If you’re thinking about building a new website, you might be wondering what content management system is best suited for your needs – it’s not uncommon to get lost in the debate between different technology solutions and which will serve you best. The three biggest consumer CMS systems – WordPress, Joomla and Drupal – all have their own benefits. But of the three, WordPress was designed specifically to combine power, flexibility and extreme ease of use for a wide cross-section of users.
Here are some of the biggest reasons a WordPress website is a great choice for building your website design:
Ease of use
Of the three major CMS systems, WordPress is the easiest to setup and use. Drupal tends to be more developer-oriented, and even extremely experienced developers have been known to complain about the general lack of documentation and support. Its benefits, however, tend to come into play with large, data-heavy sites that need a complex organizational schema. Joomla offers a more mid-level approach – somewhere between Drupal’s developer focus and WordPress’s consumer focus. WordPress was designed specifically to be easy for anyone to use for regular updates and maintenance without requiring a high level of expertise.
Extensive documentation
If you’re looking for documentation for building or maintaining your WordPress website, there’s no lack of material out there – both in user forums and on the WordPress site itself. Drupal, on the other hand, is known for a lack of documentation – even experienced developers find the learning curve steep and complain that documentation is hard to come by. Whether you’re looking for information about developing themes or just updating content, WordPress has been extensively documented in easy-to-understand terms.
One-click installs
Most major web hosts include some sort of “easy install” option for WordPress website builds – click one button, and you’re all set. Being able to sidestep the standard installation process saves you time and effort.
Ample theme selection
There are themes to cover almost any possible need you could ever have for a site – it’s easy to find both general themes and more specialized ones tailored to specific businesses, like hotels or restaurants. You can also choose from a huge number of free and paid theme options – though it can be a very good idea to go with a paid theme, which generally runs in the range of $25-$50, since you will very likely have access to developer support as part of your purchase. Free themes can be sometimes be buggy and difficult to troubleshoot without proper support.
Responsiveness
While not every WordPress theme is designed to be responsive straight out of the box, it’s becoming more and more common for themes to be designed for display across mobile devices and iPhones, as well as web browsers in both standard and large-screen sizes.
Plugin selection
There’s an enormous number of plugins available to work with WordPress as one-click installs, directly accessible from the user dashboard. These plugins help you with any number of tasks, from adding tracking codes, to displaying social media widgets, to adding ecommerce functionality, to adding forms to your site. If there’s anything you want to add to your site, there’s probably a well-tested plugin for it available literally at your fingertips.