There are certainly a lot of platforms to choose from when it comes to building your website. With so many options out there, I would like to explain why I recommend WordPress.
Of course, every situation is different. Maybe there actually is a platform that is a better fit for your needs. I hope you will at least consider these options before choosing whichever platform is right for you, your business and your audience.
Let’s get this out of the way first. IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE to your website visitors which platform you use, unless, of course, that platform is painfully slow. The platform you choose will depend entirely on what is best for YOU to CONNECT with YOUR AUDIENCE.
The main reason I am writing this article and asking you to think about it is because too many times I hear people just simply go for what seems easiest at the time. Look, I get it. We’re all busy. We don’t have tons of time, and possibly even the patience or technical savvy to take a more difficult approach.
And, speaking of difficult approaches, just be grateful this isn’t the old days where you had no choice but to hire a website company to develop and code your site entirely by hand. WordPress has made it WAY easier for everyday folks to be able to build simple, beautiful and powerful websites.
Look and Feel
If you’re concerned about how your website is going to look, WordPress is the way to go. Because it is the one of the most widely used website platforms, there are a LOT of developers out there competing to build better and more modern themes. No other website platform comes close to WordPress in this arena. I’ve seen some of the themes that many platforms and sites have to offer, and they are really not that impressive.
In their advertising, so many website platforms boast of how easy it is to build gorgeous websites. To me, that’s a problem. What a website looks like is just the icing on the cake. It’s an important factor to be sure, but it is not the most important factor. When they advertise to this desire, they are assuming that you really don’t know anything else about websites, other than your desire to make them look good.
Scalability
Not only are there tons of theme developers out there competing to build the next best thing to make your site look awesome, but there are also tons developers out there competing to build the next best add-on to your website. The WordPress community is HUGE. It is a worldwide community of thousands of developers. Other platforms do not have those vast resources.
These developers are constantly creating, improving and updating ways to take WordPress capabilities to the next level. You can start with a basic site and continue to add on to the functionality of your website – most often times for free. The possibilities are seemingly endless. Not so with most other website platforms. They may have a few add-ons available but not nearly the choices you have with WordPress.
Cost
This is where it really pays off to have a little insider information. First of all, the WordPress software is free. If you have the right hosting company, such as Hostgator, all you have to pay is just a few dollars a month for hosting…and that’s it. With Hostgator and WordPress you get unlimited pages, unlimited storage, unlimited emails, unlimited…you get the point. You get all this for just a few dollars a month.
With many other platforms you have to pay incrementally for having more pages or more storage, etc. I’ve seen the most basic plans with some of these platforms start at triple the cost of what you would pay using Hostgator and WordPress. And it only goes up from there! Also, some of these platforms include a mailing service as a part of your package. It’s really best to keep that sort of thing separate.
Now, of course, they say, “You get what you pay for.” That doesn’t necessarily apply here, because it’s a trade off. You’re not paying as much, but you do need to bring a little bit more to the table in terms of patience and willingness to learn the ropes.
The real cost cannot be measured in the short term. You can sacrifice look and functionality to get a website up quick, or you can make an investment and learn to handle a platform that will serve you better in the long run.