If you’re busy:
- Reliable Platform: WordPress’s proven track record since 2003 makes it a trusted choice for web development.
- User-Friendly: Intuitive management tools mean anyone can update their website with ease.
- Extensible: WordPress’s vast plugin ecosystem allows for extensive customization and functionality.
- Community Support: A large developer community ensures shared knowledge and solutions.
- Open-Source: WordPress promotes transparency and flexibility, allowing for full control over your web presence.
- Expertise at Banas Web Design: We specialize in WordPress to deliver high-quality, tailored web solutions.
If you’ve got a minute:
WordPress is an Open-Source Content Management System that provides users with an easy-to-understand platform for creating and managing their website’s content. WordPress has been around since 2003 and has since grown to power more than 40% of of all websites on the internet. This huge market share has incredible benefits for WordPress users and developers, but also some things that do need to be taken into consideration when creating a WordPress website.
Why we like WordPress.
Banas Web Design reaches for WordPress by default, not just because it’s the tool that we’ve built our careers around but because it’s proven to be a reliable, verbose and widely-supported tool that has stood the test of time. We do re-evaluate other platforms constantly, and often work on projects that use platforms like Wix, Shopify, Squarespace and Webflow, while also keeping an eye out for up-and-coming platforms. If there was an option more well-rounded and durable than WordPress we would use it, plain and simple, but we always seem to choose WordPress.
User-Friendly
WordPress is intuitive, if you can login to a Facebook account and make a post, you can manage content on a WordPress website. With that said, of course everybody has different levels of comfortability and experience with technology and so we offer WordPress training for all of our clients – we will take you from zero to WordPress hero.
Extensible
Extensi-what? Extensible means that while WordPress is good on its own, it’s real power comes from it’s ability to be added to. For instance, WordPress doesn’t have its own calendar app, but WordPress allows and wants developers to create calendar apps that can play nice with the WordPress system. This allows for a competitive marketplace of WordPress plugins and themes that are all trying to outdo each other.
Contrast this marketplace with platforms like Squarespace that have one addon that allows you to set up a calendar on your site, but what if that calendar is missing features? What if there are bugs in the code that they won’t fix? You’re stuck dealing with it.
WordPress Community Support
Along with a 40% market share of the internet’s websites, comes a ~40% market share of web developers and those web developers love to talk to each other and solve problems for each other. If you have a problem on a WordPress site, it’s extremely unlikely someone else hasn’t had that problem before. You can Google any issue and there will be pages and pages of people discussing your exact issue – or you can bring your problem to the WordPress experts at Banas Web Design and save yourself some frustration.
Open Source
Last, and certainly not least, probably most actually.. Open source software is vitally important to the health of the internet, and WordPress is one of the largest open-sourced projects out there – you can go and look through every file of it if you want to. Open source software is software that is open and free for anyone to view, use or contribute to. This software lives in repositories on platforms like Github, Gitlab or Bitbucket.
We believe in and support open source projects because the alternative is having every piece of software you use in your daily life be owned by corporations that are not beholden to its users, but to its shareholders which leads to price gouging. I often think of the quote “don’t build your house on rented land”, and it applies with websites too – if your website is built on Shopify’s platform, you are beholden to Shopify. If your website is built in WordPress, you don’t even need to know who owns the trademark because it’s completely irrelevant to your business.
Things to consider when working with WordPress.
WordPress lacks a truly powerful E-Commerce solution
WooCommerce is the consensus-best E-Commerce solution for WordPress sites, but it simply does not scale well to larger E-Commerce outfits or ones that may have massive jumps in sales traffic. This is due to inherent flaws with WooCommerce’s caching architecture – woah, let’s slow down with the tech stuff nerd. WooCommerce works great for smaller businesses or businesses with predictable sales traffic, but may struggle in other situations, in which case we would reach for a solution like Shopify which is built to handle much larger E-Commerce operations.
Its biggest strength can also be its biggest weakness
Remember when I said the word extensible and you were like “man this guy is smart!”? That extensibility can be a double-edged sword if not properly accounted for. Nearly every WordPress site uses themes and plugins that are not native to WordPress, they are built by someone else. Whether that someone is a multi-million dollar company or your weird neighbor can be tough to discern sometimes. This can present serious problems for WordPress developers and website owners because it can introduce software that may have vulnerabilities in it.
Security, speed, and overhead are the trifecta of WordPress concerns. Left unchecked, they can spiral into significant issues. A plugin with an exploit, for instance, can open the door to vulnerabilities, while bloated plugins can slow down your site, compromising user experience and SEO rankings. The overhead of maintaining and updating a complex suite of plugins can also be cumbersome. Therefore, it’s crucial to choose reliable plugins and themes, keep them updated, and regularly review your site’s performance and security. This proactive approach helps ensure your WordPress site remains a robust and efficient digital presence.
Whether you choose WordPress or another platform, Banas Web Design will be there from start to finish to make sure your website project goes as smooth as butter.
