7 reasons to use WordPress for a small business website

Posted on June 14th, 2009 by Glenn Reffin

WordPress can help small businesses

Which Content Management System (CMS) to use for small businesses that wants to update their website content? There are many options available for a small business and these may seem bewildering. In this post, I will give 7 reasons why WordPress is one of the best tools to support your small business website.

Self-hosting

With WordPress installed on your hosting server, you remain in control of the site, its software and its content. You are not at the mercy of a third party being responsible for maintenance and upgrades; you have complete control. You can choose to manage the whole thing yourself, or you can pay someone to do the maintenance and upgrading for you, as necessary. You will need to make sure that your chosen web host is capable of supporting WordPress on their servers (most are).

Plugins

If the standard setup does not do what you want it to do, there are masses of extensions to the functionality of the platform available as plugins. All that is needed is for them to be downloaded and activated and they are ready to use immediately. Plugins offer a huge amount of flexibility to your WordPress installation, making the functionality fairly bespoke depending on the plugins that you install.

Community support

If you have problems with your installation, there is a vast community of professionals who are able to assist, unlike other more specialist platforms, WordPress is built on PHP and MySQL, which are languages that are readily understood by many developers and other professionals. As WordPress, PHP and MySQL are open source platforms, there is a huge amount of information and support available as well as a very active and supportive WordPress community. If you have any problems or questions, you will find it fairly easy to get an answer (and no question is too trivial, believe me!).

Flexibility

As WordPress is open source and has a great community following, it offers flexibility and ease of use. Indeed, one of the biggest advantages of WordPress over other platforms is its user-friendliness: you don’t need to understand programming languages, PHP, HTML or MySQL to use it. You can just log in, click and type. Often, it is considered to be ‘only’ a blogging tool but its flexibility is astonishing at accomplishing many different tasks.

Open source and free

WordPress is built on an open source platform and is itself open source. It is free to use for any purpose (personal or commercial). This has to be a huge benefit for any small business or not-for-profit organisation with a limited budget. Also, it is simple to learn and it is quick to keep your site up to date and fresh, so resource use can be minimised and you won’t need to go on any expensive or time consuming courses.

SEO and Standards compliant

WordPress takes much of the pain out of ensuring your site is Search Engine friendly and automatically completes many of the tasks that have to be completed every time new content is added to a web site. It also ensures that new content is compliant with the latest web standards and that your site is accessible and visitor friendly (depending on the theme that is used to display your content). It does all of these essential things out of the box, allowing you to get on with running your business.

No coding necessary

Unlike some other platforms, you may never need to touch a line of code. All the HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL takes place in the background, where it should be. You don’t need to be an expert in web technologies to use it, which leaves you time to ensure your content is great. With many websites and some other CMS platforms, you would need to have a knowledge of some coding to update, change or add to your existing content. With WordPress, this is not necessary, saving you time and money.

And finally, one more for luck…

Branding

You can easily make your web site look and feel the way you want it to with bespoke themes. A theme is a set of ‘templates’ that wrap around your content so that it looks the way you want it to look. Whether you have a brand identity, or an existing web site that you want to pull your blog into, you can theme your installation how you want. There are many existing themes available (some for free) if you want to use something off the shelf. But if you want something bespoke, you can easily get it designed and developed for you by a WordPress expert.

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Glenn Reffin

Owner at Redcentaur Design

Glenn has been a web developer and graphic designer since the early 1990s. He has followed the development of HTML, JavaScript and CSS from the beginning and has caught on to newer technologies, such as PHP. Never resting, Glenn tries to keep abreast of new developments in his areas of expertise and is always keen to pass on his knowledge to help the web and graphic design community to improve user experience. Glenn set up Redcentaur to offer easy access to the internet for small businesses and individuals, without the cloud of mysticism that surrounds internet technology. The stated objective of Redcentaur is to demystify the web for the uninitiated by offering easy-to-use, end-to-end web solutions and hosting at accessible prices.

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