Wordpress Agency in London

What is WordPress?

WordPress (WP) is an open source content management system (CMS) that can be downloaded for free and self-hosted by anyone with the technical knowledge to do this. It is currently considered one of the most popular applications ever built, and for good reasons: its administrative interface is intuitive and very easy to use, the creation and taxonomisation of content is straightforward and it allows webmasters to easily structure it and update it.

It is estimated that WordPress currently powers 34% of all websites on the internet (W3Techs), a figure that is nothing short of impressive considering that there are approximately 1.7 billion websites published (Internet Live Stats), making it the most popular CMS in use.

Why use WordPress to create websites or web applications?

There are many reasons to use WordPress, both from business and technical standing points. WP is a highly versatile framework that’s very easy to install on a standard server and manage, it’s reasonably secure and extremely extensible, companies can develop unique plugins and templates to serve almost any purpose. Because of its unmatched popularity, companies using WordPress will easily find the specialist resources to work with it, from marketing to SEO and to technical people like developers and DevOps. Another reason to consider WP is the immense knowledge base facilitated by the Internet, from tutorials to well-run forums and the official documentation. And finally, WP comes with native Android and iOS mobile applications that allow webmasters to manage their websites using a mobile phone and it’s SEO friendly, which is an essential consideration for most companies.

To summarise, we like WP because:

• is free and open source;
• it’s very versatile and easier to learn than Drupal, Joomla, Magento etc.;
• it’s extremely extensible: immense offer of free and premium plugins, templates AND it has its own REST API;
• there’s a large and dynamic community behind it;
• impressive learning resources: good documentation, tutorials, forums, blogs etc.
• companies can easily find good specialist resources to work with Worpress;
• out of the box mobile applications to aid with website management;
• it can be used to build almost any type of website: blogs, presentation, portfolio & corporate websites, online shops, forums, membership platforms, wikis, you name it;
• search engine friendly and easy to structure content;
• out of the box support for many media types to create content-rich websites.

Totally has developed WordPress high-profile websites since 2005 and we’ve only got better in time, combining a number of 3rd party technologies to turbo-charge WP into unique, state of the art web applications. We are also fans of it simplicity and technical elegance.

What types of websites can you build with WordPress?

In the hands of competent and creative development agencies, almost any type of website can be created using WordPress. Starting with business or corporate websites, blogs, interactive presentation/portfolio websites, to more complex platforms like wikis, forums, portals, e-commerce and membership websites and everything in between, WordPress can be used as a technical framework to build upon to create those bespoke software solutions. It can handle fairly large databases as well as simple presentation websites and this is always an advantage to consider.

We already have a Worpress-based website, can we create a new design but keep the content?

In general this is possible, yes. Because WordPress works with an SQL database where the content, authors, meta information, internal links and other details are stored, it is possible to completely change the layout, alter or implement new functionality and even integrate with third party APIs without losing any of the existing content. Things are not always straightforward in this respect but we have always found ways to work around content when it was important to do so.

Can you integrate WordPress with 3rd party services like Salesforce, Mailchimp, Google etc.?

Yes. We have extensive experience integrating WordPress with 3rd party APIs and also using the WordPress API to develop unique websites to meet business needs. We haven’t yet met a technical challenge we couldn’t overcome, whether it was strictly WP or something else.