Why we love WordPress (and recommend it for business websites)

There was a time we took pride in custom-coding new websites from the ground up. That was before the Panda and Penguin updates by Google, when suddenly ‘content’ became the indisputable ‘king’ of organic search engine optimisation (SEO). To perform better in search engine results, websites would need to be continually updated with fresh, high quality, on-topic content – just like a blog. Who would want to continually update their website via some clunky content management system, or have to call-in their web developer every time changes needed to be made?

This was the moment when WordPress – the longtime favourite platform for the world’s blogging community – came into its own as the platform of choice for business website development. We’re heavily into business website development, so we are often asked this question: why do we love WordPress?

With a custom-coded website, the content (words and images, as visible on the website pages) is typically embedded within the code. This would mean only someone with high-level web development skills could access the code, and reliably alter it to reflect owner-requested changes in the content.

WordPress, by contrast, locks website content into the WordPress database on your server. The ‘skin’ or ‘theme’ of the website (the look and feel of it – the design and layout) is a separate issue from the content, and can be changed or upgraded independently, without losing content in the process.

Website fashion evolves as rapidly as clothing or home decor fashion, and as the increasing power of website technology and visitor bandwidth allows. We generally estimate that a website design (if current now) should remain viable and competitive design-wise for about three years.

With content locked in the database, technical changes in the layout and design elements of WordPress are made efficiently and with relative ease.

You could think of a WordPress website as being metaphorically similar to a car chassis, with its drive-train, engine and running gear, onto which you could bolt a different ‘body style’ (exterior) as fashions changed.

Because WordPress was originally designed to support the world’s blogging community, updates are made user-friendly. We can configure Wordpress websites for users to update directly or via email or mobile – just like tweeting, so simple.

Busy people can find it challenging to post news updates to their websites, but these updates are needed for social media and search engine optimisation purposes – and so must be done.

To make life easier for plugged-in, news-posting business owners and executives we can help things along. A few notes or points sent to WordPress as a draft can get us started fleshing out the points into a newsworthy article, and dressing it up for interest with appropriate images.

Notes or drafts sent to WordPress by email or mobile create drafts that we access through the back-end of WordPress. Drafts can be enhanced by us into articles for approval, and the originating author can preview them as they will appear before giving approval – and all this can happen in the back-end of WordPress, without the hassle and risk of passing different versions back and forth by email.

It used to be easy to pick a WordPress-based website because they looked like a blog (even when they were pretending to be something other than a blog).

But as the WordPress user-community grew from millions to gazillions, this momentum created one of the world’s largest and most prolific open-source development communities around WordPress. The technology available to designers and developers working in Wordpress started galloping ahead.

Today, what we can do with WordPress is almost limitless. This is a WordPress website. It sings with powerful messages conveyed in words and images including animations and video. Our news section is very easy to update. I can post articles from a hotel room in Melbourne, a cafe in Sydney, or from out on the farm, without having to mess around with any code.

We have created many business websites in WordPress, and with more exciting developments happening almost every day in Wordpress technology, we will be creating many more. There is a lot to love about WordPress (just ask any of our WordPress website owners).

As one of the world’s most commonly-used and widely-recognised website platforms, WordPress attracts more than its fair share of hacker attacks. There have been times when more than a million WordPress sites across the world have been compromised overnight. Doesn’t that sound scary?

But as hackers grow in number and ever more crafty, so does the honourable technology community’s response to their threat.

We install WordPress plug-ins to block and alert to attack at the frontline, but there are also a number of routine measures we can carry out for the WordPress website owner to minimise, if not totally exclude, the possibility of cyber attack.

It’s important to keep WordPress itself updated with the latest version, and these updates can be released quite frequently, like every few weeks or so. It’s also important to keep all WordPress plug-ins (such as those used for displaying videos and image galleries, and for SEO purposes) up-to-date, as plug-in vulnerabilities can become the keyhole by which hackers try to gain access.

With good barrier protection and continually updated technology, there should be no reason to lose sleep over security with a WordPress site, given that any web-based platform in the world is potentially vulnerable to hacker attack. Our WordPress maintenance program keeps security alerts monitored and platform-related technology updated. This is relatively easy (and therefore cost-effective) for us to do with WordPress, and another reason why we recommend WordPress for business over a custom-coded website.