After attending a web design related event about the up-and-coming website/blogging platform WordPress, I decided it would be a great idea to give a basic introduction and explanation of what WordPress is and why it’s becoming so popular. . During the event, the speaker talked about how many designers, and even their clients, request websites made in WordPress without knowing exactly what it is and what it means to have a WordPress website for the client or backend user.
WordPress is the result of the collaboration of developers from all over the world. They have built and continue to build what is now very successful and easy to use website and blog building software. It can be used to create a free hosted blog on WordPress.com or a non-hosted website (not free as select hosting services must be paid for), which is supported through WordPress.org. When creating the blog and/or website, the user can select pre-made templates, also known as “child themes”. These themes are very basic and can be modified by the user through an extremely easy to use back-end interface called the “control panel”, which is very similar to the Blogger interface. New posts, media (photos and videos), pages, subpages, widgets and plugins can be added without the help of a developer/coder, making updates to a website or blog easy and fast for both the designer and for the client. . Not to mention a decent amount of built-in security, search engine optimization (SEO), globalization capabilities, CSS coding options, and many more fun and useful tools.
Another benefit is the ability for WordPress sites and blogs to use widgets and plugins. These allow the designer to pull information from other websites or databases to display and interact on the designed website i.e. Twitter, news feeds and anything that is updated frequently, the plugins will serve as a window to those updates on the website. This makes sites more functional and because many WordPress templates are already designed with places for widgets and plugins, adding them to the site often doesn’t interfere with the overall design of the website.
All of those things make designing a website fast, cost-effective, and content management easy for the client to control once the designer has completed the website. But this does not conclude the list of benefits of using WordPress. WordPress works with PHP code. This means that graphics and images are supported in a way that doesn’t compromise their resolution so the site looks clean and crisp. This is great news for designers who have long struggled to keep their designs as close to their original design as possible. Too often, after going through all the flaming format hoops that other coding platforms often require, layouts get squashed, bitmapped, and distorted if things aren’t saved or built the right way. Long story short? WordPress helps accommodate small human (designer) errors so the site looks its best with as little coding and fuss as possible.
WordPress functionality does not stop there. If a designer can collaborate with a developer well-versed in PHP and the ins and outs of WordPress website design, then the sky’s the limit. Here at Bop, our developer creates custom templates to meet the needs of our clients more specifically. The result is a great portfolio of visually stunning and communicative websites that can be created in less time than ever before. And as WordPress grows and becomes even more user friendly, I’m not sure why anyone would want to use anything else to build their websites.
