When selecting a website design the most important part is not always the website look itself, it is the functionality of the structure of the website. There is nothing worse than having a website designed that you can not make edits to yourself. At Big Red SEO, we are approached by companies daily that are downright frustrated with having to communicate with their current website design company for simple edits like adding a blog post, changing a photo out in their slider or updating their contact information after relocating.
The biggest challenge many consumers experience when outsourcing a website design is the excessive fee for items that can take 5 minutes or less to complete.
If you have read previous blog articles you can tell that our Omaha website design team at Big Red SEO loves WordPress. We have the expertise to design several different of website designs, however, WordPress is by far our favorite platform developed so we use to empower our website design clients.
Over the last decade, WordPress essentially began as a blogging platform, but it’s grown to become much more, leading in front of all other CMSs for ease of use and functionality. WordPress has evolved to an insanely popular platform for every type of website, in fact for everything from membership sites to online shopping stores. As an open source platform, it’s rich with features and functionality. Below, our team at Big Red SEO has outlined the features and benefits of WordPress that we love the most!
The WordPress community is immense
There are literally millions of webmasters on the Internet that absolutely love WordPress and are willing to share their insight with other WordPress users. A recent Google query for “WordPress Tutorial Videos” returned over 25 million results. Gone are the days when you have to rely on a coding guru to design and maintain your website, or purchase expensive design software and suffer through steep learning curves. If you don’t know how to implement a feature in WordPress, you can almost always find a solution within minutes online.
WordPress is extremely SEO friendly
It gives you the option to choose from a variety of permalinks, enables pingbacks and trackbacks and makes editing the alt-image attribute for images easy. Plus, thousands of free and low cost themes are available, which enables webmasters to select a site structure that complements their SEO efforts.
WordPress is simple to maintain and use
To start with, WordPress is significantly less cluttered and much more straightforward than other platforms such as Joomla and Drupal. Even users who have minimal knowledge of website design can navigate through the dashboard of WordPress is they know how to operate programs such as Microsoft Word. It also allows multiple users to have access to the site, either as users, editors or admins alike.
WordPress is always adding new features and functionality to their platform. When updates are released, upgrading your site is as simple as clicking update, waiting a few seconds and you’re done. (Always back your site up first!)
Plugins for WordPress add functionality to your website design
At Big Red SEO, we are huge believers in “working smarter, not harder”. Below, our experienced Omaha website design team shares some of the more popular plugins for WordPress that we use for our clients:
WordPress SEO by Yoast – This plugin allows users to edit meta-data alongside a page’s content, exclude specific pages from being indexed and best of all, analyzes pages for optimization.
- Contact Form 7 – Enables easy to set up contact forms.
- Broken Link Checker – This plugin can automatically notify WordPress admins whenever a link is broken.
- Google XML Sitemaps – This wiill create a sitemap that you can submit to Google, which aids in getting your website indexed correctly.
- Askimet – Even though this plugin comes with WordPress, you’ll need to activate it by adding an API key. It’s a great plugin for minimizing spam on your blog.
- TinyMCE Advanced – This is an enhanced version of the WordPress WYSIWYG editor. It gives users the ability to customize a broad array of features, such as being able to add HTML tables.
- NextGen Gallery – This allows users to create a whole new gallery section where they can then manage their photos.
- W3 Total Cache – This enables caching and CSS/JS/HTML minification.
So why WordPress?
Because it works! Websites built with WordPress are easy to find, use and share. They are easy to publish, easy to configure and equally easy to maintain. Lastly, they are easy to build, augment and evolve.
Contact Big Red SEO Today at (402) 522- 6468!
If you have any questions about upgrading to a WordPress site or implementing a website redesign for your business, please give our website design team a call at (402) 522-6468, or fill out our quick contact form. We’re always interested in talking to new companies about WordPress and SEO! As a local web design and SEO company in Omaha, we’re happy to help in any way that we can!