There is a lot more to WordPress that meets the eye. Whether you are looking for a personal blog to express your thoughts or a business site to build your brand, WordPress is a convenient platform to look towards in beginning this endeavor. Though this may be surprising to the Average Joe, WordPress is actually an extremely powerful (not to mention free) web-building platform that can be used as a blog, website, content management system, or anywhere in between. From the beginnings of WordPress in 2003, it has grown into a highly developed, robust, and user-friendly platform that allows for “thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes” to be integrated to a WordPress site (http://wordpress.org/about/). This is due to it’s Open Source nature that permits anyone with the pertinent skills to create their own tools and themes to customize their site however they want. And because WordPress is Open Source and free, it means new functions are added or improved upon constantly and are easily available to the public. This is perhaps one of the most important aspects of WordPress because it enables the average-user to build a customized site quickly, inexpensively, and with little difficulty.
WordPress is constantly evolving as a result of its strong Open Source community who is always innovating to drive more functionality across the platform. With approximately 1,400 themes and 15,000 plugins (Devious Media 2011), it enables users to easily develop a site customized to their brand and functions specific to their business. Plugin examples include registration/invoicing, shopping carts, photo/video galleries, to name a few – if you think it, the likelihood is that it is out there and if it isn’t, some one can develop it for you (Byrne, MKTG486, October 25, 2012). WordPress can handle the traffic and functionality from a simple blog to a full on e-commerce website, which is why it is a great platform to use at any point in a company’s lifecycle. Their sites are easily scalable, so if it’s a new, large, or rapidly growing business, WordPress will readily be able to meet the functional demands required by both creator and user. Themes are interchangeable, and done so without have to shut down the site for maintenance. A new theme can be introduced without compromising the integrity of the site, or any of the content currently published. Furthermore, due to it’s Open Source platform, the creation, customization, and maintenance costs remains relatively low as there are a large number of developers constantly saturating the marketing with new additions.
Using WordPress as the central hub for all your social media tools will be very effective at driving more traffic to the site. The WordPress platform is truly a content management system as its ability to double as both a website and a blog, which allows for key words and phrases to be easily detected in a centralized location. And the more you blog, post updates, and feed more information into the web, the more chances a “search” will trace back to your WordPress site (Professor Atkins, MKTG486, October 25, 2012). So, by having all your content managed and contained across one platform, you open yourself up to more Search Engine Optimization opportunities. It will also make cross-promotion to other social media platforms much more fluid as there are readily available plugins that are easily integrated. “Blogs offer the best opportunity for sharing thoughts and information, so use other, less content-heavy platforms to promote the deeper ideas found in blog posts” (p. 96, Barker, Barker, Bormann, Neher, 2013). WordPress creates seamless integrated marketing communications by being able to connect across other social media platforms providing ease and consistency of communication.
The versatility and ease-of-use of the WordPress platform is what makes it so popular. As the world’s fastest growing web publishing platform, many people are realizing that moving towards WordPress as a one-stop-shop for many of your web and social media needs is the way to go. And because it is so easy to use, anyone at any technical skill-level will still be able to contribute and add content to the site. Once the site is developed through incorporating themes and plugins, knowledge of coding is unnecessary, as content will still be managed in the simple WordPress backend. This significant advantage allows for businesses to be quick to post updates and stay relevant without having to wait for their web-developers to add content for them. WordPress fully empowers users to be able to manage the content themselves.
It’s reassuring to know that large companies (and in very different industries) such as CNN, Mashable, and UPS are using WordPress as their web publishing platform (www.matmon.com/resource-blog/website-design/ten-companies-and-sites-using-wordpress/), and it further demonstrates that although free and easy to use, WordPress is a sophisticated enough to perform a variety of uses. Along with its ability to post blogs and to aggregate all your content into a centralized location, WordPress also tracks metrics, which provides insight on what is buzzing and trending. And with its user-friendly and ever-evolving platform, it’s no wonder that 14.3% of the top million websites out there are built on WordPress (Devious Media 2011).
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