CMS, SEO, HTML… Website development is full of confusing and often obscure acronyms and terms. It’s difficult enough for those who dabble in website development; imagine the confusion for those people who simply want a website to market their business’ services and products?
And that’s one of the reasons why using WordPress as a CMS or content management system makes sense.
What is a content management system?
In simple terms, a CMS separates the coding and design of a website from the content. For the end user, which for many small businesses is the owner or manager of the business, a CMS allows them to update their own website content – such as headings, text, images and links – without having to learn about website coding. Many content management systems also allow users to set up blogs, which are increasingly becoming popular businesses tools.
There are many different content management systems available worldwide, many of which are free. Importantly, once a website is built on a particular CMS it can’t be simply swapped to another CMS.
Why WordPress is the best CMS
Having a CMS is obviously attractive to most small business website owners. The ability to edit information, change prices, add pages, insert images and make other changes without having to call a website developer makes sense, from a cost and efficiency perspective. Unfortunately, I’ve seen many small business owners struggle with making even the simplest of changes because the CMS they’re website is built on isn’t all that easy to use.
To me this is the key reason why more small businesses should be using WordPress as s CMS. Compared to most content management systems, using WordPress is quite easy to learn. And once you learn how to use WordPress, editing is easy. This is important because if you’re like most business owners, you don’t have the time, resources or skills to spend on keeping your website up to date.
Here are some other reasons why I believe WordPress is the best CMS:
- For developers, WordPress is easy to install and is free to use. The developer still needs to design/code for each business’ brand, style, features and needs, but these points do help to minimise the cost of developing websites.
- While you will be able to edit your website, there will be times when you’ll need to call on your website developer to make changes and improvements. Most website developers can work with WordPress, which allows you to easily seek assistance elsewhere if required.
- WordPress is continually improved and updating is easy.
- There are literally thousands of WordPress ‘plugins’ available which either improve the user experience or help website owners administer their website.
- A WordPress website can grow as your business or resources grow.
- WordPress is a brilliant blogging tool. So if you’re interested in developing a blog, articles, news or posts section on your website, WordPress is even more attractive.
Another great thing about WordPress is that you can create a test website and see how easy it is to manage – for free. Go to www.wordpress.com and sign up for a new blog. While the resulting website will look vastly different from your intended business website, it will give you first-hand knowledge of what it’s like to work with WordPress.
If you’re interested in having a WordPress website design for your business, see our WordPress page for more details.