ChrisEly

Nothing handles web content quite like WordPress. Here’s why…

1. Traditional websites were effectively brochures on the web.
   They looked nice, had a certain amount of information but were static.  By contrast a WordPress Website and Blog is a living thing.  It is designed from the ground up to radiate ‘I’m here!’ to the search engines, social media sites and Cyberspace.  It’s a connected technology that communicates with the world.
2. WordPress has unlimited capacity to grow.
   Unlike traditional websites, WordPress sits on top of a database (MySQL) which handles the web pages and posts, organizes and collates the images, videos, brochures and documents.  It is highly extensible through themes and plugins.There is a development community out there that create add-ons to WordPress enabling it to undertake just about any task.  WordPress is almost infinitely expandable and extendable.  You’ll never outgrow it!
3. WordPress lives and breathes Search Engine Optimization.
   Every page and blog post you create with WordPress is designed to attract attention.The URLs  (page addresses) are editable to provide descriptions of the content on the page.  Where you call a page ‘About Us’, your URL can read‘wordpress-training-consulting-development-blog-writing-seattle’;which offers a stickier phrase for the search engines to catch hold of.Search engines cannot read what is in an image so WordPress gives you many ways to describe an image.  You can create a caption, a pop-up message and a full description so your images become part of the search engine optimized content just as much as your posts themselves.You can add keywords and tags to posts and articles, and those tags get indexed by Google as well as the article title (long description as mentioned above) and content.You can create excerpts of your pages and posts.  These are summaries that are picked up by the search engines, are easy to enter and very effective.  The short answer is that WordPress is a great environment if you want your content to be found.
4. WordPress is a Content Management System
   where you as a developer, administrator or author can make fast updates to the site.  No longer will you have to wait for your developer or Web Master to change a picture, update some prices or post a new article.  All of that can be done by you.
5. Dynamic Content, Dynamic Updates, Dynamic Home Page.
   WordPress can pull in content from different places, feeds and resources; combining it all onto your page or post.  Pages and posts can be scheduled to appear when and where you want them to that your website is always fresh and alive.  Search engines begin to ignore static sites.  There is nothing static about WordPress.
6. WordPress and Niche Marketing.
   Chris Anderson’s book ‘The Long Tail’ revealed how niche marketing has become main stream.  Through the unlimited capacity of the Internet… digital marketing and distribution has encouraged niche markets to thrive.The main body of sales comprises the best sellers.  The major retail stores have to hold inventory that has to sell in numbers to justify the cost of the ‘shelf space’ Therefore the market has traditionally limited itself to a relatively restricted number of products; effectively ‘The Hot 100’, The blockbuster, The top 10,000 book titles etc.  But that has all changed.What ‘The Long Tail’ revealed is that the market is much bigger and more varied than people imagined.  As ‘search’ became more effective than advertising and display, niche products could be offered and found as easily as the latest Lady Gaga CD.  Although individually, sales down the far end of ‘The Long Tail’ may only be in single digits, the combined sales of all of these niches actually rivals that of the best sellers.  The Long Tail is a market of niche products and we can all be part of it.WordPress is the perfect vehicle to develop and promote niche products.  Niche products by their very nature are targeted to small groups.These groups seek out products and services that are unavailable in local stores but are available online.  And nowadays, the more unique the product, the less competition for search engine key words and phrases.If you have a niche product, a WordPress website and blog is the perfect vehicle to ‘open shop’ to a market searching for you.  Product descriptions, testimonials, blog posts and articles, embedded videos and case studies are all a few clicks away.  Every time a new article or product is posted, the blogosphere and search engines will be ‘pinged’ and the market will grow.
7. WordPress integrates with Social Media.
   WordPress is designed to get you up and running fast.  Once you have your products and services on your WordPress website, visitors can interact with you!If you post an article or case study, visitors can leave comments or questions.
   Customer Service becomes transparent and interactive as customers openly discuss good or bad service and you can respond quickly, honestly and directly.Social Media links and tags can be incorporated into your posts which makes it just a simple click for a visitor to bookmark an article or offer… or to share that offer with his/her Facebook friends.  The effectiveness of the Social Media Links cannot be over emphasized.  Let’s say you post a case study on how your business resolved a problem for one of your clients.  Soon after someone else has a similar problem and searches a solution.  Your case study pops up and they call you… but not only that; they also share it on their Facebook and click the Twitter link.  That Twitter link gets shared with their 120 followers, a few of whom ReTweet the link to their combined 10,000 followers.Because WordPress  makes it so easy to share and integrate with other social media sites, your message can get out there quicker and further than you ever dreamed possible.
8. The WordPress Dashboard.
   Developing a traditional website can be a tricky business.  You need to learn a system like Dreamweaver or Frontpage.  You have to know how HTML and FTP works.  But the WordPress dashboard presents you with every tool you need to create an effective website and blog in a clean and intuitive manner without having to be a web developer.The Dashboard features:a.  Blog Posts.  Using the in-built text editor (essentially a word processor with full formatting) you can create posts and articles and allocate them to a sophisticated set of relational categories.b.  Media.  WordPress makes it a breeze to upload images, brochures, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations and more to its media library.  It automatically files these away giving total access for inclusion in your websites and blogs.c.  Links.  Here you can create links to all of your favorite sites or indeed pages within your own site.a.  Pages.  WordPress Pages are created the same way as Posts but are more like traditional web pages; although  they have the bonus of Parent/Child relationships and dynamic content.b.  Comments.  Here you can monitor and moderate and respond to the comments visitors have made on your site.c.  Appearance.  Comprises a set of tools to change, update and configure the appearance of your side including themes, widgets and more.d.  Plugins.  There are thousands of plugins that have been developed to extend the features of WordPress.  These range from simple slide show presentations, contact forms, photo galleries, statistic packages right through to highly sophisticated eCommerce systems.e.  Users.  WordPress is multi-user and here you can create new users with varying degrees of access and security.

