Alright, you have followed along this series on The Perfect Website and that means that by now you should have established who your ideal client is, or as we in the marketing world call it, who your ideal avatar is. Also you know specifically what problems you solve.
That means you know exactly who your audience is and how to talk to them and you know what you can solve for them and how to communicate that.
You also now have establish a great domain name, a great URL that possibly also will help you with your chances of getting a high ranking for one keyword that is important for your business.
Now comes then the time to make a decision on the subject of on which platform to house your website.
This post is not to become too technical, but by platform in this case I mean what technical platform to build your website on.
Do you go for a Drupal site, a Joomla, a WordPress or something else?
Here at Amazing Ideas, Inc. we exclusively use a WordPress platform. The reasons are many, but one of them is in fact that it is easy. It’s also a platform that thousands of people are writing code for, which means that more and more cool solutions are offered (in the form of e.g. plugins and themes). In addition what I really like, is that you can relatively easily and quickly change the look and feel of your website with a WordPress platform, just by changing out the theme you are using.
You may be able to find similar abilities and advantages on other technical platforms, but I’m pretty convinced that you are making no wrong decision by going the WordPress route.
Personally, I have had a little experience with a few other platforms. My first online website creation experience was via Apple’s own program. I cannot really remember what they called it, but I almost would think it was called iWeb (at least that seems somewhat logical following all of Apple’s i-something-programs).
I liked this program for it was so easy and that’s what I was looking for. I was not in the game to learn technical stuff at all. However, it came will many limitations among which was the lack of abilities for really optimizing for web searches.
As I have previous stated, you can have the best solution in the world for some problem, but if no one knows about it, it will do you no good (nor your target audience). If you cannot get found in search results, you are likely to get nowhere.
A further limitation is that I believe Apple subsequently killed the application off, which probably was a very sensible thing to do seeing these other platforms are so well functioning, relatively easy to grasp and use and seeing they probably each are more focused on providing such solutions, whereas Apple’s focus might have been too distracted on other products.
I have also for a brief time had some experience with the Joomla platform. Personally I found it to be cumbersome and “oldish” to work with. When the site that we worked on had to be upgraded because of security issues and concerns with the platform, we chose to build a brand new site on WordPress.
On occasion you will run into other platforms that promises easy build and drag and drop features. While I welcome ingenuity and intuitive platforms, I wish to make to sure that in the midst of things we are not losing abilities for awesome plugins en masse, as well as excellent tools for carrying out the necessary and important work of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) along the way. Platforms such as Wix and Weebly come to mind. People sometimes come and ask me; “But what about this site… and this site?” and without being a true expert of these sites, let me just say that, I have my personal doubts.
Some years back, a friend of mine got me into bike riding as a way to get fit and stay fit. I thought “great, why not?” and started looking into what bike to get.
He mentioned the brand Lightspeed which was aluminum based, but then also mentioned a few brands that were carbon based. Of course the bikes looked awesome and held promises for me to become the coolest bike rider in no time. Hmm.
I looked a bit further and before long I found that there were at least 10 or 12 very high end brands all with their own very cool bikes (expensive too). I also found that speaking with any bike sales guy or any bicyclist would result in a new opinion on what to get.
Long story short. I wanted a bike and needed to cut through the clutter. So I asked myself: “Who is the best bike rider out there?”
Well, this was probably 2004 or so and Lance Armstrong was winning one Tour De France race after the other, so I thought, “OK, Lance Armstrong must be the best”.
No concerns at this point on drug enhancement or not. That’s not the issue here, nor if indeed Lance was the best rider of them all. Point is, he was killing it and that meant he probably also was using a great bike.
I proceeded then, by asking the next question: “what bike does Lance ride?” Well, easy to find out, it was a Trek bike and at the time I entered into it was the Trek 5900 or something to that effect.
My conclusion was simple: If the Trek 5900 was good enough for Lance, it was probably good enough for me.
So off I went and bought a Trek 5900.
The power of marketing and exposure, huh?
I’m by no means a mean bike rider. In fact I get on my bike way too little, but I still enjoy having a great bike when I do venture out on it and I actually still have and use my Trek 5900.
My point is, when deciding on choices among a myriad of what seems to make for good solutions, you will often find a ton of so-called experts that each have their own opinions and recommendations about what you should go with. What I do, is to look at who is doing the best out there. Who is crushing it? Who is creating phenomenal results and who is dependable – in this case – on their web platform to be working and function able at all times?
When I looked around almost all that I found, who really depended on the web platform and web presence, were using the platform WordPress. If it was good enough for them, it would probably be good enough for me too.
Those who were not using WordPress typically had some custom made platform.
But custom made, while it can be powerful – also renders you in need of specialized knowledge and expertise to keep running. Want an upgrade to it and now you are more than likely suck facing yet another expense on developers and coders. So custom is not the route to go in my opinion.
So without mocking any other platform, let me just say, that I personally see no point in investigating (at least at this point in time) any other platform than WordPress. Indeed, if I get involved with a client that demands another platform to be used, I will either outsource that work or tell the client that we are not a good fit.
Truly, I don’t believe there is some need a client might have in these regards that can not be satisfied via the WordPress platform, so instead of thinning down our expertise, we will rather want to stick to this platform and thereby only get better and better and even more savvy than we currently are.
My conclusion and recommendation is thus simple: Just go with the WordPress platform and you’ll be fine. Could this recommendation change later on? Possibly, but I don’t foresee this for any foreseeable future.
Upcoming Post: Where to get your hosting service and a couple of things to look for.
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