I'm starting to feel like we're beating the same drum with back to back articles about WordPress, but the simple fact is that marketing with WordPress makes a lot of sense for most businesses of pretty much any size. It takes planning and effort, but of all the low cost ways to grow and market your business, writing blog articles can eat away at your competitor's market share in a way that is difficult, if not impossible, for them to compete with. It's hard to decide whether WordPress's incredible ability to reliably achieve top search rankings, or the ease by which site owners can manage their websites is the more valuable feature, but in my view search engines always win out over everything else. Not true in all situations, however. For a lot of business owners, providing a simple means of managing content is key. This is especially true for companies that use their websites to supply current information to an established user base. SEO may be be a factor in this case, but by no means most important. For most organizations, search engines rule. If you are selling a product or service, achieving top search engine rankings can mean the difference between success and failure. With WordPress, I've spent years experimenting with the right combination attributes and discovered that it is possible to achieve more or less real-time indexing of your website content. What this means is that, within minutes of your publishing an article (post or page), Google will have already added it to its search engine results page (SERP). I can't emphasize enough what realtime search indexing means to most businesses. By eliminating the normal crawl cycle, search engine marketers (as well as non-technical website owners or content managers) can get onto the SERP in a few minutes, a process that often takes 30 days or more--sometimes much more. Generally speaking, my list of top reasons business owners should consider WordPress is as follows...
All this sounds great, and it is. But, there are a few things for which WordPress may not be the best choice. Topping that list is large scale e-commerce. While there are many plugins (WooCommerce is one popular example) that make selling products possible, and even simple, none that I've worked with are ready for prime time. WordPress also may not be the best choice for websites that must present many varying types of data or content. For example, a site with several regions or feature areas on each type of page. To do this using WordPress, programmers often issue database calls to specific post categories or tags and display the result in the appropriate location on the webpage. It seems clever enough, but if you have a lot of them, things get out of hand pretty quickly. We've resolved the issue by doing unique things with custom post types, but there are times that a more traditional content management system (CMS) makes a better choice. This isn't so much of an issue here, but most web designers simply don't have the programming skills to do any serious custom work within the WordPress engine. As a result, many web designers install off the shelf themes and modify them. Many times, that's fine, but these modifications can be a nightmare if done improperly. For example, your website can be completely wiped out just by performing a routine update. Even with a few drawbacks, I'd say that 70% of the web development projects we do are custom WordPress websites. And, we are an engineering firm capable of building anything our clients dream up from scratch. If you've got questions about whether WordPress might be a good fit for your website project, drop me a note with a few details (joe@ocgcreative.com) and I'll be glad help you explore your options.
Unless you're in the business of designing websites, or your business is primarily e-commerce in nature, chances are you hate dealing with your website altogether. You're not alone, and there are plenty of good reasons. However, lots of business websites are bringing value to the businesses they to support, minus the frustrations. First, let's take a look at what those frustration points are then examine ways of avoiding them.
One of the key premises all business success is built upon is clear access to accurate information. With the web, however, everything seems shrouded in mystery. Endless technical barriers and other considerations act as barriers to keep the site owner from making clear decisions.
Some designers even use industry lingo and vague references as a smokescreen keep the business owner from engaging too directly. It's a dependency thing. If the web designer can keep the website owner convinced that any meaningful input should be left to "experts," the result is a measure of job security for the designer.
For you, the business owner insists that everything your web designer does can be justified in business terms that make sense. Our approach is to put in writing everything we do, and explain it in normal speaking language. We go further by empowering our clients to take control of their own websites, blogs, etc. We even provide a "nerd to human" decoder ring! Well, okay, I made that up, but we do make sure our website owners have the tools necessary to ensure their own success online.
This one's tough, even for us. Certain things take longer than expected. It's just one of the struggles, we as web developers must deal with. However, when you, the business website owner builds a strategy with the expectation that something will be finished on a certain date, that date is vitally important.
