Date: 29/11/2024
Author: W&P Marketing

Introduction

So what is all this talk about WordPress? We hear you cry!

You might be thinking about getting your current website redesigned for a brand-new website designed for your business?

You might have gone around various web design agency’s offices, and they’ve offered you every single type of fancy coffee and the sun?

You might have been offered flat whites and double espresso’s, and if the web design agency is really fancy, you might have been provided with a “pumpkin spice latte”—that’s our favourite.

Jokes aside, if you’re interested in having a website designed, you’ve most probably heard about the content management system “WordPress”. In our humble opinion, it’s the best CMS out there, and we create most of our clients’ websites using WordPress.
WordPress was launched in 2003, it is now, by a large margin, the most popular content management system worldwide, powering over 60 million websites worldwide!

One of the reasons we recommend WordPress is that we’ve seen companies being talked into using bespoke content management systems that either been built by the web design agency itself or it’s a CMS the web design agency has recommended that practically no one outside of the web design company may have heard of!

The question we always ask our clients is, why reinvent the wheel?

Why choose a content management system you never heard about?

Why not pick one that’s good quality, reliable, and used by millions of businesses worldwide? This is why we recommend WordPress. So don’t invent the wheel, choose a system that’s popular worldwide, choose WordPress.

It’s like buying a car; some brands are reliable, dependable, and designed to be, well really good, so there is a safe bet. Why would you want to go for car brand you never heard of, that is more expensive and perhaps less reliable? Unless you’re looking for something high-performance sports car to make a statement that is!

We deviate again; lets get back on point is, why reinvent the wheel?

So, whether you run a small business with a large company, WordPress is fantastic for most businesses’ requirements. This is why we recommend it to our clients all the time.

Avoid basic, nasty-looking websites

We see this all so often: the business is in a rush to start up, could be a self-employed consultant or small business, and they have a bash at builing the website themselves.

When ends up happening? Is a website that looks like a glorified business card online? It’s naff, its full of stock photos, and it’s too basic.

So we can recommend a WordPress hands down, everytime to our clients.

Table of contents:

• What type of websites can be designed and built using WordPress?
• What are the main benefits of choosing WordPress?
• How long has WordPress been running for?
• How to start building WordPress websites

What Is WordPress?

WordPress is simply an open-source CMS. If you don’t know what CMS stands for, it stands merely for the “content management system. The benefits of owning a CMS such as WordPress are clear; it allows the owner to log in using a username and password to the administration panel.

However, in the admin panel, within WordPress CMS is called the “dashboard”; there you can change almost everything about the website. Depending on the template or design, you can change the wording, the colour scheme, the pictures, and the page layout.

So, many businesses, hear in Cardiff, allow web developers to build their websites for them initially because this often a lot of work and the business may not have the time to do this work themselves.

Yet, Because they’ve been built using WordPress, they can change the design later themselves later. For example, they might move from Cathedral Road to City Road in Cardiff; they can change the address themselves if they own WordPress website.

A WordPress website has benefits because the content management system has a simple and straight forward to use dashboard. You don’t need any coding knowledge or even know what PHP means. You can make the edits yourself within the dashboard.

What type of businesses use WordPress?

When WordPress was first launched in 2003, most websites were rather simplistic blogs, which were designed using WordPress. However, things have now changed substantially. Intricate e-commerce websites can be built using WP and the plugin, WooCommerce, and many global brands even use WordPress because it’s a fantastic quality content management system.

WYSIWYG editor

The WordPress WYSIWYG editor is built into the actual CMS, which is fantastic and allows you to edit blog posts that your adding.
Therefore, without coding knowledge, you can make the text bold, add a H1 tag, and add internal links and anchor text.

In our opinion, out of all content management systems and the sun, we think WordPress and the WYSIWYG are superb.

What things do I need in place to design a WordPress website?

Think about the domain name and make sure it’s available

There are a lot of businesses that contact web designers to get a website designed, yet they may not have finalised a choice of business name just yet. So they may not have purchased a domain name.

Sometimes, for example, a customer might ask, “Can you go ahead and start designing the website and we give the business name and domain name later?”
Often you cannot.

That’s because the content marketing needs to be written to include the business name.

We must also register a domain name for a company such as GoDaddy, and the domain name must be available.

What you often find is that when you select the perfect domain name, that’s a short name, that sticks in your mind, well often sometimes it will already be taken.

That domain name might be reserved by another businesses, or someone has parked the domain and now asking thousands of pounds for your domain name every year for another business to use it.

So before you contact the web developer or designer, think about a business name and check whether it’s available on a domain name registrar such as GoDaddy or on 123Reg or 20i. if your domain name is available, say for £9.99 a year, snap it up, as someone else might take it. For example, sometimes a business might have to pay thousands sometimes, if it’s a really good domain name that they want, but someone else has parked it.

You have to install an SSL certificate

You should ask your web designers to add an SSL certificate to the page.

Start burning the midnight oil and start writing!

So you do have to burn the midnight oil sometimes and write a lot of content marketing in order to get a website up and running; for example, even with a small brochure website with just seven pages or less, you could sometimes have an excess of 3000 words that need to be written!

This can’t just be any old waffle. The content marketing must be high quality.

It must be well-written and persuasive so people want to buy your company’s products or services.

Therefore, we ask our clients to write the text before contacting our web design agency. Sometimes, writing this text can take many months, so you might want to have the text in place before contacting your web designer to start building a website.

Different page builders

When you select WordPress, you can choose from different page builders such as “Elementor” and “Divi”. However, our firm favourite is “WP Bakery”.

Your web designers should show you how different page builders work. Some people prefer different page builders; we like WP Bakery.
However, another company might prefer Elementor.

It does come down to choice. However, we say you need to sit down with your web developer and ask them to show you how these different page builders work, because you need to use them to edit everything from the text on the website, through to adding pictures, or say adding new blog posts you have written. So you must find the WordPress page builder simple to use.

If you don’t find them simple, you might want to try different page builders. However, you need to talk with the web designer about which page builder you want because changing once the website has been built, is a very hard task to do.

Why Use WordPress?

So why do so many businesses choose WordPress?

It’s a widely stated statistic that over 40% of all websites have been built using WordPress!

It’s a content management system with tens of millions of websites built using it.

This is good for so many reasons. It’s good because it’s been around for a long time; it’s been improved and refined, just like a fine wine; it has improved with time.

It’s now a simple-to-use, elegant and brilliant content management system.

Many businesses can use it, from car garages through to solicitors practices- well just about any business can use WordPress. Perhaps you’re thinking about launching a product range and setting up an e-commerce business, well there are plugins such as Woocommerce, which make an absolute piece of cake to turn WordPress into an e-commerce store.

A Brief History of WordPress

WordPress has been around for a very long time, since 2003. It was first created by Matt Mullenweg, who wanted to design a website that you could edit and improve without modifying the source code. This is when WordPress first started. We here at this web design company have to say a massive thank you to Matt Mullenweg.

The Importance of WordPress 1.0

WordPress 1.0 was first offered to businesses in 2004. It had the name “Davies” back then, and when WordPress since then has rolled out many updates each being assigned with a code name.

An example of a popular, well-known update, the significant change WordPress was called “Gutenberg” update.

Come and have a chat with us

Come and have a chat with our web design agency, we design fantastic websites; we have experience designing websites for a wide range of businesses, everything from dental practices through to car garages.

We are WordPress experts within Cardiff

Why not give us a ring today?