Why WordPress is An Ideal Platform for Startups !!

When you are enthusiastic to implement a great start-up idea online, the first thing that comes up in your mind is: how to build an attractive and attention-worthy website that can help you market and sell your products & services to the gigantic internet audience almost instantly. Most often, you get frustrated while looking at so many options that are available out there in the market with its own set of pros and cons. From my vast experience of completing 500+ international projects at TIS India with a highly determined team of website developers and designers, I have come to the conclusion that the choice of a right platform is indispensable for the success of every online business today. However, it is absolutely challenging yet important to choose a platform which is powerful enough to provide you with extreme versatility and high-end customizability – all in one place.

So, why not consider WordPress – the one and only award winning Open Source Content Management System which is ruling the web today with a total 20% of world’s websites thriving successfully on its robust platform. Undeniably, the high end flexibility and the ease in the operability of WordPress has made it stand out from the crowd of various other Open Source frameworks that are populating the web cloud. With WordPress, it is possible to jumpstart your project with a little budget without compromising even a bit on the functionalities, aesthetics and most importantly, the usability. So, let’s gear up our tech minds with the latest features and functionalities of WordPress to get the most out of this renowned platform this fiscal year !!

A Quick Insight into Facts and Figures– Believe what you see !!

Without any doubt, WordPress wears the crown of being the most popular CMS – in the huge kingdom of open source platforms. But for those who are still wondering the capabilities of this giant platform, I have compiled a list of some interesting statistics which will easily convince you to go with WordPress without any fear.

• Amongst 36% of the online businesses that are running on various content management systems across the globe, WordPress ranks no. 1 with a whopping no. of 54%(~ 75 million)websites which are globally powered by this platform. This accounts for nearly one-sixth of all websites of the world that are successfully deployed on WordPress alone.
• The latest stable version of WordPress i.e. version 3.8 has been downloaded 20 million times as of Feb 19, 2014.
• The Websites and Blogs of some of the world famous brands and Fortune 500 companies – Mozilla, Yahoo, CNN, Samsung, EBay, Flickr, Techcrunch , Quartz, Forbes, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Harvard Law School, Sony Music, Best Buy, The Wall Street Journal, Metro UK, Dallas Mavericks, Sweden’s Official Site and The New York Times are all running on WordPress.
• According to the live WordPress stats, more than 409 million people view nearly 13.1 billion pages on WordPress every month and the terms related to WordPress are queried 30 lakh times per month on Google alone.

Now let’s move on to the rest of the article to know what WordPress has in box for you and how it’s features can match up to your specific business requirements.

A 4-in-one platform for Lean Startups : Easy to install, Quick to Build, Simple to Convert and Facile to customize

Usually, small businesses don’t have big investors and a huge capital to start from. Hence, they can’t spend on sophisticated infrastructure and vast human resource when they step into the digital market. In such a scenario, there is a dire need of a promising platform that can offer multiple functionalities along with prolonged benefits that can help them realize their dreams in minimal possible time and within a limited budget.

So, if you’re a novice entrepreneur who is eager to implement his start-up idea with a small capital, WordPress is a boon for you!! If you don’t believe me, let me explain how WordPress makes it possible!!

1) It is extremely easy to install WordPress. Almost every hosting solution vendor in the market provides an automatic ‘click and install’ interface for WordPress. This not only reduces the overhead of manual installation of files via FTP but it saves both your time and money.

2) Designing & Development of a WordPress website is much quicker and affordable than any other CMS platform(Joomla, Drupal etc), dedicated frameworks or programming languages. The reason being, WordPress library is the world’s largest repository of both free & commercial themes and plugins which can be easily integrated into a website.

However, you may not develop a love-at-first-sight kinda relationship with the free themes of WordPress as most of them are not aesthetically appealing. Plus, none of the theme (even the paid ones) can completely fit to the specific business requirements of your brand and with so many WordPress websites on the web, your chosen design may clash with some other website leading to front-end duplicacy. If you have to emerge uniquely best amongst your customers, just choosing a free theme and framing your website deliberately into it can cost you sales & leads. So here, I strongly recommend you to hire a good team of WordPress developers and designers who are experts in WordPress customization.

