For those outside of the web industry, you may have no idea what WordPress is. You may not even know what a CMS is. But here at Greenlight Web, it is our bread and butter. WordPress, our speciality CMS platform of choice, provides the backbone of our professional website services to clients up and down the country.
There are many different places where you could begin when designing a website. But most fundamental of all is the basis on which you start. You could start by taking a design and attempting to code the site by hand. Alternatively, you could utilise the power of leverage and consider using a Content Management System (CMS).
The most popular CMS in the world at the time of writing is WordPress. It powers nearly 40% of all websites on the internet. Essentially, a CMS like WordPress helps to provide functionality, features and style in a fraction of the time it’d take to create by hand.
Improved Security
The power of community helps to make WordPress the most popular way to create a website in the modern day. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of developers around the world that help contribute to the open-source CMS.
When a new security threat is identified, the WordPress team can release an update in a matter of minutes. Ever since May 2003 when WordPress was first released, a growing team has been evolving the platform to always be one step ahead. The open-source nature, and how websites can add functionality so easily to their websites makes WordPress a step ahead of a custom, handmade website where something as minor as the incorrect file permissions could have devastating effects in the hands of a malicious hacker.
Flexibility to Make Your Own Website Changes
Making a change to a website, shouldn’t be kept for the exclusive web designer that charges an extortionate amount per hour for a simple change. With a bespoke website, you will find this is often the case.
When your website is powered by WordPress and supported by Greenlight Web, we can provide guidance, documentation, and training on how to make changes yourself. WordPress, the open-source environment, is widely regarded as the best in the online space. There are plenty of educational materials and training available online to upskill and learn to make website changes yourself.
Define Permissions with User Accounts
With a platform like WordPress, user permissions can be granted and tailored to your needs. Often with Greenlight Web customers, we give full reign responsibility to our clients. They can choose to be an administrator of their website if they want, or only to allow themselves to create blog post content. There is so much flexibility with WordPress, that making a change to your website is as simple as making a change in a Word document.
On a hard-coded website, this would simply be impossible. One small mistake could take out your entire website, whereas a small mistake on our websites, could easily be rolled back with the support from our expert team.
Create Professional, Bespoke Designs with Themes
The developers of WordPress do not stop at its open-source backbone. While the Automatic team work on the backbone, there is a community of web designers who build themes. Such themes are different ways of having your website display. Such themes don’t apply a copy/paste job (you’d have seen this online by now if this was the case!). but provide you with some basic building blocks to get the professional design you seek. Save
At Greenlight Web, we have our own in-house web designer who helps to create professional web designs for our clients. To see an example of our work, see our case study page.
A Boost to Functionality With a Plugin Store
Much like how there is a community of web designers creating themes, there too is a community of plugin developers who are always adding new, exciting functionality.
Your imagination is your limit when it comes to what functionality a WordPress website could do for your business. Anything from e-commerce, SEO, creating your own forums or stopping spam – the plugins directory of WordPress has your back.
Such features aren’t feasible in a hard-coded website. You’ll need to spend extortionate amounts of money on your developer to create such tools, and then the effectiveness must be questioned also. Not to mention the amount of time it would take to put such functionality live. With WordPress, these features are just a search away. Plugins are regularly kept up to date to optimise for speed, reliability, and security. All are displayed in an app store-like environment where you can see the number of people who use the plugins and what their reviews are.
