For the average nonprofit management team, phrases like WordPress, SquareSpace, Magento or Drupal might as well be a foreign language. These are all examples of popular content management systems employed to create beautiful custom websites. Each platform has its own benefits and many more can build websites within a unique niche or purpose. These platforms utilize a variety of great tools to build your site, but we’ve developed the majority of our clients’ sites with WordPress. Why do we recommend WordPress for website design? The reasons are staggering!
WordPress is Open Source Software (it’s free!)
Many people remain confused between WordPress.com and WordPress.org for website design. Both WordPress.com and WordPress.org are completely free to use, but there are major differences between the two. WordPress.org is a self-hosted version where you install an independent version of the software with endless customization possibilities. WordPress.com works great for complete beginners, but it’s not exactly the best for businesses or nonprofits that cater to a large audience. Since WordPress is open-source software, a large number of developers are designing software to expand upon the capabilities of WordPress. As we often tell clients, if you can imagine a unique functionality for your site, it’s likely someone has already designed it, you just have to tap into the technology and apply it!
WordPress is Unique
When analyzing the various website platforms, we found WordPress to be extremely versatile. In fact, it can be used to create a variety of types of sites including shopping carts, chat rooms and galleries. WordPress is often thought of as a blog website, but it’s far more than just a blog engine. With our WordPress designs we’re able to create a unique look for your nonprofit — customizing landing pages, your logo, the navigation bar, the footer and more. It’s like a site within a site!
WordPress is Easy to Learn
With a minimal amount of training, we’re able to teach our clients the basics of WordPress. With this information they can create new pages, maintain an online newsletter, manage an email campaign from their blog posts, adjust navigation bars, add images, edit content and so much more. Often after managing their site for just a few months, our clients are creating new content and functions based upon what they’ve learned in training.
WordPress is Secure
There are many vulnerabilities within website design, and WordPress is far from immune to malicious attacks. But WordPress is one of the few web platforms that provides software extensions to prevent attacks as well as software to backup and restore your site. You can monitor your site 24/7 against viral attacks, receive notifications if your site is offline and even be notified if there are failed logins to your site. If you’re a victim of an attack, WordPress provides the ability to restore your site to its previous state within moments.
With WordPress, SEO is a Priority
How productive is your custom website if no one can find it? Of course, the answer is not productive at all. With WordPress, SEO is always a priority. WordPress automatically creates title tags and meta descriptions for all your pages and posts. This lets search engines known about your content, getting you indexed and potentially moved up in search engine rankings.
A Google search for “website platforms” will reveal all sorts of results, and WordPress will most likely be one of them — alongside WIX, Squarespace, Joomla, Magento, Shopify, Weebly and Drupal. And these platforms are perfectly fine for making websites, but it’s difficult to find a platform as comprehensive as WordPress. For security, customization, endless design and functional applications, WordPress is likely the best choice for your nonprofit website.
If your nonprofit needs a website upgrade, let us know. We love making missions come to life in the digital space.
– Jeff Hall, Web Development Consultant
