Ever considered creating your own website? If yes, then there is no doubt that you have heard about WordPress one of the simplest and easiest web building platforms out there. You don’t need to be a tech genius or a coding wizard to use it. All it takes to create a website with it is to decide on what you require. There are thousands of customizable themes to choose from and millions of plugins that can add a new dimension to your website. With an open community which constantly adds new features and helps make the platform better, the platform is growing in both size and stature.
However, WordPress is not given enough credit for its abilities and often ridiculed for the lack of skill it requires. Often other platforms are chosen over it, even CMS. So what is CMS exactly?
The Content Management System (CMS) is an application that allows you to publish and successfully manage your online content. So that it can represent it as web pages and posts. You may host this content on a variety of servers, including fostering plans and servers of your own. You get full control over the website and all its functions. You can create a page with a number of tools to make it more elegant and make the changes if needed.
The webpages can be expanded by modules, upgrades, themes, templates, or your own coding. Boosting a lot of alternatives to empirical classification. It is not the same as a web builder platform, far from it that is an interface allowing you to structure a site using drag-drop options accompanied by a simple click to add a feature alternative. Such networks do not offer a lot of help in dealing with content, and the sites that operate with them are typically supported on the servers of the network. You have less control over such types of platforms. As most of the work has to be done by the user and considering that the support is not in abundance you may need to learn a lot to get things done.
There are many advantages to hosting a website using Content management systems. But when it comes to operating and function. It can be a little difficult to use the interface because most of it requires knowledge of machine languages.
Launched in the year 2003 and is now one of the most famous CMS in the market. Occupying almost over 31.7% of the World Wide Web, and owning 60.1% of the CMS share. It was developed on PHP and utilizes a MySQL database to run its basic operations. It is simple and easy to use. It requires no expectation to have pre-knowledge of its performance. Making content with a single layout is a basic function. Making content with more format alternatives is progressively troublesome. However, it should be possible with code or with specific modules. It helps to create pages, posts, ventures, custom post types, custom route menus, sidebars. The sky’s the limit from there when it comes to WordPress and its functions.
It is amazingly adaptable and has more than 56,000 modules. With a large number of resources in storehouse alone. There are likewise a huge number of premium modules and resources accessible as well. These are resources that the creators form the community produce and can be obtained by purchasing them. But just because it is a web building application it does not mean there is nothing for the coders and designers to do. Each plugin and theme can be edited from its code, basic CSS script. A coder can easily read and edit the various elements of the script to be used according to the needs of the organization.
The simplest example of such a change can be, the removal of the ” Powered by WordPress “ tag in the footer of the website. It is a watermark that is put by the platform but can easily be removed by simply deleting the text from the script. You can even add your own text in places, such as the copyright disclaimer for the public or something else that you think would fit.
WordPress and content marketing is a simple connection. You create a website and add content you want to display and in turn attract people who would like to see your content.
Content Marketing is the representation of what your organizations stands for and wants the public to view it as. It is the combination of text and graphics that makes the website more appealing.
In any case, simply creating incredible content is not sufficient for growth and customer conversion. You additionally need certain tools to make your content stand apart from the rest in the industry.
Considering everything and the current scenario, it is ideal for all your content marketing needs.
With huge amounts of stunning options and tools, it makes it simple for you to make, arrange and distribute the content. Apart from that, it enables you to effectively and effortlessly embed media, such as videos, images on your pages, blog and different posts, helping you to create stunning content. Attracting more customers and standing out in the crowd. The various plugins available on the platform help you add more features to your website to make it more appealing to the visitors such as interactive design and auto chat options for the customers. Even if you consider the marketing standpoint, it has many features that can help you promote your brands such as pop-ups, newsletter options or arrangement of ad blocks on your website. You name the function and WordPress has a plugin for it.
The best part is, all its features are customizable. Meaning that the script for the feature or design is easily accessible to the user and if they know how to code they can make changes to the core design. Creating a custom design or function to suit organizational needs.
There are many reasons why WordPress is better than any CMS tool out there. For starters it enables the users to have absolute control over the functions of the website without the knowledge of code or any other technical qualification. It is very simple and implementing changes is very easy.
The set of WordPress is very quick, enabling you to set up the entire website in 10 mins or less. Its tools are very powerful and effective. Unlike in any other CMS tool where the entire thing has to be coded and may take weeks to implement.
It is ideal for those businesses that are not into web designing and are not looking to hire any engineers or designers for the job. All they have to do is to set up the website according to their needs and decide on which features they want.
Some of the major stands out points of it are as follows.
Yes, it is true. It is free to use a platform with a very large community backing it. What this means is that most of the features are free to use and there is a tone of free content that you can easily use for your website. While most are in their beta testing, many features are free as a sample for the premium service. Some other implications of an open-source community are as follows.
There is a lot of free content in its library. There are millions of people out there who use WordPress and quite a large number of them don’t know how to code. With so many features there are some which can be integrated without any plugins but only a few lines of code. For people who don’t know code can always install a plugin. There is a plugin for every possible feature that you can imagine, even for a social media networking site!
And that is just the tip of the iceberg. The free content is not just limited to plugins. Many stunning themes and designs are also free to use. However, the best is reserved for the premium category.
In any case, there is plenty of free content for you to work with and create a good looking website for your business.
A large community also means an active forum where people can post their problems and others in the community can resolve it. With it being so famous, most web designers and coders are very active on the forums in order to find projects to work on. Most are paid to resolve bugs and help businesses.
Bugs can create a real nuisance in the operations of your website. If you don’t know what is causing the error it can take days and sometimes months to resolve the problem. Outside assistance can really help with gaining a new perspective on the matter and resolving the problem faster. It helps the community to help each other by transfer more information to people who are lacking it.
An active community means that even if the official update for the platform is not available, the users will help you keep the platform up to date. This is important because the plugins and themes do not support the older version of the platform and render the effects useless. Also, updates keep the interface more secure from cyber-attacks.
When the official update for the platform has launched the community and its members produce the content that matches the update. Helping to grow the platform constantly and adding new features to the platform. This helps to introduce more possibilities to the design and gives the platform an endless scope of growth.
When the community is alive to the changes in the industry. It is very easy to grow. There are millions of active users who share their knowledge and resources with one another. It gives the user a chance to interact with others in the same community and discuss how to make things even better. The active forum helps resolve the problems and get feedback from the community about how the feature may affect the business.
One of the easiest things to do with WordPress is to manage it. The dashboard at the back end is a very simplistic and functional interface you will ever work with. All the features and options are listed to the left of the screen and the rest is how you can manage the website customizing it to your needs.
Adding new stuff be it plugins widgets or even a post is very simple. You just need to find the head tab and click on add new. This simplifies things significantly. As any new addition is just a click away.
It enables you to play with the layout and wireframe of the entire website. If you feel, the current design is lacking and want to try something new. All you have to do is change the theme and it is done. The hardest part of changing the theme is to select which theme you want, the rest is just clicking the right options.
Change is inevitable. It is all the truer for the digital industry. The plugins will need to be updated and the comments to be responded to. But it is not difficult to manage anything because the interface allows handling everything very easily. It notifies you to all the changes that are needed and you can decide which one to implement. Again it is all clicking the right buttons.
One of the most important aspects of website is search engine optimization. It is how the users can find you with the help of search engines such as google, bing, etc. These search engines have some criteria to rate the websites and rank them according to the ratings. Your website needs to meet these criteria to be found better on the internet. It is a huge industry and there are many professional organizations that can help you with SEO if you can afford them. If not then you can always use a WordPress plugin.
As mentioned earlier, there is a plugin for almost everything on it. Search engine optimization is quite a significant aspect of the website and has a huge number of plugins that can help you with it. Some of the ways that SEO plugins work are.
Images and visual content are an integral part of a website. But not all images are able to load on various platforms. The plugins can help you with that and provide a simplified solution. A method of image optimization on it is lazy loading. It is a set of resources that are preloaded by the browser for better surfing. Image optimization is the key to better SEO ratings.
The internet is just a very big yellow page. It is a set of web addresses and links working together to get you to the destination. Links are very important and very long link names can create a problem. To simplify things, the plugins shorten the links and resolve these problems. It also helps to intangle the links with one another to create a web of well-connected pages on the website for your users to experience.
Page description
Notice some of the websites when you search for them have a short note about them attached to the search engine below the search result. This is a short description of the website the user is about to access and can help them to understand what the website is all about. Search engines like google promote and even appreciate websites with a description for each page on the website. It helps the search engines to better categorize the websites and rate them accordingly. Description of what the customer is looking for is otherwise good for your organization as well because it helps the customer to not waste time and get straight to business.
In the end
WordPress is an amazing platform to manage a website. It requires minimalistic effort and can produce wonderful results. However, it must be noted that it is still just a platform with templates and has its limitations. It is the best platform for that business who do not want to spend too much on a website but need it to be presentable. While there are many plugins for the platform, almost all of them are either beta or a free limited version of a premium one and there is so much you can do with a free version.
In short, it is great if you are a small to medium scale business. It can help you function well. But there are certain limitations that the platforms cannot help you with, for which you need professional help or a code based website.