3) The best part about WordPress is its inherent flexibility that lets you customize each and everything the way you want and that too on your own. With WordPress, the Site management becomes much easier and quicker with the famous user-friendly editor: WYSIWYG(What you see is what you get) which is built-in into it. This editor has a drag and drop functionality to let you create new web pages, posts or articles easily and quickly just like you do with any other editor you’re familiar with.

Below I have included a screenshot of this built-in editor right from our own WordPress dashboard to make you understand better. You might notice two tabs in this diagram – Visual and Html. In “visual” tab, you can write content, place images and do everything just like you do in MS word and whoa, when you click the HTML tab, you will see that WP automatically codes the HTML for you!! Further, if you don’t want to publish your new blog or webpage live on your website, you can save it as a draft and use it later.

No other platform, Joomla or Drupal is blessed with this kind of editor till now and yes, they’re working on this aspect in an endeavour to outpace WordPress. But unfortunately, none of the platforms have succeeded in this attempt as of now.

4.) WordPress is the only economical solution if you compare the project development costs with any other platform. In terms of hiring costs and development time, WordPress is the cheapest and best solution to consider. Whilst it is important to get the front end customized from expert WordPress developers, you will save on the hefty site management costs if you choose WordPress.

The Biggest Warehouse of Free Goodies – Beautiful themes , Ready made modules and Super functional plug-ins at your fingertips

WordPress users are growing at the speed of light and so are its themes and plugins. With more than 2500 themes to download and over 30,000+ plugins to integrate, WordPress library is the largest amongst all other open source CMS platforms.

WordPress lets you enjoy your project to its core without the hassle of coding anything on your own and that too for free. It promises much more than the support and that’s the Flexibility, Scalability & Stability. Not only this, it lets you choose from a wide range of beautiful themes and functional modules so that you can mould and customize everything according to your desire.

Some of the featured plugins that WordPress boasts of include : Buddypress – a social networking plugin that lets you create your own community of friends or customers ; WP Super Cache – an extremely fast caching engine that produces static html files ; Theme-check – an exclusive theme development tool that also lets you test your theme on all versions and BBPress – an exclusive forum software.

As far as WordPress themes are concerned, I would recommend you to go through one of my previous posts – Top 10 wordpress web design trends in 2014 that talks about the hottest trends that are ruling the web right now along with the suggested best responsive themes that can give an aesthetically appealing brand new look to your web designs.

Built in SEO capabilities – A weapon to out reach to more and more customers right from the start

SEO- friendliness is something that’s built-in into WordPress. It’s architectured that way – Practice Modern SEO Effortlessly!! WordPress comes with some exclusive SEO optimization tools that will let you attract website traffic right from the day one. I am listing some very important features below to make you aware about the SEO support that WordPress offers.

• WordPress gives you the ability to create Permalinks –user friendly URLs that enhance your site’s visibility to a great extent. With permalink feature, you can control the type of URL’s or links and convert big meaningless names to meaningful ones that search engines can easily understand. For e.g usually when you create a webpage dynamically through frameworks, the URL that is created looks like – http://www. abc.com/index.php?p=13. But with permalinks, they will be converted to meaningful URLs like http://www.abc.com/my-rose-garden.php etc.
• With WordPress, you can easily include Keywords, meta tags, descriptions etc with every webpage via Custom Fields Option
• Image optimization via adding alt texts and title tags is easy with WordPress. Plus, you can easily add captions to your images. All this can be done using its robust admin panel with utmost ease.
• WordPress gives you the ability to categorize everything on your site. This lets you arrange all your important stuff (articles, posts etc) automatically just like aggregating everything into small folders. This helps search engines to index everything fast. Here if you play intelligent, you can include the most-searchable keywords as names of the categories to boost traffic on your site.
• WordPress allows you to create tags just like you create labels at the end of your article. This lets you use keyword phrases to describe your post better and faster. Plus, it will assist both search engines and web surfers in finding your site.
• WordPress makes cross linking easier by allowing you to create inbound links efficiently. Hence it’s like an another WordPress tool that facilitates search engine optimization.
• There are numerous 3rd party SEO plugins and hacks which can be easily downloaded from the official WordPress plug-in directory. The integration of these plugins into your website can serve all your advanced SEO purposes efficiently.

