WordPress, a pressing topic.

Here at Yellow Cherry, we sometimes get asked why we use WordPress for our website builds. The short answer is “its simple and well supported”.  The long answer, well, it’s a bit more complex. Let me explain…

Picking software

So first things first, we don’t actually use WordPress for ALL website builds. Some of our older sites run on a technology known as Joomla which we still support and run. Some of the team here even prefer it to WordPress!

But unfortunately, Joomla is becoming a little inflexible and doesn’t really scale well on a larger scope. It also doesn’t work well with outside systems so we’ve more or less moved over to WordPress now. But that doesn’t mean we’ll stop supporting it any time soon!

It’s great practice for the team to get a taste of something different to WordPress so they can get a broader understanding of how things work over different software instead of becoming stuck to one specific software. This is good for keeping the minds sharp and the skills flexible!

If a client has a specific enough need, like wanting a web application instead of a website. Then we will use a custom Framework instead of a WordPress package to build it. We generally use Laravel for these kind of builds and it has served us well in building high performance, flexible and responsive web apps.

But why these options?

We generally stay loyal to these 3 options as they are all PHP-based (PHP stands for PHP Hypertext Pre-processors, confusing I know!) which is the scripting language that our developers are most proficient in. However, if the need arises, our website developers and website designers are quite capable of working in any number of other languages.

Of course, its best to stick to what you know and that’s why we generally use WordPress, Joomla and Laravel. This is also useful if we encounter an unforeseen problem we will be able to figure out a solution swiftly.

All three are also well-supported in their communities and there is endless information and documentation backing them up so we can use to perfect a website to your standards.

But why WordPress specifically?

We decided to make the change to WordPress as it has a user-friendly backend system, similar to a click and drop website builder. Here at Yellow Cherry, we want to make sure that our clients are able to use and manage their own sites and that its not some “secret arcane knowledge” that you’ll have to pay us to make changes to. We also offer training after a website is complete to ensure our clients know how to manage their site and make all the changes they like without relying on us.

WordPress is also extremely simple to setup and get running from scratch. This is very useful for our designers so they can immediately start working on the site and getting it to the standards that the client expects. WordPress also allows our developers to work on it at the same time in order to get the mechanical parts of the site working. This is a massive time and cost save to the client when we can have multiple team members getting a website built.

Another advantage of WordPress is its massive and extensive plugin marketplace, due to its status of being an industry standard. Much like the famous “there’s an App for that” advertising campaign from Apple in 2009, the same could be said about Plugins. If you can imagine it, there’s probably a plugin that does it. Because of this we have a number of “must-use” plugins that we put on most client’s site.

One of these is a powerful SEO-based plugin that has been shown to massively increase their on-page SEO by letting us add meta descriptions and keywords to a page. This plugin is also useful for making a client’s website look better on Social Media and is super helpful for link building. All of this helps our client’s with their SEO in only a couple of clicks!

We have very rarely come into a situation where we were unable to find a suitable plugin to fulfil a client’s need. In this event, we would either start designing our own plugin or take the closest one to the job and edit it to fit the client’s specification.

Finally, WordPress is extremely flexible and scalable. We have found it works with many external systems so we can build a rather complex site that can talk to a customer’s warehouse/checkout/vendor automatically to communicate purchases and orders. Combined with the hosting we provide, WordPress will also scale to any desired audience size, ensuring your site stays online even in the heaviest traffic.

WordPress also has a great suite of tools that we can use to improve digital design and SEO to a site, which makes it really stand out and rank highly on search engine results.

What if I use a custom CMS?

Just because we prefer WordPress doesn’t mean we don’t know how to use other software! If you have a website written in a totally different CMS, foe example, Jadu, or maybe it is a completely custom site, we will still be able to work our way around it and do whatever you need us to do.

We do sometimes recommend that a client transfers their site to a WordPress system, if we feel that their current solution isn’t effective to their needs but this is not a requirement. We’re very willing and flexible to help anyone out with whatever they may need for their website.

Although, it might take us a little time to find our way around, but don’t worry, we won’t click any big red buttons! Drop us a line no matter what software your site is, to see what magic we can work!