WordPress – Friend or Foe?
One of the more popular CMS’s out there now is WordPress. It seems like everyone is using it or has delved into it in some form or another. Even many of the top SEO agencies even use WordPress in their everyday jobs. It’s known for it’s simplicity of use and developer flexibility, making it pretty fantastic for the average SEO’er who wants a little more custom.. But ultimately how good is it? Three essential people that I want to focus on are End Users, Developers, and of course, the SEO guy.
End User: How Good is WordPress for the End User/Client?
Very. Yet not so much at the same time. Let me explain. Doing the everyday things that a normal person would want to do such as creating a page, or a new blog post, this is a well organized and easy product to understand. However, as soon as a user ventures out into the more fundamental settings, things get more complicated. Simple things such as setting the front page, and blog page, are mixed in with permalink settings, and more advanced things that could potentially break their site. You see where I’m going? The only way to prevent this is by setting limitations, letting the client know what things are off limits. Do this and you can save yourself and your client a lot of pain and WordPress can still be an enjoyable experience.
Developers: How Well Could I Develop for This?
WordPress is an incredible software base that is extremely forgiving especially for people still introducing themselves to PHP. In fact it makes PHP seem easy, because there is so many custom calls built right into it. The only uphill struggle is familiarizing yourself with it all. Take a read through their documentation and most of the time you can figure out exactly what’s going on and what your next course of action should be. One of the coolest parts about WordPress is child themes (and the best way to learn it in my opinion), which give you the ability fto build off of someone else work. Without having to build a theme from scratch, just taking and modifing to fit your needs, is an extremely easy way to see how things work. If you are an experienced developer WordPress will be a breeze, so I definitely recommend it.
SEO Guys (and gals!): How Well Are Things Optimized?
Even when WordPress is setup correctly there’s room for improvement. Especially when it comes to Local SEO. Now Adster Creative specializes in Local SEO, so when it comes to that there are a few things you’ll definitely want to have to get better results. One of the most important tools for us is the Local SEO plugin by Yoast. This allows us to have far greater control over what’s going on and be aware of how Google sees you which is the most important part of SEO. Add this fine tuning and you will get the results you want., especially for local SEO.
So where does this leave you? Well let me tell you, if you are looking for an easy to manage, state of the art, custom site, you’re looking in the wrong place. WordPress is relatively inexpensive, and when proper limitations are set can work well for the end user. It’s an extremely flexible solution that works in most situations, however it’s not for everyone. Hopefully this provides you with enough information to get you on your way to creating a successful theme or client solution.