Thanks for reading the final post in our Brew City Marketing original blog series Why WordPress. From the ability to have multiple users to 100% customizable design, we hope you’ve enjoyed learning all about what makes WordPress an exceptional CMS. Miss a post in the series? Head to our blog to catch up.

WordPress is an Open Source Project

WordPress doesn’t belong to any one person or company. Instead, the platform is an “open source” project that’s constantly being maintained, tested, and improved by hundreds of developers around the world. Licensed under the GNU General Public License, WordPress is free for anyone to build as many different types of websites as they wish.

The Benefits of Open Source

But wait: what’s so great about open source? Unlike some proprietary content management systems on the market, the open source aspect of WordPress allows users many invaluable freedoms and benefits. Need some examples? Here are just a few.

• It won’t lock you in – Unlike a proprietary CMS, WordPress offers you a ton of flexibility…especially when you want to make a drastic change in design, content or even hosting. This is tough and sometimes near impossible to do with a proprietary CMS.
• It’s constantly being updated – One awesome aspect of WordPress being open source is that it’s constantly being updated and improved by the community. Because so many people are working on it at a given time, bugs and security issues are addressed quickly. With a proprietary CMS, you’re at the mercy of the company or individual to update the system should things go wrong.
• It’s safe and secure – Like most open source platforms, WordPress is incredibly secure. Security is bolstered by the hundreds of WordPress volunteers around the globe who are constantly working to solve known security issues and mitigate others.
• It’s on a long list of open source success stories – Still not sure of the viability of WordPress? Consider other open sources success stories like Firefox, Wikipedia, OpenOffice, Android and more. These companies are juggernauts in information technology and are used by millions around the globe.

Open source means users are afforded a measure of flexibility, freedom and security that’s unmatched by proprietary software solutions. On this and more, WordPress delivers.

These days, website administration is a team effort. Instead of having one person be responsible for updating content or design, multiple team members play a role. Luckily, WordPress easily accommodates this modern workflow by allowing for multiple users.

As an administrator of a WordPress site, you can set-up multiple users for your website and assign access levels or capabilities to each user. Having the ability to set up multiple users benefits you in a myriad of ways, including:

• Greater accessibility – With a computer and an internet connection, you can make changes to your website or update content no matter where you are in the world. Effectively, this means that multiple team members can be logged in and working on different aspects of your website at once, from anywhere on the map!
• Increased collaboration – WordPress is a great platform for multi-author blogs and other projects that require collaboration and teamwork. In fact, one of our clients runs a travel blog where many contributors update the site in real-time as they go about their travels. WordPress is the ideal platform for them as they can all be logged in and blogging at once.
• Ease of creating a membership site, if you wish – Multiple users also applies to website visitors. With a little help from plugins, your WordPress website can become a full service membership site with as many or as few levels of accessibility as you like!
• Ease of updating – Because WordPress was built with multiple users in mind, the interface is very easy to navigate. Not only does WordPress make it easy to train multiple users, it also makes change management a cinch.

The ability to add multiple users to a WordPress website is a benefit that is often taken for granted. But when you stop to consider that most other CMS’s charge for this simple and important functionality, it becomes a yet another reason to–you guessed it–choose WordPress.

This is the fourth post in Why WordPress—a Brew City Marketing original blog series about what makes WordPress such an outstanding content management system (CMS). Keep an eye out for our next post about how WordPress trumps the competition in terms of design and customization, and head to the blog to read our last post!

If you ask a developer what they like most about WordPress, chances are pretty good that their answer will be plugins. Not only are plugins typically a breeze to upload and maintain, they truly give your website limitless functionality. Best of all, a lot of great plugins are free, with more and more plugins being developed and added to the WordPress database each day. Still need convincing? Read on to learn more about the power of plugins.

What are plugins?

Plugins are bits of software that enable your website to do anything—and we do mean anything—you want it to. Plugins can be easily added to a website in order to expand functionality or to add new features, and contribute to a rich and robust browsing experience for website visitors.

What type of plugins are available?

To date, there are over 29,000 plugins in the WordPress database, with new ones being added every day. Do you want to add a video gallery, Twitter feed, shopping cart, or more to your website? There’s a plugin for all of this and more!

Popular plugin uses include:

• Social media
• Spam or traffic management
• Multilinguality
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Backups and more

What if the plugin I want doesn’t exist?

It’s unlikely, but in the event that the plugin you want does not yet exist, it can be created for you by anyone who is familiar with the PHP programming language. Brew City Marketing ran into this scenario when a client of ours, Real Time Automation, requested an advanced product selector as part of their website redesign. Existing plugins missed the mark, so we custom-built a product selector plugin for them that would allow their clients to choose the best possible connector for their needs.
As with anything, plugins do have their caveats. Still, we think the positives of plugins far outweigh any negatives. Plugins are cost-effective, plentiful, and scalable, and contribute in large part to the excellence of WordPress as a CMS.

This is the third post in Why WordPress—a Brew City Marketing original blog series about the benefits of WordPress. Watch out for our next post about how plugins expand the functionality of WordPress websites! Missed our last post? Head to the blog.

Do you have ambitions of growing your business from a small operation to a full-scale enterprise? If so, fear not: your WordPress website can grow right alongside your business.

Scalability may seem like a no-brainer, but many content management systems (CMS) on the market today often miss the mark. With that mind, let’s explore the ways WordPress trumps the competition when it comes to growth and expansion.

It’s Not Just a Blogging Platform Anymore

WordPress began as a blogging platform in 2003 but eventually evolved into a powerful CMS. Today, WordPress websites run the gamut in terms of scope and complexity, with some like the New York Times and TED featuring thousands of pages of text, media, and other content. Despite the large size of a WordPress website, performance is never compromised.

Plugins Offer Limitless Functionality

We’ll expand on this more in our next post in the series, but the thousands of plugins in the WordPress database offer your website nearly limitless functionality. Perhaps you started your business out of your home, but now you’re in need of a full-fledged e-commerce shop. Never fear: there’s a plugin for that! And if there isn’t, one can be built for you by a skilled developer or programmer at a reasonable cost. The same cannot always be said for other content management systems.

It’s a Non-Proprietary CMS

Speaking of content management systems, there are many out there today that promise long-term scalability. But in our experience, this isn’t always the case. For example: when a client of ours started her business, she opted for a proprietary CMS. To her delight, her business began to thrive, which lead to the opening of two more stores. Unfortunately, her CMS couldn’t keep up. They wanted to charge a host of fees to add or develop new website features that weren’t part of her original plan. With WordPress, it’s a completely different story: if your business needs happen to change, you never have to worry that your website will outgrow its’ functionality. Your website can change and grow as your business does.

Start small with WordPress and you won’t regret it. Not only is it cost-effective to actually scale your website when the time comes, performance is always tip-top in the hands of a skilled developer.