WordPress… if you’re in the marketing industry then no doubt you already know all about it. But what about those of you who aren’t?
Maybe you’re preparing to start your own small business, maybe you want to take your current ecommerce site to the next level, either way you should be aware of the absolute powerhouse that is WordPress.
In many ways, web design in Liverpool revolves around WordPress. Here in Liverpool, we have so many small and local businesses that we Scousers are proud to support! WordPress helps these businesses get their name out on the internet and their products/services into the hands of customers.
So, let’s take a dive into WordPress – the most popular CMS on the internet.
What is a CMS?
Yet another acronym in the marketing world is what it is!
CMS stands for Content Management System. When building a website from the ground up, you have to know how to code in HTML and CSS, you then have to know how to add functionality to your site through JavaScript – all this is the bare minimum you need to know.
Baffled already, stick with us!
A CMS takes care of all of this for you. You have a template that is efficient and works well – you then add your own style and details to it without having to know any code. This means you’ll easily have an attractive user interface, or what we call the ‘front end’.
We can’t stress enough how important a good front end is for any website. It’s here where you’ll win or lose sales depending on the customer experience…make them feel good and you’ll win, provide a poor experience and they’ll bounce off your site within seconds.
On top if this, a good CMS is able to give you plenty of insights and customisation options behind the scenes in what we call the ‘back end’.
The back end is crucial to the maintenance and configuration of your website. Without back end development, having a gorgeous front end would be useless because there would be nothing for the customer to see.
WordPress website design UK costs can vary depending on how detailed and responsive you want your site to be. If you want to work with a web design company that knows what they’re doing, then you should expect to pay for competent WordPress development.
Or you could try and do it all yourself, which is one of the reasons why a piece of open-source software like WordPress is so popular in the first place.
Why do so many people choose WordPress?
Put simply, it’s the best at what it does. And it helps that it does it for free!
One of the main benefits of using WordPress is how much time it saves to get your site up and running. There’s no way around it, using WordPress is just so much more efficient to get a good-looking site live compared to creating your own using code.
Because WordPress is open-source, anybody can build plug ins or design themes for WordPress and publish them for people to use for free.
If you want to build your own WordPress site then you’ll have access to over 55,000 plug ins and a massive catalogue of themes. If you don’t know what plug ins are then don’t worry! It’s really simple: plug ins are basically apps that let you add a new functionality element to your site, while themes dictate how your site appears to viewers.
if you want a more unique website and you know a bit of code then you can even personalise your choice of theme using HTML or CSS. You don’t have to do this, but it can help setting your website apart from others out there, and it always helps to learn new skills like how to code!
WordPress is unusual in the way that it dominates such a large portion of the internet. It’s estimated that around 40% of all websites use WordPress.
You might be thinking ‘that number’s fake, it’s inflated by all the small bloggers who use WordPress’. Wrong! Around 38% of the websites on the Quantcast Top 10K, a list of the 10,000 websites with the most traffic around the world, are on WordPress.
This number isn’t slowing down either. Every day there’s over 500 new websites listed on WordPress. What this means is that there’s a huge community of developers using WordPress that’s only getting bigger and better.
Finally, WordPress is self-hosted. You can host your site on your choice of server and you can switch the host whenever you want. This means the content you publish is completely yours and you can’t be told your website is being removed or disabled by your host.
WordPress or Shopify – What do I Need?
Shopify and WordPress are similar in some ways, but dissimilar in a lot of others. Shopify is an ecommerce platform rather than just a CMS, and therefore Shopify website design is different.
With Shopify, you’re all set for either launching an online storefront or adding an online service to your store. However, it isn’t as fine-tuned to support non-ecommerce content like blogs or other landing pages.
Both WordPress and Shopify are tailored for beginner developers and aim to make setting up your own business as easy as possible.
If you fall into that category, you might be thinking about combining the two. Well, if so then you’ll be glad to hear that it is possible to add a Shopify plug in to your WordPress site. Although this can be a bit more complicated than adding in some of the other WordPress ecommerce plug ins that are available so it might be best to leave this task to the professionals to make sure your site is fully optimised.
