We’ve been busy in the Avoca Design office over the last few months tightening up our website development workflow and thought we could share some of the benefits and the ongoing challenges. Our goals were to speed up our progress, make it easier to roll back changes and generally streamline the production process. This will bring benefits both internally and for our clients.
Why WordPress websites?
We have worked with WordPress for a number of years but have used Joomla in the past as our primary platform for any heavy lifting or complex sites.
There was a time when we didn’t consider Wordpress as a viable option mainly due to menu management features that Joomla had and Wordpress lacked. Since version 3.0 of Wordpress any lingering doubts about the suitability of it as platform have vanished and we have been relying on it for a year now.
There are several key benefits for both our clients and us:
- Website updating is a breeze, the updates just work, no time intensive and costly migrations needed. With updates being so important from a security point of view this is a key cost advantage to both us and our clients.
- WordPress is easy to use – the ‘back end’ administrative interface is easy and logical. Our clients find it a much easier tool to learn than other platforms we have used. It is also malable and we can configure it easily to suit a clients needs.
- WordPress is powerful – there is a common misconception that Wordpress is only for blogging. It is actually a powerful and flexible platform that can easily power a wide range of projects from business websites, online shops and ecommerce to portfolio sites for artists. We are finding that it is easier and less development time to deploy complex websites using wordpress than it was with Joomla.
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is easy to setup so your website gets found in Google searches. We have some great tools that integrate tightly with WordPress to make this easy.
- WordPress has a huge community behind it – WordPress is an open source platform (developed by a community of coders not a company) that is used by millions of websites (over 76 million or more than 18.9% of the entire web). This broad adoption has created a large and vibrant community of people and services that continue to extend and improve it. When you use Wordpress this benefit is felt in areas too numerous to mention.
- We can specialise in one system and do a deep dive into the geeky underpinnings of your website. We know one system very well and can deliver better quality website experiences for our clients. We can also do it faster.
A key objective of the self improvement process has been to improve our WordPress tool set so that we have strong security built in and a set of plugins that provide a great experience for our clients. SEO is important and we have implemented some great features that help our clients to be found online.
We’ll talk more about this tool set in future posts.
This is a multipart series:
Part2: Web hosting for our websites