In today’s evolving digital landscape, it’s more competitive than ever. With the advent of the internet reaching into every corner of the world, your company’s website is among a lot of competition: there are over one billion websites in the world. And even more amazingly, an estimate 300 to 500 websites are published every single minute.
How do you stand out from this fierce competition?
The good news is that most of those websites (even the websites of your competitors) aren’t optimized and built to any particular level of excellence. With the rise of automated plug-and-go solutions for websites, most of them don’t have any specific qualities: you’ll notice theme after theme looking just the same as the previous dozen websites you’ve visited.
That’s where custom development comes in. In order to take your company’s digital presence to the next level, it’s worth considering whether you need to have a totally custom website engineered for your specific needs. Even a small improvement helps a brand stand out online: so even a simple deviation from the norm can be the difference between an average performance and an excellent performance.
We’re an special fan of WordPress. It’s the world’s most popular content management system, powering over 30% of the sites in the world. That’s incredible: a third of the whole internet runs on WordPress. There’s a reason it’s so popular: it’s extensible, well developed, and has a massive ecosystem of developers, webmasters, and site owners working together to create plugins that will let you do just about anything. Whether you’re running an ecommerce website selling retail products, or just a simple portfolio site showing what you can do, or perhaps have a simple backend to help your company keep track of projects: WordPress can run it.
We’ve used the WordPress platform to build solutions for companies in a range of industries. WooCommerce, a popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress, can help transform your static website into a dynamic retail experience perfect for selling your company’s products online.
However, WordPress isn’t without its difficulties. For a website owner who isn’t an expert in web development, it can be very difficult to customize your installation to provide you with the exact look, feel, functionality, and stability so important to a site’s commercial success. While managing content on a WordPress site is simple enough, and is directly geared towards the non-technical administrator, it’s another thing entirely to dive into the styling sheets and templating to produce a truly new functionality. That’s our particular expertise, and we think the WordPress platform provides an excellent base from which to approach more complicated development projects.
So what sort of projects is WordPress good for? Let’s look at a selection of possible uses.
- First, let’s look at a typical case: a small business owner wants increased visibility in their local market. In this case, WordPress can be an excellent resource for a small “portfolio-style” website that showcases the work and services that a small business can provide. By developing a site like this, you can stand out from your local competitors who might not even have a website at all. This increases trust and confidence in your services.
- Second, a growing company who wants to sell their products online. There are multiple ways that a retail company can expand online, and WordPress offers an excellent base to start from, with plugins that let you manage inventory, accept payments, manage shipping and orders, and everything else needed in order to run a stable, profitable ecommerce store.
- Third, say that you’re a real estate agency who wants to showcase homes on their site and engage bookings for potential buyers. A WordPress site can be developed to do exactly this: allow you to showcase your selection of homes, so that interested buyers have your company in mind as soon as they decide to make a purchase.
The possibilities go on: and you can manage even very complicated, content-heavy sites using WordPress as your content management system.
Of course, there might be times when using WordPress isn’t the best choice for your particular needs, and in this case you should make sure that your developer is able to use other technologies as well. There are a huge variety of platforms and technologies that enable a website owner to run a profitable site: so be sure that the development company you choose can build mobile apps, work with different web frameworks, and use other ecommerce solutions like Magento or PrestaShop.
If your site is already successful and running on WordPress, simply modernizing your site can also be a good move. Studies have shown that for every few seconds you decrease off of your site’s load time, conversions can increase by 1-2%. In one example, for a load time decrease from 5 seconds to 2 seconds, the website’s revenue increased by 14%. This means that you can gain so much revenue from simply optimizing and modernizing your existing installation. Fast, reliable performance is essential to incrementally improving your revenue.
We’re always happy to help clients leverage the power of WordPress for their business. In today’s world of fast-changing technology, websites can become outdated in just a matter of months: that’s why we believe staying on top of your digital presence is essential to maintaining a competitive edge in your industry, whether that’s real estate, healthcare, ecommerce sales, or local business.
