Some Common Myths Surrounding WordPress
When handling requests from potential customers I always get the same request. The customer wants a custom website. They want everything customized for their business and their business only. When I inform customers that I use wordpress to make almost every single one of my sites I quite often get the same questions. Isn’t that free? Don’t you use templates with wordpress? Isn’t that a blog? If it’s free then can’t I do this myself? The answers to all of these questions is of course yes, which makes it all the more reason to use it. First I will explain these three questions and in my next post I am going to give you 10 reasons why you should be using wordpress for your dive shops website.
Question: Isn’t WordPress free?
Answer: WordPress the platform is free. That’s what makes it so great. You can literally start a website with a wordpress basic framework and any number of free themes and pay absolutely nothing. To use some of the best plugins, themes, and tools made by the best developers in the world, you are going to have to pay. Nothing crazy usually as the developers are able to sell their themes and plugins to mass amounts of people and earn money from thousands of customers for the same tool. For instance. I use and install a form maker called Gravity Forms on every single site that I make. It is fantastic as you can easily make forms, integrate them with PayPal, MailChimp along with several other payment processors and mail list management services. This one tool creates forms in minutes that would take dozens of hours if I were going to code them myself. I pay $199 per year to have a developers licence for this one single plugin. Not a huge amount but certainly not free. The same thing goes for themes. Themes are just the basic ground work for a site. Once you have picked the theme there is still hours upon hours of setting up and customizing the look website and then of each and every single page. Most themes that are from well respected and trusted developers cost between $50 and $100 for a single site licence. Again, well worth it as far as how much time I am going to save.
Question: Don’t you use templates With WordPress?
Answer: I touched on this above, but of course you use templates (they are actually referred to as themes) with wordpress. A well made theme with wordpress will save a developer so much time it is easily worth the $50 or $100 price tag. Think of a theme as like basic building codes for a house. The codes give you the basic rules and structure to build from, but you can still make any modifications and changes that you desire for your website just as you can with your house. Well made themes are completely capable of being customized and allow for these customizations to be made site wide with a few clicks of a mouse or strokes of a keyboard. The best developers in the world are creating wordpress themes, not creating custom code for completely custom websites. Why would a developer create one website for a client when they can create one theme and sell it for $100 to 50,000 customers. The answer is they don’t. Creating wordpress themes is a million dollar business for some developers.
Question: Isn’t wordpress a blog?
Answer: That’s the best part of it! Each and every wordpress site you make is able to incoporate a blog immediately. WordPress sites are seperated into several different categories. For simplicity of this post, I am going to keep it to two different types. Pages and posts (a lot of themes have custom post types which allow wordpress to be even more powerful). Posts are used for blogging and allow you to easily update your website with fresh content in a very easy to use format.
Question: Can’t I use wordpress myself?
Answer: Of course you can. That is one of the greatest parts of it. After setting up our dive shop clients websites we always ask if they want to be able to make minor edits and be able to post blogs updates on the site. The vast majority say they would love to be able to have that ability. Minor changes in wordpress can be really quite simple. We always give a quick tutorial to our clients and answer any questions that arise when they are learning the ropes of blogging or making change to the site. The other part of this is that yes, you can do everything that we can do with a wordpress site by reading some books or watching youtube videos, learning some html, and buying some graphic editing software and spending some time getting the hang of the platform and spending some money buying the plugins and themes. The service we offer takes that whole process out of it, saving you time, money, and headaches. It’s the same as fixing a car or a computer. If you bought the tools, the parts, did some reading and watched some videos, you can fix anything. But why would you when there is already a mechanic who has gone through the training and has the tools already at his disposal to use to fix your car. I encourage you to ask any of our clients who we have set up sites for if they feel they have gotten their moneys worth out of the sites we have made. The answer is going to be a resounding yes each and every time!
If you have any questions you would like me to cover about why I believe you should use wordpress to make your dive shops website or anything else related to webdesign or online marketing, please comment below or contact us. We would be happy to answer your questions and possibly work with you in the future!
[ut_service_column background=”#dd3333″ icon=”fa-hand-o-right” headline=”Half Price Offer!” align=”left” width=”full” effect=”swing” last=”true”]If you are already running wordpress and looking for a great deal that wewill be offering until the end of November, we are currently offering weekly dive articles posted to your wordpress site for $9.99 per month which is on half of our normal rate of 19.99 per month. Please contact us for more information! [/ut_service_column]