What’s in a Wordpress Website?

Wordpress started as a blogging platform and is still used extensively for this purpose. However, over the past few years it has increased in popularity as a platform for building websites. A Wordpress website offers many powerful benefits in its user friendliness and strong CMS (Content Management System) capabilities.

As an open source platform, Wordpress has all the usual benefits. Developers are constantly amending, updating and improving features – all of which are immediately available to users. You don’t need to buy a license to use this software or benefit from its improvements, so it can make a lot of financial sense.

Probably the most attractive feature of a Wordpress website is that all code is web standard. This makes Wordpress sites popular with Google and many people report the Wordpress website getting picked up and listed on Google within a very short space of time.

Given that Wordpress began as a blogging platform, this feature is also particularly strong. Blogging is an excellent way to build content on your site, making it both user and search engine friendly.

Wordpress website snapshot:

• Very easy to use, no HTML knowledge required for set up
• Huge number of add-ons available
• Search engine friendly
• Easy to update and manage content
• Easy integration of images, written content and video
• Wordpress is free, you pay to purchase themes, customise or upgrade
• Free support from Wordpress forums and users world wide

The limitations of a Wordpress website

Wordpress is not the most powerful platform when it comes to large scale ecommerce. Your Wordpress website will be fine to sell a few products from, but for larger catalogues you may be better off exploring Joomla or Magento.

Adding and removing posts, as well as changing the navigational structure, requires some knowledge of the Wordpress scripting language and potentially CSS as well. In this regard, making changes to your site can be time consuming and you may need to employ a web developer with expertise in Wordpress to expedite certain processes.