Will WordPress Replace Traditional Web Design?

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Today everyone wants/needs to have a website. From the housewives who would like to spread their amazing recipes on their personal blogs, to the photographers with the aim of showcasing their work in their online gallery, and the enterprises who simply cannot compete with their rivals and enlarge their clientele without an online presence. How can these businesses of different size and budget get along and find the right way to having their website done? Does WordPress meet the wide range of requirements?

Changing Trend
The reason I picked this topic is that I’ve been contemplating the phenomenon of the disappearance of hand-coding with amazement. Few years back I worked at a web design agency where we constantly worked on creating websites for clients from scratch. By traditional design, I mean the time consuming hand-coding, building websites from the ground up. Now, this demand seems to fade.

In the recent years, clients have obvious requirements: building their websites based on a CMS (mainly WordPress, we’ll investigate the reasons later).

In the following sections I would like to explain the benefits of CMS’s, the reasons for WordPress being the most popular one, and how it is connected to the descending trend line of traditional web design.

cms-google-trends

The Domination of CMS’s
A Content Management System (CMS) is the key today to have an organized website that rests on solid foundations. CMS’s generally aim to avoid the necessity for hand-coding, nevertheless support coding in case of custom elements or features have to be added to a website’s functionality. CMS’s both facilitate the job of web designers and developers, and help site owners organize and edit their content, as well as provide version-control access to their data and store their files.

CMS’s just like WordPress made it possible for plenty of people to appear online with an own website, by providing a friendly solution at a reasonable price.

The biggest and most popular content management systems of the recent years have been Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. These three are more similar than different considering the main functions a they have to provide. Before any developer kills me for my previous sentence, let’s pinpoint, there are tons of differences of course, but I won’t go into details here, and try to focus on WordPress hereafter, as I have experience in that field.

The Growing WordPress Empire
WordPress proves itself to be far more popular than any other solutions. There may be several reasons for becoming the number one in the recent 3 years. One of these is that WordPress is already much more than a blogging tool it was originally, it is now powering more than 23% of the websites and the number is increasing month by month.

The user base voting for WordPress is growing steadily, as WordPress itself does. They hear about it, read about it, and they are aware of the most important selling point of the platform: it is usable. Thus website owners will be able to update and manage their website later and won’t have to pay for someone else to do it.

WordPress goes far beyond usability and scalability. Its growing community and the hard work of its developers’ army make it possible for everyone to set up a website in no minute, then customize it with the help of the many thousands of tutorials available on the web.

WordPress with its extensions is a goldmine both for a beginner and for a developer. There are more than 30,000 plugins and around 3,000 themes available free of charge in the official WordPress repository, plus the paid ones, which (despite the fact that WordPress may still not be the best choice for a site that needs heavy customization) can help anyone edit a website effortlessly, as well as change the look and the functionality of a site, or extend its features, just like a magic wand.

Why WordPress is Remarkable
There is a long list of special features that WordPress provides. Let’s see why it became the most popular content management system.

  1. Setting up a website “armed” with dozens of features has never been easy. Thanks to WordPress being an open source CMS, anyone can download and use it free of charge, furthermore, themes and plugins are available for free or at a reasonable price.
  2. Social Media Friendly. There are many tools for integrating your site or blog posts automatically with social media, which helps broadening your community circle and gaining new readers and customers.
    SEO Friendly. With its friendly permalink settings, consistent code and powerful SEO plugins this CMS is probably the most SEO friendly of all currently.
  3. User Friendly. The amazing tools and themes aim to provide a “puzzle-effect” for users. Who doesn’t love puzzles, right? Using drag and drop interface and visual composer makes customizing a website a real fun, especially when these two features are combined, like in Startup WordPress Theme released recently by Designmodo.
  4. With the plugin system you can set up almost any functionalities in just a few clicks.

The Costs of Hiring a Designer or a Developer Today
How does this full-scale solution affect traditional design/development work and the whole ecosystem built around it? Let’s see the average prices of creating a WordPress based website traditionally by an agency.

Prices vary a lot thanks to the diverse set and needs of clients. Every business has its unique needs, and it’s not a pushover to match the budget available with the high expectations of the client.

