You’ve heard of WordPress, but chances are that if you haven’t used it yourself, you remember it being mentioned as a blogging platform. It’s true that this is how WordPress got its start.

But now WordPress is on an entirely different paradigm. Here’s a short list of facts that I think will surprise you:

1. A whopping 22.5% of the websites online use WordPress.

2. Due to its stack of features (more on that later), many top brands use WordPress to power their websites, including Google, Time Magazine, Facebook, Quartz, The New York Times, CNN, eBay, and so many more. The list goes on and on…

3. WordPress is now a versatile Content Management System, allowing for every nature of full websites. From online stores to mobile applications, the sky is the limit.

4. WordPress is free software.

5. WordPress is Open Source. The code that makes WordPress run is available for anyone to play with and modify. It’s global community software!

Impressive isn’t it?

Using WordPress is like wielding the collaborative efforts of countless programmers around the world. Any fix or feature you want on your site has a literally global effort of code behind it, free to use.
There’s no comparison, and that’s why almost a quarter of the world’s websites are now running on WordPress.

So how does it work?
To put it very simply, after you know how your site should generally look and what content should be on it, you choose a theme, then build your site with that theme. Building the site entails:

1. Stylizing and customizing your theme.

2. Filling the site with your content.

3. Organizing your content presentation.

And Voila! Your done.
Well, ok, nothing is quite that simple.

By now you may think, “This sounds easy. Why do I need to hire you or anyone else to build my WordPress site?”

The reasons are pretty vast and gritty. Here is the simple explanation in the form of another enlightening list:

• I’m fast. With my practice in WordPress and my collection of tricks, a site that would take you 6 months to build would take me weeks. If you’ve never used WP before, trust me on this one. If you have, I’m willing to race you. 😉

• I am also a designer. You know what content needs to be on your site, and you know best what message you want to get across to your users, but have you considered engaged time, experience architecture, and the latest eyetracking research? Do you have a collection of UX-savvy color palettes and fonts?

• Plugins. These are the life-blood of WordPress. Plugins are code packages written by members of the global WP community. They are individually installed and handle crucial aspects of your site, from SEO to security to web commerce. There are over 30,000 available plugins. By hiring a WordPress developer, you’re hiring the hundreds of hours they’ve put into researching what plugins to use, how to use them, and why.

  

• Sometimes, you need to code. It’s that simple. The great beauty of WordPress is that it negates the need to code a website from scratch, a process that for most website these days would costs a fortune and years of time. But small customization is almost always needed, and when the time comes, you’ll want to have a developer like myself who knows HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

WordPress is a revolutionary tool that enables small businesses and individuals to have stunning websites by hiring designers like myself.

There’s a lot more to know about WordPress, so if you have any questions at all or want to chat about your upcoming project, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

-Willow Solow