Amy Elderkin
The support staff here at Webnames.ca has witnessed first hand the rise of WordPress’ popularity over the last few years. More and more, customers are asking if our hosting plans support WordPress, wanting to know how to install it, or even just wanting to know whether we think WordPress is the right solution for their website needs. Last summer, Webnames.ca introduced its FastTrack web design service, which uses WordPress as the platform to build the site. At first glance, one might think that Webnames.ca decided to do this simply because WordPress is “popular”. After all, as of December 2011, WordPress 3.0 had been downloaded over 65 million times, and has surpassed giants like Joomla and Drupal in the arena of popular content management systems (CMS).
But like anything that’s popular – take Google, Facebook, or iPhones – it can be a good exercise to examine why it’s popular, and why people like it. With WordPress, there are a host of incentives that led to Webnames.ca choosing it for our FastTrack program, and they’re the same rationales that might make WordPress the right choice for your website. Take a look at our web design options.
WordPress is easy to use
I say this with a wee bit of apprehension. After all “easy-to-use” is a relative term. My mom finds her iPad easy to use. Not so much with a PC. She loves her Mac though. Bottom line here is that for the general, non-programming population, WordPress has a user interface that is graphical and not intimidating to people attempting to take control of their website for the first time. It’s also relatively painless to install and get started with almost immediately.
WordPress is free
And who doesn’t like free stuff? Now if WordPress was free and made terrible websites, that would be another story, but WordPress makes some great looking web pages. And for a small start up business or non-profit organization, saving cash is imperative. So you can make updates as you need to, not need a web designer, and you don’t have to buy any software. Furthermore, you can host your site wherever you want (Webnames.ca also provides 100% Canadian web hosting). This flexibility gives its users the freedom of choice to pick the host with the most, rather than having to go with the maker of the CMS (i.e. wix.com).
WordPress is both customizable and search engine friendly
Search engine bots can easily scan a WordPress site, something which has previously been a challenge for a lot of the CMS’s on the market. Another advantage WordPress has is that it has thousands of themes and plug-ins to choose from. People generally dread their cherished website looking like everyone else’s web site, and WordPress does a great job at giving its users a lot of freedom to customize. For SEO, WordPress’ customizable themes, link building and social media capability, all help with SEO, and the numerous plug-ins available like WordPress SEO by Yoast can help advanced users optimize their websites even more.
A broad community of users
One good thing about jumping on the bandwagon of something that has a huge following is the amount of support there is available. Not only from the forums at wordpress.org, but there are plenty of WordPress-related sites out there that cover troubleshooting, and tips to help other users when they get stuck.
So, if you’re still not convinced that WordPress is the way to go for an inexpensive means of taking control of your space on the web, take a look at some of the sites that we’ve created using it!
Check out FastTrack today!
FastTrack offers a professional looking website quickly and affordably using WordPress. Learn more about FastTrack and how you can get started.