In our firm, we do two things. First, we track every minute spent on every task performed by every member of every project. As a result, we know how long things take. On top of that, we're so confident in our ability to estimate, that we offer our clients a no-risk guarantee. In other words, if we miss a deadline, you don't pay. So, when we say it'll be ready on Friday, you can be sure you'll have it on Friday, whatever "it" is.
The internet is a technical world, and only getting more so. It's just reality. As technologies evolve, business demands on how to best put the web to work evolve too. We love it. We love the challenges. We love the newness, and we love the idea that we're breaking through boundaries with each new project. But, when you're busy running a company, technical challenges can be very frustrating.
Our solution is to be as full service as our clients need. Often this means that we do it all. We are a team of strategists, analysts, engineers and artists. It is our job to keep you from having to deal with technical issues that take you away from running your business.
Perhaps the worst thing business owners have to put up with regarding their business websites, are snotty, condescending web designers. You know you just want to punch the little twerp, but you can't because next thing you know, your website will be promoting some unmentionable and it's only then that you learn he's holding your domain name for ransom.
While we confess a certain level of nerd-dom, we send the snotty geeks to seek employment elsewhere. The truth is, we don't like them either.
When it comes to CMS's I was strictly "old school" for years. I had it in my head that if you didn't "roll your own" you were somehow cheating the client by charging for code you didn't actually write. Maybe there was a bit of ego involved too. And, there's the fact the web was a completely different thing. Back then, the Internet was more or less a static world where we "hand-coders" would scoff at Dreamweaver (I still do), and pretty much anything that made doing web easy. After all, the Internet was new frontier where nerds ruled and the technical barriers were plentiful. The problem was that nerds generally turn up their noses at anything they haven't come up with themselves, or that wasn't handed down by some supreme nerd that has earned dominance by taking lesser nerds to some cyber-version of the coding woodshed. So, business workflows, marketing objectives and other economically valid reasons for a website's existence rarely factored into the design and development process. The site owner, basically would get what the programmer knew how to build--or wanted to build.
WordPress grew in popularity as a blogging engine. Being incredibly easy for non-technical people to learn and use, WordPress quickly earned its place as a standard bearer for what a blog engine should be. But, being a blog platform, site owners would (and still do) find themselves in need of features not natively included in the WordPress code base. For that, thousands of individual developers have been creating solutions, in the form of plugins, for years. A plugin is essentially an additional program that runs inside WordPress to make it do things like e-commerce, membership management, or whatever fits the needs of the site owner.
Plugins provide custom functionality. Themes provide the look. There are a couple thousand themes available on the WordPress site alone. Some are great, most are okay, and others, well, suck. The best WordPress themes are those that meet the requirements of the website without causing problems with the underlying code base, or lead to issues with other plugins or future updates. At our Reno web design company, we prefer to build themes from scratch although sometimes it isn't necessary or practical especially from a budgeting standpoint. When we work with third party themes, we always develop derivative themes, which in WordPress terms are called "child themes." Child themes insilate our code and modifications to the design from being overwritten by future updates.
Custom WordPress themes are themes we build entirely from the ground up. Building custom WordPress themes is very involved, requiring many hours of planning, design and development. An example of a custom WordPress theme we developed recently is Esteem Medical Spa & Salon. Esteem Medical Spa & Salon is a perfect example of why WordPress is so popular, and why we've grown to take WordPress development so seriously. As a Medical Spa, Esteem has a staff of very talented people who perform non-surgical treatment with exceptional results. Like most organizations, they should be focusing on their specialty service and not sifting through the technical nuances of website content management. When they came to us, they had a website with slow load times and poorly optimized pages for search. After proving our internet marketing capabilities they were more than happy to let us create a much better website experience.
The bottom line is WordPress is a very powerful content management tool when it comes to Reno web design. On the other hand, most WordPress websites are easy to spot since they tend to follow a similar structure. As mentioned earlier, custom WordPress development is complex; however, it is a solid choice of CMS for just about any business.
