you would like to know more about how WordPress as a website platform could benefit you and your business, then give us a call and we will happily go through this with you.

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