To summarise, no CMS platform other than WordPress can act as an SEO-saint to meet all your search engine optimization requirements as well. WordPress automatically generates search engine friendly URL’s for you. If you add a couple of extensions to it, like the Google XML sitemap, All-in-One SEO pack and Yoast, your site has good chances to rank high in search engines since you’re optimizing everything right from the start. Not just this, search engines also tend to love WordPress. The reason being, WordPress comes bundled with a self ping feature and everytime when you update your WordPress site or blog, it will notify all major search engines to refresh its database and fetch the cached copy of your new stuff. Generally, if you don’t use WordPress, crawlers take at least 10-15 days time to index your new content when you make any changes on your website and thus it hurts your revenue generation goals. So, if you are looking for a built-in SEO solution with the CMS you wish to choose, you must go with WordPress!!

Launch a solid content marketing strategy – An integrated Blog cum Website

Executing a result oriented Digital Marketing campaign is impossible without WordPress ever since Content Marketing has taken first-seat in the business strategy of modern era. All the traditional ways of marketing have been flushed by smart entrepreneurs and now all focus is on creating an editorial calendar that can pull in quality traffic and generate new leads. For this, it is necessary to create a separate blog wherein you can frequently post new articles and manage the news related to your business. WordPress is the only robust solution that offers you both the web development and blogging features. Plus, it also lets you integrate social media widgets in your posts and share everything via “Like”, “Share” and “Pin” buttons so that you can build a good repo with your target audience as well as existing customers.

Perfect Platform to cast a spellbound on the Mobile Audience

Mobile Technology is the new storm that has swiped off everybody with its touch screen revolution. I am pretty sure that every fifth Internet user right now is surfing the web via mobile phone or tablet. Thus, it is certainly foolish if you ignore the mobile friendliness when you are choosing a platform for your business. Majority of the sites and blogs already have a mobile version that can run smoothly regardless of device and browser being used. And, WordPress again wins here with its Mobile specific themes and plugins that transform your existing site into a complete mobile site in a jiffy!! Some of the best themes, plugins and toolkits that are available for WordPress users include – WPTap, WPTouch, WordPress Mobile Pack, MobilePress etc.

You can even create a custom mobile friendly WordPress admin panel for yourself to manage comments, create new posts or change anything on your site with utmost comfortability even when your laptop or PC is not around. This can be done with the exclusive WordPress apps – WordPress for iPhone, WordPress for Blackberry, WordPress for Android and WPhone all absolutely free and easy to use.

Exclusive Support Guaranteed with huge WordPress community

Whilst community of WordPress is already the largest amongst all other open source CMS platforms like Joomla, Drupal etc; it is constantly growing by leaps and bounds. With all the tech geeks & application programming nerds at one place, one cannot doubt the support that is offered to the users of this giant platform. So, you need not worry if you get stuck implementing your star idea at midnight. Just relax and join the community. From detailed documentation to comprehensive tutorials, video lessons and screencasts etc, you can easily develop anything that you want. Currently the WordPress community publishes 5 lakh new posts everyday and there are more than 8 lakh videos on YouTube featuring WordPress tutorials. In fact, there are over 90,000 WordPress developers listed on Freelancer.com alone for those who would like to outsource their projects to web development experts.

With such a large number of fascinating features to its credit, it is certainly impossible to ignore the capabilities of WordPress and compromise the business goals by adopting any platform other than this. It is always wise to foresee the growth with a growing platform and envision a small enterprise reaching new heights of success. If you would like to give us a chance to join hands with you in building a successful enterprise, have a word with our team of experienced web designers and developers or read all our latest web development blogs that talk about the newest web-building trends. Good luck !!