Q: Why WordPress?
For 12+ years, WordPress has been proven as a solid, user-friendly CMS (content management system) platform that is continually improved upon, tested and enhanced for its users who require little to no web development experience at all. This gives many of our clients the courage and know-how to manage their own websites post go-live with little help from our development team on a daily basis.
WordPress works very hard to maintain backward compatibility, which reduces issues when updating versions and offers a very large user base to help discover and fix problems more easily and quickly. In addition, because of the wide-range of plugins and widgets available, the possibilities are endless when it comes to making clients’ sites as user-friendly and interactive as possible.
Q: How popular is WordPress?
Funny you should ask. WordPress is 74,652,825+ websites popular. At last count, that’s nearly 17% of all websites on the internet as of the start of 2015 and 60% of all sites using Content Management Systems. According to BuiltWith, a web technology information profiler tool, WordPress accounts for 47.58% of all websites using CMS technology.
To browse popular WordPress website examples, visit the WordPress Showcase or any of the well-known sites listed below:
www.vogue.com
www.newyorker.com
www.time.com
www.pardot.com
www.rollingstones.com
www.sonymusic.com
Q: What is a “CMS”?
Also known as a Content Management System, CMS’s allow our clients without any development experience to manage, add, delete, and modify content and images within the backend of their website without writing or manipulating the code. As a result, we feel one of the biggest advantages of having a CMS is allowing clients to focus on generating great content without having to worry about the technical details.
Some other advantages of having a CMS include:
- The ability to create multiple users whose roles and permissions can vary
- Improves on-the-fly daily site maintenance
- Allows for schedulable content that can be reviewed, edited and saved as drafts by other users and later published on a specific date and time
Q: What is LaunchDM’s specific approach to WordPress? How is it different than how others use WordPress?
The beauty of WordPress is how many different ways it can be used. Yes, it is true anyone can use a free or off-the-shelf theme and create a website in an afternoon’s time. Alternatively, WordPress can be used as the foundation on which a custom website is built. LaunchDM combines the skills of our Account Managers, Designers, and Developers to craft the perfect website for our clients, tailored to their specific business needs and wants.
As a result, our approach is just that – to leverage WordPress’s user-friendly CMS to enable our clients to edit their own content, while maintaining the the feel and functionality of a custom site.
Our development team can leverage WordPress in ways that far exceed the base functionality pages and blog posts. We can create a powerful store locator or a complex product configurator on top of a normal site / blog.
Want a few examples? Visit our web section for links to responsive, eCommerce and open source WordPress websites crafted by our team.
Q: Is WordPress SEO Friendly?
Google, one of the world’s most popular web search engines certainly thinks so! “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of the mechanics of search engine optimization for you” according to Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team. With the ability to add original content, unique titles, meta descriptions, categories or tags and URL structure to any page, WordPress helps immensely in terms of SEO
In addition to WordPress’s built in functionality mentioned above, LaunchDM takes it one step further by adding a free and easy to use SEO plugin to each website called Yoast which provides our clients even more SEO capabilities and control.
