Website101 was built with hand-coded flat html and ran that way for 10 years until it grew to over 800 pages and I realized I needed a content management system beyond the rudimentary DreamWeaver Templates I’d been struggling with to manage the entire site. It worked for awhile, but it was obviously time to get real with a great CMS.

But I needed to build in SEO elements and waited until I found a low-cost, powerful, rich feature set and nearly endlessly adaptable – I wanted to incorporate a great mobile option for a good experience on smart phones (go ahead and try viewing the site on your phone) I found all the best options in WordPress and I’m recommending WordPress as a business CMS to everyone who’ll listen. Please listen. 🙂

Here’s an article by Philip Light of WordPress Webkit featured at SiteProNews.

I???ll tell you the same thing I tell every one of my new web marketing clients, ???WordPress is incredible ??? and you should be using it for your website.??? It can save you both time and money, while making it far easier to build a beautiful and limitless website that you can manage and control yourself.

Once you learn more about WordPress, you???ll understand why over 80 MILLION websites are built on WordPress, and why NOW is the time for you to learn what WordPress is all about, and how it can provide immense value to your small business.

Here are my Top 10 Reasons for why you should strongly consider WordPress for your website:

1. Incredible Power Straight Out of the Box
   

   Immediately upon installing WordPress, you???ll have power features that make it easy to manage your website. You???ll have a Content Management System that allows you to add/edit/delete your own content, including images and videos, a User Access system that controls who can access your Admin Center and what level of access they have, powerful Blogging software, and a central location to manage virtually all aspects of your website.

2. Quickly Build Beautiful Websites with Existing Themes

   Forget spending $1,000???s on a custom website design when there are hundreds of highly professional themes for under $100. Simply find the theme that projects the right image for your business, install it in WordPress, and badda-bing, your new website has a top-quality look and feel to it. Any aspect of any theme can also be customized to suit your needs.

3. Add Powerful Features with Thousands of Plugins

   Forget spending $1,000???s on custom website features when there are thousands of Plugins that can easily be installed and utilized instantly. Need a Calendar, there are plugins for that. A shopping cart? A Contact Us form? An Image Gallery? Yep. If it???s a common feature, chances are you can find a plugin to use and most of them for free. If not, you can have custom features developed.

4. It???s Completely Open Source

   Is WordPress starting to sound like a website builder that you can buy for $5/month? In some ways it is, but here is where the similarities stop. WordPress is 100% Open Source and is written in an industry standard web-programming language. This means that your designer/developer is able to work directly in the code of the software to make ANY changes to the system and your website.

   For instance, you may have a theme in mind, but the colors don???t match your logo. Your designer can easily go into the code of the system and change the colors, or the layout, or the images used, or anything. Perhaps you are using a Plugin, but it lacks an option that you???d really like to have. No problem, your developer can adapt it for you to any specification. With WordPress, anything is possible.

5. Focus on Proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

   WordPress gives you a big head start in the SEO race by providing the core features for you to implement your keyword strategy. You can use search-engine friendly URL???s, edit the META tags for each page and include Header Tags and Alt Tags directly in the Content Management System. In addition, most theme designers take SEO very seriously and code their themes to strict SEO best practices.

6. Constant Development and Enhancement

   Technology is progressing faster and faster, and WordPress more than keeps up. New versions are constantly being developed and released to take advantage of new technologies, to enhance existing features and security and to develop new, cutting-edge features that make managing your website easier.

7. A Strong and Active Community

   In addition to the team that develops the core of WordPress, there are millions of active WordPress users that can help you in many ways. These users develop new plugins, new themes, provide professional services and happily answer questions for you in WordPress forums around the world.

8. Keep Your Website Safe and Secure

   You invest a lot of time and resources in your website and you need to know it???s safe and secure. In addition to security being hardened in every release, there are also tools that make it easy to keep backups of all your website files and data, allowing you to restore your website in the worse of circumstances.

9. Never Outgrow Your Website

   Your data, settings, and design files are completely separate from the core of WordPress. This makes it easy to upgrade any area of your site ??? whenever you want. And, since it???s open source, you can build features as complex as necessary. Once you build your website with WordPress, you???ll be able to grow your website to keep pace with your business, no matter how big your business grows.

10. It???s Free!

    Perhaps best of all, WordPress is completely free. Zip, zilch, nada. Just download it, install it on your server and start using it ??? without spending a dime on the software.

I hope this article has helped you get an idea of how powerful and valuable WordPress can be to your business. It will take some time and effort on your part to really understand how it works and operates, but it will be extremely well worth the effort in the long run.

Philip Light is the founder of the WordPress WebKit, a collection of WordPress Video Tutorials, Resources, and Support Options, making it quick and easy to learn and use
WordPress for your blog or website. https://www.wordpresswebkit.com

This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com