Why Use WordPress? 7 Simple Reasons

Why use WordPress? Because you shouldn’t be held hostage by your website.

At Arch Web Marketing, we work almost exclusively on the free and open-source WordPress content management system, a robust publishing platform used by more than 25 million websites, including The New York Times, Ford, MTV, and the British Prime Minister’s Office.

WordPress was initially created as a blogging platform but over time, it evolved into a full-fledged publishing platform as suited to ecommerce and corporate websites as online diaries and wedding blogs. Below are our top reasons should build your site on the WordPress platform.

WordPress is ideally suited to our clients for three great reasons:

1. WordPress is easy to use
   If you can create a document in Microsoft Word, you can use WordPress to add and edit your own site content. Creating pages and inserting content is simple. There are no complicated procedures for approval workflows or publishing status (although you can add that feature if needed). All of the buttons and fields you need to create a page are strategically placed to guide you as you create your content. Images and other media are processed and sized automatically.Once your website is set up and customized for your unique brand, it doesn’t take more than a quick tutorial to demonstrate everything you need to know to manage your site with WordPress. Plus, there’s no need to worry about messing up and losing your work. WordPress saves all posts automatically in the form of a draft, so you won’t lose any data in case of power or internet disruptions. If you decide you don’t like the changes you’ve made to an existing page, you can view your past history and restore an older version of the page with a single click.
2. WordPress is ideal for content marketing
   WordPress makes it simple for consultants, professionals, and entrepreneurs to combine many types of persuasive content – blog posts, articles, videos, webinars, interviews, case studies, and white papers or reports – into one central marketing hub. It is designed to facilitate and promote discussion through commenting, link sharing, and trackbacks (a way to facilitate conversations that span several blogs so readers can easily follow the discussion).Your target audience can easily send you questions or feedback through contact forms or comments, allowing you the opportunity to learn what interests them and what they think about your content or services. You can build a stronger relationship with your readers by participating in the conversation, answering their questions, and clarifying your opinions. (But don’t worry – WordPress makes sure new comments can be sent to your email for approval so you can allow discussion without giving up control of your site.)To top it off, WordPress comes with several built in search optimization tools. It is made to do search engine optimization (SEO) well, wrapping your feeds, tags, permalinks, meta data, and navigation links in clean, well-structured code. You can focus on producing valuable content without worrying whether it will be found and indexed by the search engines.
3. WordPress is highly flexible and customizable
   A lot of the time sites built on a particular content management system will all look pretty much the same, just with a different logo and colour scheme. The beauty of WordPress is that a designer can create almost any layout so your unique business identity can shine through. Even if you don’t design your site from scratch, there are thousands of themes that can be highly customized to suit any specific need. You’re never tied to a rigid, boring layout so your site can be completely one-of-a-kind.More importantly, you can change the look of your site without having to recreate any of your content. You can switch to a new theme and all of your page copy, blog posts, SEO meta tags, links, images, and videos will stay exactly as they were.Still skeptical? Check out the WordPress Showcase to see the huge variety of designs already in use.

From a technical perspective, we love WordPress because:

1. It’s open source (not a proprietary CMS) so you have the freedom to move your site to any web host and to work with almost any web developer to maintain your site.
2. It boasts a huge community of developers and users which means virtually any feature you can think of has already been built and tested for WordPress. You may need to customize some code to suit your needs but it’s rare to have to start from scratch.
3. It plays well with others. We’re free to use the technology that best fits your requirements, whether that’s a shopping cart, email marketing, or video blog, without worrying if it will integrate with WordPress.
4. It is incredibly easy to use. Yes, we already listed this benefit but when clients can start managing their own content with less than 30 minutes of training time, it lets us focus on the fun creative instead of technical support.

What about you?

Are you using WordPress for your business website?
If so, what do you like about it and what would you change if you could?