Mozak Design Blog

7 Reasons to Choose WordPress for Your Website

If you’re ready to create your business website, “how” you build it – what software platform you choose – is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make.

As of Sept. 2009, 202 million websites worldwide used WordPress, making it the most popular blog software in use today. WordPress is a great tool for small business owners. It is versatile, free, and easy to use.

Here are 7 reasons why I recommend it:

1. WordPress is versatile. It meets the needs of start-up businesses and seasoned pros. If you just want a blog, WordPress delivers. If you want an easy-to-use professional website, choose WordPress for its type-and-publish simplicity. And if you want both a business website and a blog, there is simply no better program available today.
2. WordPress is free. You don’t have to purchase the software. The basic themes (and there are plenty to choose from) are free. Most plug-ins (software tools that help the site operate more efficiently) are free. Online resources, including blogs and forums, are also free: This means it costs you nothing to become proficient with WordPress.
3. WordPress is easy to customize. Begin with a basic theme, and you can change the colors, layout, theme elements, and more. You can also create a completely unique theme, one that is as individual as you are. This part isn’t free – but by leveraging an existing theme it is affordable.
4. WordPress is all about “WYSIWG” – what you see is what you get. That means updating your content (something you have to do often) is easy. You type, test the page, and go live. This is also called CMS – content management system – and no one makes it easier to manage your words than WordPress.
5. WordPress is a global solution. That means it is designed to work on every browser, in almost every country, in almost every language. There’s peace of mind in knowing that your business website can do its job – selling you – everyplace it goes.
6. WordPress works with Social Media. This means Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the other social media tools, all work seamlessly on your WordPress business website.

WordPress grows with you. As your business evolves, so will your website. WordPress makes it easy to update everything from your theme, logo, color scheme, to page layout. It’s a snap to add or delete pages. When you’re ready to add a blog, offer a free ebook, or build a mailing list, you don’t have to change software programs.

Robust CSS Website Design

I have seen numerous post by designers struggling to transition into the world of CSS from table based design. One book I have found extremely useful is “Bulletproof Web Design” by Dan Cederholm.

This is one of the first books I picked up when I was learning and one I still grab every now and then. It is readable, clear, and thorough.

Topics covered by this book include: Flexible Text, Scalable Navigation, Elastic & Fluid Layouts, and Creating Floats.

While each of these topics warrants it’s own blog (and hence its own chapter in the book) I want to highlight how each topic makes for a high quality final web design.

Flexible Text:

• This is the concept of using relative font sizing instead of hard coding in a font size. The author gives a great example of a website for eyeglasses where the font was hard coded at 11px. While this might work for someone with healthy eyes, someone searching for eyeglasses might prefer to have control of setting the default size to something larger. By coding text size in relatives, this allows users the ability to control the overall font size of the site. The design controls the relative font sizing of headers and content.

Scalable Navigation

• This next topic goes hand in hand with flexiable text. Now that the font size can change, the website needs to behave well with these shrinking and growing letters. Scalable navigation allows for this. Instead of having fixed size images for your navigation. Buttons can be created using thin images slices that can be arrayed. Link button names can then be written as text with the graphic slices arrayed as needed behind them. This not only saves design time & graphic maintenance it make the website faster and more accessible to search engines.

Elastic & Fluid Layouts

• This chapter provides a great discussion on the benefit of layouts without tables. Furthermore, it explains how to utilize your viewer screen size by defined sections as percentages of the entire space. This enables websites to present well on both a wide and narrow screen. It also enable the ability to have the html content order different from the website presentation order. In other words you can place higher quality content at the beginning of your html even if it is not the first item displayed on the website.

Creating Floats

• Floats is a powerful part of table free web design. However, with all the wonderful browsers out there that each seem to interpret directions differently getting things to work as desired can be tricky. This chapter does a great job explaining how to achieve cross browser compatibility.

These are just some of the topic covered in this book.

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to refine their web design skills. It will take you from creating an okay site to building a high quality site you will be proud of.