12 Reasons To Use WordPress

In today’s digital age, competition among businesses is not restricted to local competitors or brick and mortar establishments. With the likes of Amazon, Ebay, Seamless, Eat24, Rover, ThumbTack, and others no business is safe from competitive pricing and the convenience that conducting digital business has to offer. A WordPress website can help your business compete in the digital market.

To actually compete, businesses must have a strong online presence. For this they need to have proper websites that attract web traffic and convert visitors into buyers, guests, subscribers or any other form of conversion that is right for your business.

Developing a website used to be something difficult and very costly. A New York Marketing Agency, who prided themselves in having the Best WordPress Development in New York City, once quoted me $7,000 for a website where I can showcase my resume and experience. Thankfully, I knew how to build one for myself but found a niche that I could create a business around.

Small businesses and Entrepreneurs in New York City, and around the world, struggle to juggle maintaining the business afloat and keeping up with all of the digital demands of today’s online driven economy.

Building a website does not mean that you need to spend countless hours, or money, and work on mind-boggling and time consuming raw HTML codes to launch a Dreamweaver. I was taught Dreamweaver in school and learned to hate it quickly. You can use a variety of cost effective and time saving website creation and management tools, often referred to as Content Management Systems (CMS) to ease the burden. Our favorite one, and most functionally versatile in our opinion, is WordPress. There’s nothing that you can’t do with WordPress. If you run across technical snags, or just aren’t sure how to make everything work together, there are companies like Astound.Media that can help you.

WordPress System

It is a popular system being widely used across the world by businesses to create awesome websites that not only establishes your online presence, but also enables you to transact online too. Previously, WordPress only offered blogging templates. Those got old too quick. Now, WordPress has evolved into a comprehensive CMS that offers different website designs for virtually all types of businesses across industries. Whatever you are doing, WordPress is sure to facilitate the process.

Here are top 15 reasons for its ongoing popularity and why it is being used worldwide:

1. Websites Are Now Easy To Create

With WordPress, you don’t need to be a pro at website development. There is some technical heavy lifting involved, but once the site is live managing your content is almost like updating your FaceBook profile or editing a Word document.

2. Simple to Manage and Modify

Websites built on WordPress are manageable unlike those created from scratch using raw HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP code. Who has time for that? Like, seriously!

Websites designed by web developers on raw HTML codes, are difficult to manage. For even minor changes such as adding commas or correcting spelling mistakes or making changes in pricing or discount offers, you have to make several and expensive service calls to web developers. Not with WordPress!

Conversely, minor or major modifications, all can be easily carried on sites developed on WordPress. It only takes a couple of minutes to change and update. Okay, this is only partially true. There are some changes that are more involved and have interdependencies with the site’s other functions. That’s a different post though. For what it’s worth, I have clients who do change their pricing and create coupon codes on the WordPress powered eCommerce Websites that we have designed for them.

3. Highly Extensible

So what if you like a blog design and you want to use that design for your website, what do you do? Don’t bother! There are thousands of WordPress themes and templates that will have the base functionality that you need no matter what business you are in. Websites like ThemeForest.net and TemplateMonster.com offer relatively inexpensive themes for a variety of different industries. WordPress.org has thousands of free ones, most of which can be upgraded to a paid version for even more functionality. The point is you don’t have to fret over design and functionality. I assure you that something out there already exists for what you are looking to do.

4. Multiple User Accessibility

WordPress allows webmasters to grant access to different users and user types who update the website. If you are selling products or services directly on the site, those folks can have accounts too and manage orders, update payment info, etc. The WordPress CMS has 5 built in user roles including administrator, author, subscriber, editor and contributor. This allows you to offer access rights to the user accordingly to different security levels. If you have a more complex situation that calls for additional roles, there are a variety of plugins that you can add to your site to get the job done.

5. Comprehensive Suite of WordPress Themes

We talked about this a bit already but we are pretty passionate about WordPress. Can you tell? You can change the look of your website whenever you desire unlike the standard HTML code websites. The WordPress CMS system stores website content in a separate location from your website design. This means you can change your existing WordPress theme easily and incorporate a new one in no time. You don’t have to pay a hefty sum to a web developer to change the theme of your site.  That said, it’s not always as straight forward as turning one theme off and turning another on. It all depends on your website and we find it important to manage your expectations.

6. Search Engine Optimization Features

According to studies, people only browse through the websites ranked in the first two search engine pages. This means to attract heavy traffic to your website, you need to improve SEO of your website. Search engine optimization helps to index your website in the top results.

WordPress assists webmasters with SEO. You can take advantage of WordPress value adding features like plug-ins that are designed to boost natural search exposure of WordPress websites.

7. Mobile Website Versions

Research studies show that more than 40% of the order placement on websites is being carried through smart phones. This means if you don’t have a website that is Responsive, what us geeks call a website that adapts to the screen it is being viewed from, you may be losing out on a significant number of viewers and potential sales too.

The creation and development of a responsive website is difficult on HTML coded websites, but not on WordPress. Through this CMS system now you can create quick and impressive mobile versions of your business websites by using plug-ins such as WP Touch. Additionally, most WordPress themes are now completely responsive right out of the box. That is not to say it won’t require a little love for mobile but that the bulk of the work would already be done.

8. Overwhelming Support from WordPress Users

Another reason for the popularity of this system is that over a period time, WordPress has acquired  strong support from web developers and users across the globe. If you need any support with site building or SEO, you can reach out to WordPress users on different WP forums and interact with them and get their assistance. There are also companies like ours, Astound.Media, that specialize in WordPress web development and are always ready to help. The WordPress user communities offer extensive support to new webmasters to create an awesome and highly functional website with ease and efficiency.

9. No Installation Costs

Although you may have to pay a small amount for professional WordPress themes and additional plug-ins, the cost is still significantly less than what you may have to pay to a professional web developer to design a standard HTML code website.

However, if you get basic or simple WordPress themes, it does not cost you a penny. This means if you are tight on budget and you need to get a website, you can easily choose a basic WordPress theme, modify it according to your business and brand identity and use it to boost your online presence.

WordPress offers designs and templates that can be changed easily in a few clicks as per your business persona. It is hassle free and ideal for Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs on a tight budget.

10. Hassle Free, Automated Site Updates

Whether it’s a WordPress website or a blog, you can easily use it to schedule your new and future updates. This means you don’t have to continuously keep track of the dates and upload new posts every day. This smart system does it as per your specified schedule.

Many professional and busy webmasters call this feature of the WordPress CMS a life saver. Using it does not require us to sit, write and upload posts on a daily basis. We can write 3 to 4 posts together and schedule them for different dates. The same goes for discounts and promotions and a whole lot more. Did we mention WordPress was versatile?

11. Scalability

If you are just starting out chances are that you don’t need a website with all of the bells and whistles that an established company would need. With WordPress you are able to start with as much, or as little, functionality as you’d like. With a robust WordPress plugin repository there is little that you can not add on as needed. Need a landing page with newsletter subscriptions while you focus on product? No problem. When you are ready for ecommerce add in a few plugins and you’re off to the races.

12. User Management

One of the most daunting tasks of owning and managing a website is maintaining its security while offering your users accounts. With traditional websites, this was a task for webmasters only. With WordPress setting up user accounts is a breeze and managing their permissions on the site is even easier.

We at Astound Media are here to help you build a strong online presence. Take a look through the services we offer and choose the one that best fits the needs of your company and let us help you redefine the status quo & CAPTIVATE your audience.