Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
~ Chinese Proverb
Up until recently the best looking websites around were packed with heavy imagery, Flash splash pages, lots of scripts and other weighty bells n’ whistles. The heaviness doesn’t always translate well on mobile devices and older browsers. Nor do they help search engines like Google send information seekers your way. Why have we starting moving in another direction?
- Google doesn’t like image- and script-heavy sites when indexing pages and crawling for organic traffic.
- Google’s robots don’t recognize Flash.
- Nor does it index pages with fewer than 300 characters (graphic text doesn’t count either.)
- Images taking more than 1/3 of the entire site are not crawled for higher organic listings or search engine optimization. Most of the time they are ignored completely.
- The world has gone MOBILE.
Enter Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress.
I choose to work with WordPress because I can train people to take control of their own websites, they look really great, and search engines and browsers love them.
Empowering website owners
Not too long ago websites required hard coding for every little edit or addition of pages. Web designers and managers had a title like “Webmaster” or some such. Anyone managing a company website had to have a good knowledge of HTML or some other coding language, usually several just to keep a site up to date with technology and the growing variety of browsers. We needed to know how to work with CSS style sheets. We had to have access to the site’s server, c-panel, or FTP to load files and content. All of this was at the beck and call of site owners and marketing departments that needed adjustments and service, like now.
Wordpress website and blog for Grafton Inn. Rich in property, grounds and scenic images, this theme features galleries for rooms, weddings, and the surrounding area of Grafton, Vermont.
This was an accepted part of owning a company website. The nature of the Internet created a demand to keep websites constantly updated and interactive by developers, designers and IT departments.
CMS websites like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Expression Engine, etc. have changed all of that. Today, more designers are creating CMS sites that make editing and managing content easy even for people with minimal computer skills. With a little training, clients can become familiar with how their CMS works and how to use the system’s back end to manage their own sites.
Learning HTML, FTP, CSS, and the other things are still needed to create and edit source code, but are not required knowledge for anyone but designers and developers. What this all means is that we can more easily deliver good looking effective websites that are comprehensive, but easy to learn on the user-end.
By bringing the power of a CMS website in house, you control when you want to update the site. Additionally:
- You don’t need to keep a big ol’ design firm on retainer just to make little changes and additions.
- You can write blog posts, post videos, images, events and articles in a timely way.
- You can sync your social efforts to the stories you post, even automatically if you like.
- A WordPress site is super search engine-friendly, with easy tools on the back end to help reach your conversion and readership goals.
Wordpress website and blog(s) for Valley Medical Center in San JOse, CA, the VMC Foundation engages donors, patients, and community with events, stories, and important health care industry topics.
Creativity and Versatility
WordPress lets a designer create a website with framework that isn’t so heavy. Its mobile-friendly for devices like tablets and smartphones. Site content can be easily optimized to stay on Google’s radar. And site managers can take the baton and create new content, pages, blog posts, and all sorts of elements on the site with no fear of bogging down the load time or bungling search engine indexing.
Want to do it yourself? Easy. WordPress.com (rather than the self-hosted WordPress.org community) lets members create FREE websites and blogs using hundreds of great looking themes that you can even customize to some extent. WordPress.com hosts the free themes and have their own community of support and content management tools.
The difference between .com and .org is self-hosted WordPress sites are completely customizable. Its an open-source program with a huge community of support, plugins, and custom content management tools. The WordPress framework itself is always free, but there are virtually millions of themes out there on the web to install onto the main framework – making them yours. Many are free. Some, like the themes I build upon (paid premium) are customized to fit an organization’s brand, content, viewers, and goals.
Makes you look professional
Blaise+Co. in NYC is actually three WordPress themes wrapped into one branded presence. Main website, blog (Bulletin) and forum (Collaboration.)
WordPress’ user-friendly back end let’s you make updates in a snap. Websites that look fresh and attended-to show visitors you’re on top of your messaging. With WordPress you can:
- Add new and edit current pages, write a quick blog post, and maintain an events calendar.
- Add images. WordPress lets you optimize them.
- Re-order your navigation menu to highlight priority pages as they change.
- Pull in real-time activity on your social places like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc.
Why do I design only for WordPress?
There are a number of comparable CMS programs out there and they all can look great and be easy to use in-house. I chose to work with WordPress exclusively because
- I wanted to be really good at one thing rather than mediocre (at best) at several
- I design/develop using WooThemes products. The support, selection of themes, and quality are second to none. Some of Woo’s components have been worked into WordPress core, like custom navigation.
- 65 million WordPress websites can’t be wrong (check out the counter for just the latest 3.3 version alone. Wow!)
- I get great satisfaction when training clients to use WordPress. Its the look on their faces when they realize how easy it is to use.
- If I fall off the face of the earth, there’s a huge network of support and other WordPress developers right outside the cyber front door ready to step in and help.
Check out the websites I have created using WordPress, most of them with WooThemes »
