According to wordpress.org, 60+ million people are now using WordPress to design and manage their website. If this doesn’t motivate you to get WordPress, then the fact that its “responsive” or “mobile friendly” should. Google recently announced that websites would soon be penalized if their site wasn’t mobile friendly. In other words, make your site mobile friendly, or risk losing your ranking position for all your keywords.
WordPress offers a lot of advantages that should make life a lot easier. It claims to be a solution for those who don’t know how to write their own code, i.e., HTML, CCS and Javascript. There are close to 3000 themes available if you want to change the “look” of your site without any impact on the structure and content of the site. If there is something special that you want your site to do, or if there is a major problem with it, there is probably a plugin for that. Its true that WordPress is a blogging platform, but its also robust enough to create a typical manufacturing or industrial website. But is this enough?
The Problem
It doesn’t appear at first glance that there is anything to worry about when it comes to moving to something like WordPress. Its suppose to be user friendly and doesn’t require any knowledge of HTML (the very basic coding language for web pages). This all sounds good until you try to get started. Downloading WordPress is pretty straight forward, and installing it can be a bit of a challenge, but something changes when you start creating pages and putting things together.
1. WordPress
The first thing you might notice after a while is that WordPress is an open source project which means that there are thousands of contributors and that WordPress is constantly evolving. Hence the the constant updates, which if you don’t keep up, could lead to security issues and so on. Wait a minute! Whaaaaat?
2. Themes
Just so you know there are gazillion themes out there and they all want your money. Some are great and worth just to get you started. Others are horrible and will lead you down the path to eternal search engine hell. The problem with a theme is that you never know just how good the code is that it was made with. And if you need to customize it “to make it your own”, get ready to work. I’d like to think that the latest theme from WordPress might be the answer. The jury is still out, but it sure looks promising. At the very least, it might be a good foundation for building your own theme. That’s where I am going next. I think it’s time to learn PHP.
3. Plugins
Whenever you’re asked to update WordPress, you’re taking your life in your hands. Because you could “break” your site. Of course, as we say about our SmartPhones, there is an app or plugin for that. Security plugins are just the beginning. There are plugins for this and plugins for that. There are literally thousands of plugins – some with good support, some for free, some paid ones and of course, some with horrible reviews and some with great reviews. How are we suppose to make the right choice? Well … all you can do is make sure you use a plugin to backup your site so that it can be restored. Okay. I get it. I need a plugin to protect myself from all the plugins. Check. Done.
Oh and I almost forgot. These plugins are constantly in need of being updated. Very needy.
4. Design
I have to admit that I hated the look and feel of the first WordPress site that I came across. Since then I have changed to the point where I am quite impressed by the functionality that is possible and with the flexibility there is when it comes to layout and design. But you have to understand that WordPress was initially developed for Blogs. Yikes. What on earth is a blog? Sounds like something I could get stuck in.
A blog is something dynamic – always changing. “Oh no! My site only has pages that never change”. Its okay. Take a deep breath. By the time you figure out how to convert your static pages into a workable and comfortable design, you might want to think about writing your first blog on how necessary plugins are – how ABSOLUTELY necessary they are – for making static pages look good. I don’t mind telling you that it takes a while to figure out. So Beware.
5. Search Engine Optimization
Here’s another potential drawback with WordPress that probably means installing another plugin. Its great that WordPress is responsive and will make your website functional on a SmartPhone or Tablet. This is the biggest reason why I thought it might be worth checking out. But what about all that code? My 1.5 MB site of 300 pages is now 0.5 GB website with so much code that it’s a miracle that googlebot has enough time to crawl the entire site. Am I missing something here? Forget that there is a plugin for making your site search engine friendly that may or may not work. What about the fact that its impossible to make file names identical to your existing files names already indexed as such by Google. There’s a plugin for that? Of course. 301 Redirect. No thanks. I think I’ll just update my .htaccess file. No prob lem o.
6. Social Media
Yikes. Social Media. You mean FaceBook? YouTube? No. This can’t be real. The old traditional way of getting someone to link to your site has taken on a new meaning. Getting someone to “like” you is what’s all about. Sigh.
7. Solution
I am your solution. I design digital or inbound marketing systems using WordPress that not only creates content for social media platforms, but stores that content in a database for other uses . I’ve installed, moved, restored WordPress more times than I care to admit. I can setup Google Adwords, Analytics, Tag Manager, Sitemaps and Webmaster Tools. I’ve broken several sites when updating a theme or WordPress itself and still managed to get through the day. I know how to backup WordPress without a plugin. Whoa there. You had me at “solution”.
Best of all, I know how to improve your bottom line.