Even if you haven’t heard of WordPress, the chances are you will have seen and looked through a website that is built on the WordPress platform (hint: this one’s a WordPress site!) Since 2003, WordPress has been a worldwide open source project to develop elegant and easy-to-use websites. It is now the leading content management system being used on over 60 million websites.

It’s a popular platform that’s also easy to use

For the end-user, the website’s audience, it’s incredibly easy to use with clear, well laid out designs and a seamless user experience. The design themes are responsive, which means they work across all devices — iPads, tablets, mobiles, PCs etc…And WordPress sites are easily found online as they tend to rank well in the search engines such as Google.

For the website owner, the business or organisation that owns the site, the WordPress platform is easy to update and with some basic training, even those without website development skills can add content easily to their site. It is a website for life. Depending on how the site is developed and the how the administration settings are configured, the content of the site can be added to or changed as often as required and can include extra features such as blogs, news feeds or social media accounts to name but a few. If you need to change hosting providers, that’s not a problem. WordPress websites can be migrated easily and transferred to new servers or even to a different domain.

Customised design for your unique website

With so many WordPress design templates available to choose from, there will be something to suit each and every business. The template provides the basic infrastructure of the website. Then the content — images, writing and branding— can all be customised to create a truly unique site that reflects your business.

We mentioned extra features earlier in the article such as blogs and news feeds, but WordPress is great for add-on features. These are known as plugins. These can be used to enrich the functionality or for additional custom features. These might include SEO (search engine optimisation) enhancements, analytic tools to monitor site activity or even appointment booking calendars and contact forms.

A cost-effective long-term website solution

By building a website around an existing template, the development costs are minimised as the bricks and mortar coding has already been done. And given the longevity of a WordPress site and the flexibility of the platform, if your website needs a design refresh or even a full content overhaul, this could be done without developing a new website from the ground up. This is why we use WordPress and recommend it for our customers’ web design projects.