I caught up with Jonny, our resident digital expert (and Digital Director), who kindly agreed to share some of the valuable knowledge he has mastered over the years on the subject.
With well over 10 years experience working with WordPress, Jonny is our man who delivers a perfect mix of technical expertise and custom-built websites to any business large or small.
I had worked with a number of content management systems already (and even half-coded my own at one point!) when a client had asked for a blog platform. I researched and picked WordPress – and by the end of the project I was eager to learn more about how to get more out of this powerful system! It has an intuitive, powerful template system and the PHP and overall code structure was easy to understand and flexible, so it quickly developed into an obvious choice to build more sophisticated content managed websites.
With it now powering nearly 25% of all websites live on the Internet right now, there is no denying that it’s a popular platform to build websites with! With a very passionate community around it that all work hard to contribute to the project to improve it, it has strong future development potential.
Put simply – it’s a great tool with great flexibility to extend for developers to provide a truly bespoke website content management system for any purpose.
That’s an easy question to answer! Out of the box, it has pretty good content management features and provides a very solid foundation to build on for our clients.
We’ve developed a number of internal private tools to make it work even better – so clients are truly empowered to build content-rich pages for their website.
finally, WordPress is basically free. It’s Open Source developed software, meaning that thousands of people around the world contribute to the code of WordPress – even us! This means that it is highly scrutinised for security and performance, with all code exposed for anyone to see and modify. The benefits are no license fee to pay, and regular updates that improve this powerful platform.
The learning curve! WordPress is a platform that requires a high level of working knowledge of CSS, PHP and Javascript to really get the most out of it. Although I took to WordPress quickly, this was already built on years of web coding and design experience.
We still never stop learning as a team on how to stretch this platform further. All of our WordPress sites are built bespoke to the clients exact requirements to make them work as efficiently as possible, load quickly and be easy to manage and edit.
The difference between a client buying a generic, ‘premium theme’ and the way we create WordPress sites is not only skin deep – our bespoke WordPress installs run and load much faster, are easier for us to modify in the future and also feature a unique design built for your organisation and it’s styleways.
A bespoke site build by us will also perform better for visitors than any off the shelf solution – and provide a solid platform to extend in the future.
A CMS like WordPress empowers the client to take charge of their website, making it easy to create and edit content and media with little to no coding knowledge. A traditional ‘static’ website requires the person editing it to code HTML, CSS, PHP and Javascript, edit and upload to the server which is a very long-winded and complex process. A good example is the way we build editable menus with a simple drag-and-drop interface in WordPress – compared to having to manually edit the code of a navigation.
Although WordPress has its roots as a blogging platform it has always essentially been a content management system. Over the years new functionality has been developed that now make it the worlds most popular content management system, used and trusted by some of worlds biggest organisations. It is a platform suited to any scale of business.
If you’d like to find out more about WordPress and how it could take your business to the next level, we’d love to hear from you! Check out some of our recent work, or get in-touch to talk over your project.
