Taking Charge of Your New Website – 5 Reasons to Demand WordPress

It’s really important to ensure that your site is built on a content management system (CMS) that works for you. In fact, it’s a make or break decision.

After all, it is going to be your gateway – the interface – that connects you with your website.

If the way you update your website is clunky and difficult to work with, chances are, you won’t update your site nearly as much (or at all) rendering your new website static and keeping you from building a following for your fresh and useful content. Not to mention foregoing the SEO advantages associated with great content creation.

Over the years, we’ve seen it time and time again, when a client can easily contribute to their website, they do. And it’s a game changer.

And yet, we’re seldom asked what CMS we advocate. Lucky for our clients, we have hitched our wagon to WordPress.

the promised land–a standard, easy-to-use, multimedia-friendly platform

Forbes

A September, 2012 article in Forbes titled “With 60 Million Websites, WordPress Rules The Web,” said it best as “today WordPress powers one of every 6 websites on the Internet, nearly 60 million in all, with 100,000 more popping up each day.” WordPress became the “default” CMS for many of the leading media companies – companies with vast content publication requirements, delivering “the promised land–a standard, easy-to-use, multimedia-friendly platform–after a decade of lurching through clunky, expensive, jerry-rigged content-management systems.”

After more than a decade, it’s a platform that runs small blogs and enterprise business solutions alike. So we’re happy to have the CMS discussion with you. Here are just five reasons why we love WordPress:

1. It’s free

It’s pretty hard not like that! While back in the day even the smallest clients were shelling out $10,000 for a for a mediocre, complicated CMS license, today your budget goes directly into the development of things that matter to your organization.

2. It’s almost limitless

In the right hands, the custom solutions a developer can offer are almost limitless. And that’s why it drives sites from small startups to some of the world’s most trafficked media sites and Fortune 500 companies like GM, UPS, Sony.

3. WordPress keeps getting better and better

That’s important for you because the web is always changing. For example it addresses all the hot-button issues by being responsive (addressing how sites look across all screen sizes), SEO-friendly, and standards compliant. WordPress has an army of developers contributing to the core of the software providing free updates, new features and addressing security issues typical with large software projects. An even bigger community of developers has created to date nearly 30,000 plugins that extend the functionality for developers to handle any number of needs.

4. It’s easy to use

Our clients love WordPress. We take a lot of care to build in all kinds of little goodies into our code to ensure that our clients can easily contribute to their site and have it look as good as the day it launched. It’s the  combination of the world’s best CMS and the skill to tailor it to the client’s needs, creating a pleasurable experience for content editors (as well as your visitors). You can read more on this topic in our article, “Why Not All WordPress Sites Are Created Equal.”

5. Flexible account management

You can decide who has access and how much access they have to the organization’s website.

It’s quite amazing what a good CMS means to a company or association. When it’s easy, when it’s enjoyable, your site will come alive. Contributors happily add all the great stories your organization has to tell!

Do you have a question about WordPress?

Kelly Patchet

Kelly is a co-founder of GK Media and has been a web content expert and website strategist since 1997.