Why WordPress?
WordPress has been around long enough that it no longer needs to be the shiny new thing. That’s part of the point.
For a small-business website, we want a platform that is flexible, widely supported, understandable, maintainable and capable of growing without requiring you to rebuild the whole damned thing every time your business changes.
That’s why Blue Dozen still builds with WordPress.
You Own the Website
One of the biggest reasons we like WordPress is simple: your website can actually be your website.
You’re not building your entire online presence inside a proprietary website service that decides what tools you can use, how your site can behave and what happens when you want to move somewhere else.
With a properly built WordPress site, your content, database, theme and files can be backed up and moved. You’re not married to Blue Dozen, either. We would obviously prefer that you remain madly in love with us forever, but another competent WordPress developer can work on the site.
That’s healthy.
WordPress Can Grow With a Business
A five-page website today may need considerably more tomorrow.
You might eventually need:
- Online forms
- Appointment scheduling
- Ecommerce
- Membership features
- Event listings
- Custom post types
- Directories or searchable resources
- Third-party integrations
- More sophisticated marketing or analytics tools
WordPress gives us a strong foundation for adding functionality without treating every new business requirement as an excuse to throw the old website into a ravine.
That doesn’t mean every plugin on Earth belongs on your website. It means the platform gives us options.
It’s Good for Content
WordPress started as a publishing platform, and that heritage is still useful.
Pages, posts, categories, media, authors and other content are organized in ways that make sense. A business owner can learn to make routine edits without learning how to code.
That’s particularly useful if you’re publishing articles, case studies, project updates, resources or other material intended to bring people into the website over time.
WordPress Gives Us Control Over SEO
WordPress doesn’t magically make a website rank well. Nothing does.
What it does give us is control over the things a well-built website needs: page titles, headings, URLs, internal links, metadata, image information, redirects, structured content and the actual words on the page.
SEO plugins can make some of that easier to manage, but the plugin isn’t the strategy. The website still needs useful content, sensible architecture and a reason for people to care about it.
That’s a much better starting point than a platform that hides important controls or forces every website into the same little box.
There’s a Huge Ecosystem Around It
WordPress is widely used, which means there is an enormous ecosystem of developers, designers, hosting companies, documentation, integrations, themes and plugins surrounding it.
That matters when something needs to be fixed.
An obscure proprietary system can become a serious problem when the original developer disappears or the company behind the platform changes direction. WordPress gives you a much larger pool of people and resources capable of keeping the thing alive.
But WordPress Isn’t Automatically Good
This is worth saying clearly.
A WordPress website can absolutely be terrible.
Install fifty questionable plugins, ignore updates for four years, upload gigantic images, use a lousy host and bolt together six different page builders and you’ll eventually create something that wheezes when somebody looks at it.
WordPress is a tool. The quality of the result depends on how it’s built and maintained.
We use it because it gives us enough control to build websites properly, not because installing WordPress automatically produces a good website.
What About Security and Maintenance?
WordPress does require maintenance.
The core software, themes and plugins receive updates. Backups matter. Security matters. Hosting matters. Somebody should occasionally look under the hood and make sure nothing is smoking.
For a business website, we consider that normal maintenance rather than a fatal flaw.
So, Why WordPress?
Because for the kinds of businesses Blue Dozen works with, it hits a useful middle ground.
It’s powerful without requiring a completely custom software project. It’s established without being trapped in the past. It gives us control without forcing the business owner to become a developer. And if the website needs to change three years from now, there’s a very good chance we can change it instead of starting over.
That’s what we want from a website platform.
If you’re planning a new site and trying to figure out what you actually need, start here:
