We like to help people get well ahead with WordPress and think that it offers a lot of benefits for our clients in terms of:
- Technology
- Ease of use
- Self-management
- Efficiency
- Affordability
If you run a small and fairly straightforward website you may be tempted to take a ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ approach and not see that you may be doing yourself/your organisation harm by not moving forward with the times, if this sounds familiar we recommend getting well ahead with WordPress and throughout this post explain our reasoning.
Old Is Not Always Gold!
Clients ask me a lot why websites needs to be re-developed when they already have one or if they re-did theirs a few years ago. I think it’s a fair question to ask as re-developing a website does mean time, resources and money.
As with anything in life, things change and we have to move with the times. All of the things below are contributors towards change and these aspects affect your website too:
- People
- Requirements
- Technology
- Style
- Process
- Trends
Creating a website, doesn’t stop once it is live. As we have said before, maintaining a website is the key to its success. Maintaining a website does also mean from time to time investing in its development.
My advice at this stage; don’t think of it as a burden of going through the process again or the expenditure. Think of it as an opportunity and an investment. More so think of it as an ideal marketing opportunity. After all, isn’t that what your website is there for?
You may have a website that worked really well for you years ago but that doesn’t mean it is fulfilling the role now that it initially had then.
What Is WordPress?
WordPress is an open source content management system (CMS). WordPress has been commonly known to be a blogging tool but you can also use it to make gorgeous and functional websites.
WordPress is a great option to consider re-developing your website in because it is modern website technology that has been built to be scalable for the future.
Find out more about WordPress and have a read of our post what’s so great about WordPress?
Main Benefits Of WordPress
You’re In Control Of The Content
We always preach that you need to update content regularly and there are many benefits to having new unique content on your website. This includes returning visitors and help with your search engine rankings.
Clients are always asking to be able to manage the content on their websites themselves and rightly so! The easiest way to keep your website updated is to be able to write and add content when you want to and not wait for your web team to be able to do it for you.
Before it used to be costly and take time to set up a full content management system on websites. Well now you have WordPress, you can manage all the content yourself. Gone are the days where you have to pay your web team to do it or wait on them to schedule the work in. In fact, you can schedule posts and articles to go live when you want them to.
Get Blogging
WordPress has a built in blog so you don’t have to set up a separate blog and link to it from your website. You can categorise and archive your posts and schedule when you want them to appear online. You can have all of your pages and content in one place making it easy for you to manage and your visitors to navigate around.
Beautiful Designs
Even the designs have become easier. There are so many design themes/templates available that you could use. This helps save on cost and if you wanted that something extra and specific to your brand you can have a customised design created. The limits seem endless as there are so many options that work to suit your requirements.
Endless Functionality
WordPress has an open source community so people all over the world are developing functionality for WordPress all of the time. If you are looking for a type of functionality then most likely there is a plugin that will meet the requirement.
Resources & support
If you are worried about support and tutorials, there is no need as WordPress is so huge that there are numerous in fact a huge amount of tutorials, advice and guidance available online and easy to understand.
For the WordPress websites we work on, we ensure our clients are trained on their sites so they feel confident in terms of using the site once it’s live.
Other Advantages:
Other advantages of WordPress include:
- WordPress is SEO friendly
- You don’t have to be a web designer or developer to use WordPress
- You can have multiple users and set access levels
- WordPress is social media friendly
- It’s great for time management as you can schedule content to appear online when you want them to
- You can update your website from any computer or device as long as you have internet connection
- People will always develop more functionality for use on WordPress websites
Conclusion
From experience I have seen that it is easy to stay with our existing websites that were created years ago with older technology. I think it’s imperative that we change with the times.
It’s not about keeping up with the Jones’ but making sure your website does what you need it to do and more so does what your audience needs it to do. They are the driving force that will make your website work.
A re-development in WordPress is an investment and in the long term much more cost effective to maintain. In terms of value for money and time, it definitely makes the move worthwhile.
More often than not, staying with older web technology and maintaining an older website actually costs more than moving to a new website in more scalable technology.
Websites are the significant marketing tools for nearly everyone. So keep your options open and why not give making the move to WordPress some consideration.
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