WordPress is a free platform that has been used widely since May 2003 when is was first established as a blogging platform. Since then it has grown into the biggest website platform of them all, running small blogs, local business websites and large corporate websites.
The people who say it is too slow or prone to glitches or hacking have probably used free themes or plugins with dodgy code in them or weak passwords or have not bothered updated plugins and themes. Slow websites are caused by bad hosting, bloated themes and plugins, bad coding and too many large images in the content.
At AJM Digital, we only use professionally developed plugins and build our own super fast templates instead of using a commercial themes.
This supplies the perfect framework for a fast, secure and functional website that can be developed and designed for any business in any niche.
WordPress is an amazing blog, CMS, and website platform, but it is not used by all web developers for all of their projects. This is simply because there are other great options, including Joomla and Drupal which always used to beat WP on the content management.
Wordpress is used by a quarter of the top 10 million websites (2,500,000 websites) as well as by many high-profile websites such as The New Yorker, TechCrunch, and CNN.
These days WordPress has its own flexible and ultra powerful content management system which can turn any website into a powerhouse. It is important to know how to deal with WordPress if you are a web developer or a designer so that you can get the most from it.
At AJM Digital we understand how to turn a plain vanilla WordPress installation into the custom built website you always dreamed of.
Many designers who use WordPress, go about creating a website which is often cheap looking and made with a theme that they do not know how to customise to make it unique. This method of churning out a lot of websites that are of low quality is of no use to most businesses because they want a good return on their investment.
It also adds to the bad press that WordPress can sometimes get because they might look nice but they are often slow, badly coded and contain unoptimised content. They hardly ever rank well because there was no seo consideration in the structure or content.
Developers tend not to go this way. Yes there are developers who will take the cheap and easy route, and perhaps not quite get the best design, but most of us will take the time and care to create something beautiful, functional and will stand a good chance of ranking well for the main keywords too.
When you are thinking of building a new website for your business, there are many things you need to consider. You should also be aware of the fact that the website you build at first is not going to be perfect. Once you understand this fact, you need to learn about the important factors that influence the price of a new website.
The cost of a website depends on the following factors:
The most obvious factor that affects the cost of a website is the complexity of the design. A website that looks very simple to the viewer may have a lot of back end coding that allows the search engines to index and rank more pages, or in many cases have hand written code to make complicated stuff look simple on the pages that your visitors actually see.
At AJM Digital, we offer packages that run from £595 and go as high as required to deliver the functionality required by the business owner.
If you need a complex form to get information from your visitors then that is one feaure that can cost a fair amount, others include ecommerce, a membership section, bookings and reservations.
With a few easy steps and in a few minutes, WordPress can be installed on any hosting.
However, there are other factors to take into account before the design/development and content can be considered.
The first step is to decide on your domain name and web hosting. We can do both those steps for you, in fact there is a tutorial listed here that will guide you through the steps if you want to do this yourself.
Once we have that established, we have to research the type of content required for your particular niche and the main keywords to target.
Then we set up a WordPress installation on our own private network (so no-one can see it until it's ready for the world!)
It is worth researching competitors in your niche to see the kind of website they have and this will provide some insights as to the layout and functionality.
Then we create the templates for the site with dummy content, when the layout looks good we upload all the files to a live server for you to preview. After any changes are made we then add content.
All of this can take anywhere between 2 to 4 weeks normally and then once the onsite seo has been completed we launch the website and leave it a couple of weeks until Google indexes all the pages and then start tweaking things to perfection.