Originally posted in 2016, this post was updated on November 16, 2021.
Why should a small business or organization use WordPress to build their website? It’s a good question. and sometimes the answer is that the business shouldn’t. But a lot, and I mean a lot, of small and medium sized businesses have found WordPress the best choice for them. Lots of different ways to count the stats, of course, but most of the ways they count, WordPress powers about 40% of the web.
So, why is it a good choice? There are lots of reasons. We’ll talk about three today.
- It’s popular
- It could be more difficult
- You can focus on your content.
It’s popular
Ok, that sounded straight out of the fourth grade. And I found the fourth grade very annoying. No, I’m not suggesting you trust WordPress with a significant part of your digital marketing because it is the cool thing to do.
One factor in your decision is the ease of finding products and services. There might be a technically superior choice out there but it doesn’t matter if you can’t find people who know the software when you need training, employees, or additional features for your site. If you are a small business, you can find the WordPress help and add-on software when you need it. Guaranteed. WordPress is everywhere.
It could be more difficult
Everyone talks about how easy WordPress is. That is basically bull. It does too much to be that easy. The web isn’t that simple anymore. And now we have all of these annoying bad guys who take up a lot of resources on websites just because they weren’t raised right and can’t put their otherwise impressive skills to good use.
But false advertising aside, WordPress is learnable. You can do it. Even if you have a lot of other things to do; and chances are you do or you wouldn’t need a website, right? Yeah, see, that’s the part the “WordPress is easy” crowd doesn’t get. Because they do WP all day long so it’s easy for them.
And, back to reason #1, you can find people who will do all the stuff you don’t have time or inclination to do yourself. That makes it easy.
This is a screenshot of the editor where you add your content. Not too bad, huh?
You can focus on your content
It doesn’t matter if you have items in your eCommerce shop, online courses behind a paywall, or descriptions of the professional services you offer or the charitable work you do. Whatever your site’s content, that is where your focus needs to be. Content is also what will make your website a success.
If you love all the techie details, you can do it all. If you don’t have that kind of time, find someone to hire or contract with who will do whatever you don’t want to. And sure, we do that.
The way WP is built, it really handles separation of content (text, pictures, that stuff) and appearance and mechanics all nicely separate. It also handles multiple users with different permissions. Those two broad features combine to control who can do what and when. And that means, control over who can goof up what. That’s excellent.
Takeway: If you want to ignore the all the techie stuff, you can. And you won’t break your site.
So, WordPress is pretty cool. Whether you want a simple site that you can make small additions and changes to yourself or you want a complex site that handles shopping carts, members-only areas or a host of other difficult tasks, WordPress is worth considering.
If you’d like to know more, get a hold of us.