At The Xcite Group, we use the WordPress CMS platform as the foundation of almost all our website projects. Many of our clients have heard of WordPress, but sometimes they wonder, is WordPress the best tool for their website?
Is WordPress a better solution for your website than other options?
What is WordPress?
WordPress began as a blogging platform, and has grown to become a first rate content management system (CMS). What this means is that you can add, change and manage your content – copy, images, graphs, media, links, etc – from a simple to use “back end” to your website, and your changes will show up on the “front end” where they belong.
How does WordPress help?
Blog site vs. Website
Ultimately, WordPress is the go-to tool if you want to add a blog to your website. With its feature-rich blogging capabilities, and its simple to use back-end, it has become the most popular blogging platform in the world. But it can be used for so much more than a simple blog!
While we often incorporate a blog into most of our client’s websites, we also use WordPress as the framework for the entire site. Wordpress has become a very powerful and sophisticated system, offering a stable foundation we can build off of, with a high level of customizability. On our end, this allows us to build – and make changes to – your website quicker, with more consistency throughout every page. It also lets us create some pretty complex functionality without having to spend a lot of time coding. We pride ourselves on our ability to build complex dynamic websites on WordPress that don’t look like WordPress sites! Our own website that you are reading right now is a WordPress site.
Plug-ins
WordPress has thousands of plug-ins to accomplish just about anything you want, from adding social media sharing links, to turning your website into a full-out shopping cart. Because there is a plugin for everything, we can offer you so much more, without the time and costs it would take to add that functionality by coding from scratch.
Security
While some critics try to claim that WordPress is not secure, the evidence shows that WordPress is hands-down an extremely secure platform – more secure than your typical static HTML site. The reason for this is because the owners of WordPress know high security is imperative for the 25 million+ live websites using WordPress, including big-name companies like CNN, eBay, The Wall Street Journal, etc. Wordpress uses both server-level and client-level security measures, plus we add extra layers of security from a combination of plug-ins and administrative best-practices.
Simple Content Management
Last, but perhaps most importantly, WordPress makes it very easy to change and add content on your website. Many web companies like to charge you to make changes to your website, even simple ones, but we at Xcite will not only hand over the keys for you to be able to make changes yourself, we will teach you how to do it – and give you a free, personalized, how-to video for reference.
In the end, WordPress offers everything we want as web developers, and everything you want as a website owner. Yes, there are many other options for building websites (and sometimes we decide that another option would be better suited for your needs), but most of the time we have found WordPress to be the tool of choice for web development.