Using WordPress for Website Design

WordPress has become one of the most widely used tools for website design. It is a highly flexible and customisable solution to website design. It is also supported by the largest number of website hosting companies as the blogging tool of choice. And above all it is FREE.

Benefits of WordPress

The benefits of using wordpress for website design are many. The biggest benefit is that it allows people to be online in a few minutes. It also allows people to blog to their hearts content without ever requiring any knowledge of HTML or CSS or Javascript. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to people getting their own websites is the fear of not knowing how to “program” a website?

WordPress works around that by providing an intuitive interface for website administrators. It works like MS-Word in that authors can just type up the content and hit “Publish” and have their site live on the internet.

Customising a website is easy with a large selection of themes and plugins available to do a variety of tasks that might have been difficult for people. A large percentage of these plugins and themes are covered by the GNU GPL License and hence are kept free. WordPress is a magnet for web developers who continuously push out new tools for people to incorporate into their websites and create rich and interactive web content.

Using WordPress for website design is an excellent way of showcasing your talent and keeping a tab on your content without ever having to edit or change html or php.

Disadvantages of Using WordPress for Website Design

WordPress stores all user content into an SQL data base and references the databases to put the html together for users when they visit a wordpress driven website. This means that there are no files in the traditional sense on your webserver. While this minimises storage space used on the website, it means that people can find it difficult to get their head around how the data they type is stored, used and presented.

The strengths of using wordpress for website design are also its weaknesses. The plugins and themes are excellent for customising a website and creating rich web content but they also limit what  you can do. It is not easy to customise the plugins or themes without having knowledge of either PHP, HTML or CSS. This is usually not an issue due to the large variety of tools that exist.

While website design is made simple by wordpress, you still need to understand the difference between a shortcode and widget and a static page and a blog page etc.

WordPress is an excellent tool for designing and maintaining websites as it makes content creation simple and intuitive. The areas where you still require computer programming knowledge, Xava is here to take that headache of your plate and set you up with a professional website.