There are several types of agencies and freelancers providing web design and development services. Some of them guarantee overall assistance including creating the website, SEO and marketing services, fixing bugs and maintenance. Others are specialized in one field only. There is a huge difference in prices though, building up a website can cost from $300 to more than $100,000.

The reasons for the gigantic diversity in prices are as follows:

  • Depending on the characteristics of a project, clients can be charged hourly or by the project. Hourly rate is a lot more traceable, but a sum is usually a more fair offer.
  • Freelancers are generally cheaper, as in many cases they do web design part time and charge the client by an hourly rate (an average hourly rate of a freelancer starts at $25, while a small market agency charges from $50/hour, and a large agency does the same from $75 hourly).
  • Prices also depend on the location of the agency. In some leading countries like the US, Australia and the UK clients can assume higher fees.
  • As the price is calculated based on the time spent on working on the project, agencies usually go with a higher fee: they have their separate employees for each task from sales to design, development and maintenance, so fees are multipliable.
  • If a WordPress theme can be used as a base of the website, the grand total will be a way more affordable than in case of building everything from scratch.

Let’s suppose you would like a simple website for your plumbing business, with 3-4 sub pages, with no development work needed, and a custom design. It takes approximately 20 working hours to complete this project, and depending on who you choose (freelancer, small agency) to do the work for you, the project can be done for $500-1000 with a quick turnaround time.

Generally speaking, a website built on WordPress is likely to cost much less than the one built from scratch. Also, once you vote for WordPress, you will still have two options to choose from: doing it with the help of an expert or by yourself.

So Where are We Heading?
While the trend shows that hiring expert web designers and developers is on the wane, there will always be a need for investment in hand-coding. As the range of options that WordPress offers is broadening (and the CMS continues to be dominant on the market), gone are the days when everyone has to pay a fortune for a website. However, there are some businesses who still will. For behemoth enterprises with custom requirements and the need of website maintenance, a webmaster is priceless, and it’s worth paying even hundred thousands of dollars for them.

WordPress – Most Popular CMS with 54% of Market Share

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The infographic also provides statistics on the market share of various content management systems. Based on the analysis and research data, WordPress, with a market share of 54.4%, has a competitive advantage over other top CMSs. Following WordPress, (with margins of difference of more than 45%) are Joomla and Drupal with market shares of 8.9% and 7% respectively.

I build custom wordpress sites.  Lets work together!

CMS Infographic

 

 

How to Use WordPress for Business: Why Some Companies Love WordPress

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WordPress was designed primarily to be used as a blogging platform, but it is also a powerful website content-management system. Here are 10 reasons it works for business.

 

1. WordPress software is free.

While “free” is not always the best business solution, WordPress is well established. “WordPress.org can serve users at all price points from those who want to start with a free theme that they install themselves, to those with more specific needs who can hire a web designer to create a custom theme that integrates with their site and supports their branding,” Cool says. From the start, the only cost will be the price of hosting your site.

2. WordPress is open source.

Why should that matter for your business? Open source means that the technology that powers WordPress is transparent for easier development. As a result there are people all over the world developing new themes and plug-ins to share with other WordPress users. With other blogging programs such as TypePad, users have to learn a specific programming language to use it. Movable Type can be cumbersome for non-techie users.

3. WordPress can be used for simple blogging or full website content.

“It is more appropriate to consider it as a platform for full website content creation and management,” Armeda says. Perhaps you already use WordPress for a personal – or company – blog. With a few adjustments, WordPress can also be used to run a full-service website. This makes it a one-stop solution that can eliminate the need to use two different programs for your company website and blog. “In most cases we create full web properties with WordPress, blogs are a component of these solutions, not the main focus,” Armeda says.

4. WordPress is optimized for SEO.

“I use WordPress for the majority of my websites due to its ease of use and SEO capabilities,” said Katie Wilber, owner of The Marketing Momma. When building any website or blog that’s aimed at a wide audience, search engine optimization (SEO) is important. WordPress has SEO benefits built-in. “WordPress sites tend to do much better in the search engines and rank well quickly,” said Wilber. “I have had several sites that within days of setting the site up with keyword friendly domain names that are ranking on the first page for that keyword.”

