While we can develop any type of site for our clients, most have used WordPress as the foundation.
If you are considering building a new website or upgrading an existing one, give some thought to using WordPress.
Like most web design companies we like to use a template approach to building websites for clients. The advantage with this approach is that once the look and feel of the website is build, the template will automatically apply it to each page. This reduces the development time for the web design team, which in turn can be passed onto the client in reduced fees.
It also minimises the ongoing costs of changing the site and opens the door to allow customers to edit their own site without any technical web knowledge (html etc)
Unlike most other web design companies, we decided not to build our own proprietary system. We opted to have the freedom to choose the best the world has to offer. We also understand that the most popular and widely used software has thousands of people using and supporting it. This allows shortened development time and the opportunity to engage experts from around the world on our projects. It allows us to deliver and support world class code with the minimum of operational overhead. All this in turn leads, to a higher return on investment for our clients over the lifetime of their site.
Some of the factors we took into account when selecting our template system where:
Large community Support
There needed to be a large community backing the development of the software. If there are problems this allows us to search answers out from bulletin boards and other communities around the globe. Equally as important it means that the ongoing development of the product will keep pace with the evolution of the internet.
Open Source Software
We looked for Open Source software which allows it to be used free of cost. You can use it on any kind of personal or commercial website without having to pay a fee to use it. It needed to be built on PHP/MySQL (which is again Open Source) and licensed under GPL.
User Friendly
We needed a user friendly system making it easy for our customers to use and for our staff to learn.
Themes Support
The system need to have a large number of ready built themes for all types of applications. This would allow our customers to select a zero cost template with no customisation if they wished to keep cost to a minimum.
Plugins To Extend Functionality
We needed a modular system with lots of free plug-ins allowing us to quickly add any functionality the customer might need.
Standards Compliant
The system needs to follow all the Web Standards and compliant to all the rules that have to be followed when running a website.
SEO Friendly
Websites must be designed to be friendly to human visitors, but equally importantly, they need to be search engine friendly. Search engines supply for free, visitors looking to buy customers products. The template system must support different functions which allow it to be search engine friendly. For example sending pings to other sites, making categories, tagging posts, use of h1/h2 tags etc.
After looking a a wide range of platforms we eventually settled on WordPress, arguably the words most popular blogging software which has developed to the point where it can easily be used as a Content Management System (Template System).
WordPress has exceeded all our requirements and has performed well for all our clients to date.
It is also used by on a wide range of well know sites across the globe. Check-out this article for twenty of the more popular or this article .
If you would like some stats on WordPress check out this page by the WordPress team, while they may be a little one eyed the sheer size of some of the numbers will surprise you.