If you’ve heard any of us talk about WordPress in the past year or so, you’ve likely either converted your site to this fabulous program or have plans to do so in the very near future. If you haven’t, let us introduce you to Carmen. If you’re not in love in 2 minutes, we’ll meet you down the page a bit.
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Reasons we LOVE WordPress:
- Visitors can interact with the site (happier customers spend more money)
- Makes it easy for the site owner to edit their own website (which means they will keep it current, which means it will pay for itself!)
- Makes it easy to grow a website by updating its own navigation on every single page when something is added (saves time and money)
- Makes it a lot easier to change look and feel of a site without having to move all the old information (saves time and money)
- Ongoing site maintenance is greatly reduced (saves time and money)
- Dynamic sites deliver information tailored to the visitor’s specifications (happier customers)
- Content is time-stamped, telling both visitors and search engines the site is current (more likely to trust means higher search rank and happier customers)
- Makes it easier to create a solid, organic search result both within the site and in the search engines (saves money, happier customers)
- Multiple users can collaborate to update the site (more and better content means better search results, happier customers)
- RSS feeds!
- Makes it easy to make the site mobile-friendly (more accessible, happier customers)
- Makes it easy to expand income opportunities through affiliate banners and teaser ads (saves time, generates money)
- Makes it easy to password-protect sections of the site (reward good customers with special features and they’ll spend more)
- Novice users can control image filesize without being exact in pre-sizing images for the site (fast loading means happier customers)
Reasons we love the Carmen release of WordPress even more:
- Image editing, cropping, flipping, rotating and scaling AFTER uploading! This is huge!
- No more “are you sure?” messages because <ta da!> delete has been replaced with a trash feature. When you move something to the trash, it sits there for a month where you can retrieve it, should you change your mind.
- Batch updating of plug-ins, which includes a compatibility check, means that site owners can update plug-ins themselves rather than putting it off until they want to spend the money for us to do it for them.
- Video embedding is even easier (and it was pretty darned easy before). Support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv are here now and more are planned for the next release.
There are about a thousand other reasons we LOVE WordPress, most especially now that she’s turned into a lolita named Carmen. We’ll spare you the geeky rundown…for now. As you work on your 2010 budgeting, please, please, please, consider upgrading your website to WordPress. You won’t regret the decision*.
*Sorry, we aren’t living in a one-size-fits-all world. If you have a custom, dynamic site or a fully-developed e-commerce site, this isn’t a good move for you. We’re talking to the 90% of our readers who have personal, non-profit and business websites which showcase their offerings and maybe offer a little bit of e-commerce. That said, you big site owners would almost without question benefit from ADDING a WordPress blog feature to your site… Woof!
