Why we develop websites on WordPress
Open Source
WordPress is an open-source project maintained by the community and Automattic. It offers big benefits:
- Free to use and modify as needed
- Beautiful and intuitive user interface
- Simple, powerful and expandable foundation for websites
- Thousands of 3rd party plugins, usually decreasing development time
- Great documentation and community support
Search Engine Optimization
Another big win for WordPress is its incredible per-page SEO capabilities. True SEO comes from content and proper coding (among other things, of course). WordPress lets us boil down important page elements as input boxes, ensuring it is coded properly. Part of our web training will cover how to most effectively use some of the input fields to give your content a better chance at getting indexed by search engines and ranked higher.
Paste from Word
I use the Paste from Word feature to let Word markup content properly. WordPress recognizes things like headings, bold text, and links and automatically codes it correctly. Try my style set for Word if you’re having issues using this feature.
Automated Feeds, Search engine pings
Our own website (on WordPress) automatically updates our Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts as we post new content. Going back to SEO, WordPress goes one step further and pings Google, Yahoo, and Bing when content is updated or added so they can rescan the site and update their search results cache. It will also keep your sitemap.xml file updated automatically, which search engines often use to help navigate your website.
Revision History
WordPress keeps a revision history of all the changes made to a page or post, complete with the date and user who made the change. So you can go back in time to an earlier version of that page if it gets compromised in some way.
Drafts, Post/Pre date
You can save new posts/pages as a Draft instead of actually publishing the page. This lets you see your content as a normal user would, but you’re not obligated to publish it and you won’t lose your changes. Also, you can set pages/posts to automatically publish at a specific date/time in the future. We do this sometimes on our own site to make sure our blog posts have a time gap between their deployments.
Trash/Recycle bin
WordPress has a trash feature, just like Recycle Bin on your computer. Here, you can restore or delete things permanently.
Drag and drop navigation menu
WordPress has a great way of managing navigation menus. You simply add the page, then drag+drop it into place. It’s like dragging a file into a folder on your computer—very intuitive.
Automated database backups
Plugins are available that automatically backup your database every day, week, biweekly, etc., so you have a known good version to revert back to just in case.
Plugins
If you need to add functionality or tweak something down the road, WordPress typically provides a simple way of doing it or someone out there has already written a plugin that we can integrate rapidly.
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