A few years back WordPress may have been little more than a very rudimentary tool to get your thoughts online without bothering with issues such as programming, design, hosting etc. Fast forward to 2012, and WordPress is powering 15% of all websites worldwide, and out of all the websites using a Content Management System, WordPress powers 53.7%.
WordPress has many capabilities, thanks to the thousands of free or premium plugins available. The primary functionality of WordPress is content, whether it’s text, video, images or a combination of them. So for websites that want to represent what an individual or a company does, WordPress is more than enough.
If what you need from a website is to display your products and services, some history about you or your business, a way for clients to contact you, then WordPress is ready to meet your needs without any setups.
However, if you sometimes decide that you want to do encourage people to share your website on their Facebook wall, on Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest etc. all you need is a social sharing plugin, and your website is equipped with social media sharing buttons. There are literally hundreds of them, all free.
When you decide to expand your marketing to Email, there are hundreds of email marketing plugins that can meet any need you have, whether it’s a simple signup form to capture emails, or it’s a full-fledged email marketing platform, WordPress can handle it with the right plugin.
Want eCommerce, no problem. There are hundreds of plugins that will turn any WordPress-powered website into an e-commerce website. As e-commerce a complex issue, you will need to do some research and try out different plugins, but most of them are easy to set up for Paypal processing, setting shipping fees, taxes, physical or digital sales etc.
More advanced plugins offer multiple payment processors like AlertPay, 2Checkout, Moneybookers (aka Skrill), so your website will be able to turn visitors into buyers relatively easy.
There are also plugins that can turn your website into a membership site, so you can monetize your premium content by selling subscriptions and even different levels of subscriptions. All you’ll need is the right plugin for your needs, and that’s it.
WordPress also comes with over 1000 free themes directly accessible from the Admin Dashboard, but there are also tons of premium themes with added functionality, and beautiful design.
All in all, today, WordPress is a powerful web platform that powers millions of websites. Here are some websites that rely on WordPress:
- eBay
- Yahoo
- Ford
- Wall Street Journal
- Sony
- CNN
- Jane Fonda
- MTV
- The UK Prime Minister’s Office
- People Magazine
The millions of other websites out there, and the many more that rely on WordPress daily, are setting the standard of how a free platform that is easy to use but is also extremely flexible, can power almost any website you can think of… provided you don’t expect a website to make you coffee. There’s no plugin to this date that makes coffee.
So if you’re looking for a web design, or web redesign, and you expect the website to grow together with your business, opt for WordPress. It’s free, easy to maintain, extremely flexible, and the best thing is you can manage it for a relatively small fee compared to other, more technically demanding free CMS systems out there.