   f.  Tools.  A set of tools including the facility to import and export your whole WordPress site along with images, video and other content

   g.  Settings.  A complete set of tools to configure your site for the outside world.

9. The Value of FREE.
   Not only is it one of the best web development and blogging systems available on the planet at any price but being free it allows you to experiment and learn without risk.  It allows you to interact and develop without the worry of cost.  The value of free extends way beyond monetary value.  It empowers you to express yourself in an open and expansive way.
10. Blogging beats Advertising and WordPress excels at blogging.
    You can unleash your creative self and if what you have to say is worth hearing, the world will find you and listen.

According to WordPress, more than 409 million people view more than 23.6 billion pages each month and users produce 69.5 million new posts and 46.8 million new comments every month. It also powers more than 25% of the world’s websites.

Whether it’s personal blogs or major magazines and news organizations such as The New Yorker and the BBC, WordPress is gradually eating the internet and it’s not stopping. In 2017 its ubiquity is expected to increase further and it may even eat the world.  Even more importantly it is the CMS that Forbes itself uses.

This report from Forbes,

For contributors to this site such as myself, it is a publishing platform that allows me not only to write easily, it also has simple bells and whistles (as well as more complicated ones) that add content to my work, add links to appropriate places and has the facility to include images and even tweets. While it takes some time getting used to, for me it IS the internet.

For some time now, however, it has been a little like the Wild West with hundreds of WordPress suppliers in a more-or-less unregulated industry with no widely acknowledged qualifications. In many cases, a monkey could do it, but that has changed hugely over the past three years; the numbers don’t lie.

There are thousands of so-called widgets, plugins and themes that are just as important for a one-person blogger than the world’s largest publishers. Gartner’s recent pace-layered application strategy shows that organisations can accelerate their innovation by choosing an array of systems that support business requirements on long-, medium- and short-term timescales.

Systems that maximise connectivity between the pace layers offer organisations competitive advantage. WordPress’ ubiquity has driven it to enjoy a rich ecosystem of connectivity and integration, something that the baked-in WordPress REST API now extends that connectivity infinitely. This is why things will accelerate in 2017.

WordPress’ success as CMS of choice for brands like Conde Nast and News International as well as the forementioned publishers speaks louder than the often-repeated myths of limited functionality and security concerns. Corporates are now looking at the license fees, proprietary IP and jack-of-all-trades approach of enterprise platforms.

One UK company that is passionate about the evolution and progression of WordPress from its origins as a simply blogging platform is Pragmatic, based in the maturing tech hub of Brighton, based on the coast 50 miles south of London.

Other companies in the city doing great work include local poster boy social media monitoring company Brandwatch and, according to market analyst Beauhurst, 1,500 other technology companies.

Pragmatic is increasingly rapidly after outgrowing its current offers and believes it is the open source nature of the platform, which is owned by the community and its easy integration with other platforms that make it the popular product it is.

