04 Nov The Key to Gaining Control Over Your Website
by Bob West
Our custom digital work exploded in popularity throughout 2014 and took us in a number of directions to satisfy clients’ needs. One area clearly stood out in terms of what work clients are most interested in: website re-design / development.
Companies had a number of reasons for wanting to re-do their websites, but the need for easier posting of content drove most of their inquiries. As growers and retailers spend more time online, companies understand the importance of filling their websites with content and information that brings in their audience. Producing the content is challenge No. 1, but many companies don’t even want to confront that problem unless they can easily post stories to their site.
Our solution to this problem is pretty simple (and common) — it’s WordPress, an open-source content management system that we believe in strongly enough to have implemented it for all of our own websites at Meister Media. (For those of you not familiar with the concept of a content management system, that’s simply a fancy term for the program used to manage the content on your website. Unless you are coding all of the content into your website, you’re likely using some sort of CMS platform to manage it.)
WordPress is winning the battle of CMS options. According to W3 Techs, a web technology research firm, WordPress is the CMS on more than 61% of all of the websites they studied, compared to Joomla at about 8% and Drupal at about 5%.
The primary benefit of WordPress is its simplicity. Employees can be easily trained to post content to your site without involving anyone from IT, and posting a story takes less than a minute. This functionality matters most to marketers who want to post new stories, update old stories, change the home page, etc.
Plus, being an open-source platform means thousands of developers create new functionality that you can incorporate into your own website all the time. For example, we wanted a better tool for presenting pictures on our sites, so we implemented a photo slideshow tool that already existed (after making a couple of tweaks to make it all our own). Other developers did 80% of the work for us.
The popularity of WordPress simplifies the process of finding a new developer to work on your website, should you lose an employee or need to change web firms. No risk of feeling held hostage to a developer you want to leave but can’t because they are the only one who understand your website.
The decision of which CMS will power your website may be the most important decision you make. Research it extensively and talk to other marketers who have used different platforms to ensure you have the functionality you need for your website.
Bob West is the director of interactive sales for Meister Media, and he posted this story to this website all by himself via WordPress. He can be reached at 440/602-9129 or bwest@meistermedia.com.