Ever since its inception in the year 2003, WordPress has grown into one of the most popular web design platforms in the world. It is a fantastic tool, that opens the door to a wide range of possibilities. More importantly, once your design has been implemented, it is easy to make content changes yourself, and it is highly optimised for SEO and mobile users. Keep reading this article to learn a little bit more about WordPress, and the top 8 things that you should know about it!
WordPress allows the creation of a highly customised design
One of the advantages of building your website using WordPress is that it allows your web designer/developer to create a customised theme, specifically tailored to your business and website needs. In this way you are not restricted in how you lay out your content and it allows you choose the placement, style and type of content to best promote your business or organisation.
Depending on the theme and the capabilities of the editor, you can add lists, sliding, rotating and expanding content areas, image galleries, popups and animations to make your content stand out from your competitors.
WordPress is great for content creators and social media interaction
Not many people know this, but WordPress was initially intended as a platform for bloggers and content creators, as the name might imply. To this day, this is a fantastic platform for people who post blog articles and other media, and it is amazing for its ability to interact and integrate with other social media platforms. This means that publishing content is a lot easier than you may think, and sharing it with the world is seamless and painless!
WordPress allows users to create a custom theme
As mentioned earlier, WordPress allows you to customise your own theme. This incredible WordPress feature is attractive and versatile, opening the doors to exciting possibilities for you, and for your website. If you get bored or feel the need to get something different, your theme can always be edited and customised further. You can also create variations of the theme for individual content pages, running sales or promotions or for special events or holiday seasons.
WordPress is a great tool for writers and bloggers
As it was originally conceived for this purpose, WordPress is the king of all blogging platforms. There are other excellent options out there, which might be better for certain types of work, such as micro-blogging or content curation, but WordPress is still the biggest fish in the pond.
It is search engine friendly
Search engines like Google favour websites with good reader engagement rates, and WordPress allows you to create compelling websites that is easy for web crawlers to navigate and find your content.
WordPress is an open source platform
WordPress is an open source platform. This means its licence allows you to use the software for any purpose and make changes to it in any way you like. There are obvious restrictions as far as not modifying code in a way that breaks compatibility with future platform changes or security updates, though you are free to maintain your own personal version if you so choose to.
Is WordPress easy to use?
In short, yes! WordPress is a highly sophisticated tool that enables people to manage their content using simple drop and drag style editors to layout their text content, images, graphics or videos. WordPress is routinely used by design professionals as an affordable, highly customisable web design platform.
The WordPress platform is very adaptable, particularly when it comes to catering to the needs of a competitive, fast-paced industry. If you need to make edits and changes on the fly, WordPress can easily allow you do that, without needing to dive deeper into coding. The modular nature of WordPress means that you can work on certain aspects of your website without altering other parts.
WordPress is widely used
Another perk with WordPress is that it is widely used. Almost a third of all websites are based on it making it the most common platform on the web.
This however comes with a caveat that due to its popularity, it is also a popular target of hackers as more sites can be potentially be taken over, defaced or conscripted into botnets should a vulnerability be found. In most cases these are in plugins rather than the core code so care should be taken when selecting any off-the-shelf add-ons.