Moreover, the company is seeing a huge difference in the quality of inbound big brands and existing client brands who are finally tapping into its potential.

“Over the past couple of years we’ve seen a sharp uptick in enquiries from large corporate and enterprise clients that are integrating WordPress as the CMS component within a larger digital marketing platform programme.

“They are asking serious questions about the value they really bring to organisations for whom digital is increasingly not only a core competency, but a bottom-line asset and critical competitive advantage,” said David Lockie, Founder, Pragmatic Web.

These adoptions of huge brands means that 2019 is likely to see the WordPress bandwagon carry merrily along.

WordPress is a state-of-the-art web development and publishing platform. It is comprehensive, extensible and free. WordPress adheres to all major web standards and is compatible with all modern browsers. It is cloud based (online) system so is independent of operating systems. So whether you use a Mac, Windows or Linux, WordPress is the solution for you.

The World’s #1 Content Driven Web Publishing Tool

WordPress and other OpenSource technologies are giving non technical and technical people alike incredible tools to communicate and interact with the rest of the world as never before. And if people tell you that WordPress is just for blogging, think again!

WordPress is one of the most important technologies on the web today!

So what is WordPress?

A WordPress web/blog site is a full development platform for your online presence. WordPress gives you the tool to maintain and update your site without having to hire expensive web developers, graphic designers and consultants. It just takes a little imagination and some computer know-how.

Your WordPress site can reside anywhere, just like a regular website. Many people are now using WordPress as their primary website. WordPress can also be used to complement and enhance an existing site with blogging technology.

Very often the WordPress sites are installed in sub domains such as www.blog.yourdomain.com. The bottom line is – Every business whether large or small should be incorporating WordPress into their online strategy!

The thing about WordPress (and other open source products) is that we’re still just scratching the surface of a wave that is changing the world. Open source software and the whole ‘cloud computing’ paradigm are having a profound effect on the industry.

Open source software is now more than just a credible alternative to mainstream software; it is rapidly becoming ‘the’ mainstream. Budgets have taken a massive beating and for many, developing a website, hiring a graphic designer, buying Adobe Creative Suite or investing in any other commercially available technology has become just too expensive and too darned complicated. But open source software answers all of these issues because it’s powerful, intuitive and ‘free’… and how can you compete with free?

WordPress is at the forefront of the ‘open source’ revolution because it epitomizes all that ‘open source’ stands for. It empowers anyone to become a true part of the social media phenomenon. With WordPress, you can develop a fantastic website and blog; you can maintain it yourself, you can accommodate many contributors and vast quantities of materials; you can incorporate or share with an amazing assortment of social media sites such as Facebook, Biznik, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and more. You become part of a global community that is expanding every day.

By utilizing WordPress, and 3 additional open source products, anyone with a little training and a lot of enthusiasm can get online with a site that they couldn’t have dreamed of just a few short years ago. The combination of WordPress, NVU (for HTML), Gimp (for graphics) and Filezilla (for transferring files) is a one stop shop to building professional, multi-user, multimedia websites and blog without any develop costs. And for many, WordPress and a well chosen theme is all they need.

You have to understand that WordPress is not just a ‘free’ alternative to the commercial products. It may be free but it is way better than just about anything available; which is why it is so widely used by major corporations and government bodies alike. ‘Paradigm shift’ is an overused term nowadays but it is completely apt for what’s happening in the whole ‘cloud computing’ / ‘WordPress’ development culture.

The individual is empowered like never before because he or she has access to exactly the same tools as the richest of companies. And when the penny truly drops, books, training, consulting and ancillary services will sell by the bucket load because the only cost in getting online (for websites, blogs, databases, eCommerce systems and much more) will be the cost of learning.

From my experience, many total novices learn enough in just a few hours to appreciate that by using WordPress, they can be empowered to do something that they would have previous thought of as ‘extra-ordinary’.

The acceptance and integration of Open Source software and WordPress into mainstream business is becoming more significant every day. Hundreds of millions, if not billions of instances will find their way onto people’s browsers. Cloud computing (viewing and processing through a browser) opens the door to everyone. It doesn’t matter whether they are using a Windows laptop in a coffee shop in Seattle, a MacBook in a glass office block in San Francisco or a Linux netbook in Nigeria. They all access the web, have equal access to WordPress and can benefit from all that free ‘open source’ software offers them. All they need is a way to learn how to use it.