How We Build Awesome Websites, Part 3: Start With WordPress
Building or redesigning a great website takes a lot of preparation and decisions. Over the past 14 years, we’ve created a near-perfect process for creating awesome websites that meet business goals. To help you with your web projects, we’ve put together a series of blog posts about our website design, development and launch process. This is the third and final post in the series.
It’s no secret that we love WordPress. We recommend it to all of our clients because it’s free, it’s flexible, and it’s user-friendly for marketers of all skill levels — even those without coding or web development skills. And we’re not the only ones who think this way. Drupal, Joomla and WordPress were the big three content management system options for many years, but in the last decade, WordPress has pulled ahead of the CMS pack. WordPress is built with marketers in mind, and that’s why we love it.
We’ve switched hundreds of clients to WordPress and seen great results. In our kickoff meetings with new clients, there’s always some complaints about their current CMS and tons of skepticism when we talk about how great WordPress is. But 100 percent of the time, after launch in our sunset meetings with those same people, they’re in love with WordPress and their new website.
Here’s why we use WordPress to build awesome websites for our clients — no matter what business they’re in or what they want to get out of their site.
WordPress Is Easy to Use
While every CMS allows you to tinker, WordPress makes it easy to tinker even if you don’t know a line of code. You can easily customize your website on your own with plugins and themes — and many of them are free. On top of that, 3 Media Web customizes every client’s WordPress site so it’s easy to edit pages on the fly – from simple changes like updating the photo of your CEO on your management page to complex edits like reordering or changing the color of elements on your homepage. Because we custom-build each WordPress site, editing even complex designs is a breeze.
Of course, when you’re picking a CMS, there’s a lot more to consider than ease of use. We recommend WordPress because it’s got loads of features baked in and even more you can bolt on. Its versatility and expandability are probably the biggest reason why almost 20 percent of all websites in the world are built on WordPress.
WordPress Websites Offer Better ROI
WordPress makes your life much simpler, which means better ROI for your business. Allow me to give you a real-world ROI illustration.
I once worked at an S&P 500 biopharma company that used Drupal. The person in charge of the website had a notebook stuffed with notes, cheat sheets and procedures on how to edit and add to the site. That’s like the epitome of a clunky CMS. Can you feel her pain? It’s not that she was dumb, it’s that the CMS wasn’t user-friendly.
On top of that, the company had an IT person and an outside vendor to maintain the site. That’s cool, but the reality is, whenever they wanted (or needed!) to make an update, it was a massive, convoluted hassle. Changes took weeks and required seemingly endless quality checks. Yuck.
The point is, if one normal human being can’t make edits, you’ve got the wrong CMS. And Lord help you if you need a “specialist” with the technical know-how to run it. The long and short of it: If it takes several people to manage your site, your ROI goes downhill fast.
WordPress Websites Are Scalable
While WordPress is easy enough to use and manage that someone can oversee your website in their spare time, it’s also hugely scalable. You can make your website as complex and customized as you’d like. So if your site grows from a basic 10-page website to a 5,000-page megasite, WordPress can handle it.
And as your website grows, there are a lot of resources you can tap into. In addition to the gurus at 3 Media Web, you’ll be able to find your own go-to expert with knowledge in your industry to help you do what you want.
Because WordPress is so ubiquitous, your in-house content manager or web designer likely has a few WordPress hours under their belt. And if you’re looking to hire someone with WordPress skills, your available talent pool will be deep.