5. WordPress is easy to update.

One of the major complaints of business owners is that they can’t update their website themselves, and that having someone else update it costs them money. “Not only is WordPress free it is simple to install,” said Armeda. “It takes no more than five minutes to set up the software.” Once WordPress is set up you can easily update content or create new pages without knowing HTML.

6. WordPress has thousands of extensions.

There is a large community of WordPress developers who create free themes, widgets and plug-ins. There are extensions for polling, contact forms, backing up your site, blocking spam, making your pages load faster and thousands more that can be found on the WordPress Plug-In Directory. “Any enhancement you can think of, type it in to Google and you will find an answer or search the WordPress Plug-In Directory,” said Armeda. From there, you add the new features to your website or blog without having to hire a web developer.

7. WordPress has a supportive community.

WordPress users and developers have online support networks on various forums. And throughout the world, WordCamp conferences are held to talk about everything WordPress. Armeda attended a recent Word Camp held in Orange County, California, and estimates: “70 percent of the attendees were small businesses wanting to advance their online presence and new firms that want to push using WordPress to their clients.” Users also post step-by-step video tutorials that can walk new users through the most basic as well as complex concepts. In addition to a host of free online WordPress resources, if you simply can’t find what you’re looking for or don’t have the time to work on something highly customized for your site, it’s easy to find WordPress developers for hire.

8. WordPress has one-click installation.

Many hosting providers have quick installations of WordPress. “WordPress is convenient as more hosting providers offer easy-install processes for it than for Movable Type,” Cool says.

9. WordPress allows multiple users.

Multiple people at your company can have access to update your website or blog. “WordPress has core role base management and you are able to extend it as the need arises for you and your organization,” Armeda says. You can set permission levels of each user to maintain the security and integrity of your website or blog.

10. WordPress can be self-hosted.

If you decide to use the self-hosted version of WordPress, there is more flexibility in terms of features and design. “If you want to host it you have the ability, but if your company is not there yet you can manipulate WordPress to fit your brand and your needs,” Armeda says.

Choosing the Right WordPress Theme

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A ‘Theme’ on WordPress is the template for your website’s outer skin – what it looks like when people visit your site. No need to design one yourself, you can easily choose from a wide variety of customizable themes right on WordPress itself. As with everything WordPress, you have a lot of options here, just visit themes.wordpress.com. You can choose to go with a Free theme or pay for a Premium theme, but before you go ahead and start making big decisions like that, let’s walk through some tips you should consider for your theme:

Social buttons:

You already know the importance of social media for small businesses, so you have to be able to showcase or at least link to your social media presences directly from your website. You’re already investing time into your online presence, so don’t let this opportunity go to waste. Don’t go for themes with small social icons on the top corners, get one with social icons on the sidebar, preferably with a counter or a direct ‘follow’ button.

Visual media:

Think about how much visual media you will be showcasing on your website. Are you a bakery and intend on putting up pictures of cupcakes every other week? Then you should find a theme with large spaces for visual media, maybe even a slider at the top. If you’re using images, you don’t want them hidden inside posts, you want them previewing on your front page! Visual media always works great, but if you’re not going to be posting pictures all the time, then find a theme that focuses more on text presentation than showcasing images.

Colors:

You have your logo and your color scheme, and you want your site to be compatible with them. A lot of themes are customizable in terms of colors but very few have a wide variety for you to choose from. You also don’t want your logo to be hidden in a corner. So, ask yourself these two questions when searching for themes: 1. Is there enough real estate space for my logo to sucessfully capture attention? and 2. Does it have the colors on my logo?

Don’t overlook the navigation bar:

One of the most important and frequently overlooked aspects of a website is navigation. Your navigation bar is extremely important to your visitors for two reasons: getting where they want to go, and knowing where they currently are. Find a theme with a navigation bar that tells the visitor where he/she is located on the site by either highlighting or making the current page stand out (like below).

How much are you willing to spend?:

Premium themes on WordPress go anywhere from $30 to $150. People choose Premium (paid) themes because they are generally more customizable, higher quality, and have better customer support. While the first two may be mostly true, that isn’t an indication that support for free themes is bad. WordPress has a serious rating and review system that you can trust — for example, Suffusion andResponsive are two popular free themes known for having good support, and it’s shown on their reviews.

 

Why WordPress is the Best Choice for a Website in 2014

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Sometimes a specific Web building platform jumps out at us as a good fit for a particular project; perhaps Weebly for a simple but attractive brochure site, or Joomla for a portal site. However, there’s one Content Management System (CMS) that we all use more than any other, and that system is WordPress.

In this article, we’re going to elaborate on why we think WordPress is the best choice for a new website in 2014.

[Heading}Our Top Ten Reasons:[/Heading] 1. WordPress is now packed with standard features

Although WordPress has retained ease-of-use (and practically the same “back end” interface) for a number of years, the features list has grown exponentially. Menu configuration and media handling are two good examples of things that have got steadily more powerful with no sacrifice made in usability.

Wise enhancements in new versions of WordPress are what has made the platform evolve into a great CMS for all types of websites, and not merely a solid blogging platform.

2. The learning curve is just right

Creating a new post in WordPress and uploading some images is simplicity itself, to the point that real technophobes can use WordPress without feeling intimidated.

At the same time, however, there’s loads of functionality at your fingertips. It’s easy to ignore things you don’t understand, and then gradually learn more and more. By contrast, Joomla and (especially) Drupal, make the basics easy, but then leave you with complex documentation to achieve things that WordPress can do without blinding you with science.

3. The theme selection is as good as it gets

There are thousands of great WordPress themes available, and many of them are completely free. However, it’s at the premium (commercial) end of the market that things get really interesting. Some of the premium WordPress themes essentially work like Web design construction kits in their own right and give you the ability to create sites that look truly world-class – at an average price of about $50!

4. WordPress is easy to monetize

Whether you are selling products directly from your site, or monetizing with ads and affiliate offers, WordPress makes it easy.

Ads are easily inserted using widgets and eCommerce can be handled by a range of plugins including the popular WooCommerce.

5. There are some superb plug-ins

There are so many quality plug-ins for WordPress that you’d be hard pressed to think of any functionality you cannot quickly add to a WordPress site.

Best of all, you can usually find a free plugin to do most things perfectly well. Furthermore, most plugins are downloaded, installed and configured in a matter of minutes. WordPress’ emphasis on ease-of-use seems to have rubbed off on the plug-in writers!

6. Updates just keep coming

As WordPress is so popular, work on the platform never stops. While this sometimes means that keeping on top of updates feels like a never-ending job, it also makes for a system that’s constantly evolving and improving, with new functions being added all the time.

7. Support is second-to-none

As you would expect from such a popular platform, the support community is active and huge. Aside from the dedicated WordPress support resources, you’ll find an abundance of third-party forums and other options for assistance. If you have any question at all, you can be pretty sure that somebody has already answered it somewhere.

8. SEO is made easy

WordPress is inherently quite SEO-friendly, with features such as the ability to automatically generate search-friendly URLS, but with the addition of a couple of plugins, such as the Google XML Site Map and the All-in-One SEO pack, you can force yourself to maintain good SEO discipline, giving your site the best chance of good search results.

Add to this how easy it is to use plugins to integrate with social networks, and a WordPress site can perform very well in terms of modern SEO with quite minimal effort.

9. Setting up a WordPress site is inexpensive

WordPress is open source, so using it costs nothing. Even with the addition of a hosting package and a premium theme, you’re still looking at very little money to get a quality WordPress site up and running. The fact that many great plugins are free helps too.

As an example, following our complete guide to creating a professional website (using a premium theme) costs little more than $100 in total.

10. WordPress remains the best blogging platform

We’ve left this point until last as it does no harm to remember that WordPress started out as a pure blogging platform.

It remains a great (if not the greatest) blogging platform around. WordPress is a great choice for a new website and an obvious choice for a new blog.

If you’ve yet to try WordPress, we seriously recommend you give it a go. If it’s been a while since you worked on a website, you will find what you can do with such a simple interface truly staggering.