New business owners are often daunted by the choices of website providers, developers, marketing firms, hosting providers, and so forth. Yes, there are a LOT of variables when it comes to creating a website for your new business. Often, business owners get swayed toward proprietary platforms such as Wix and Squarespace.
What I mean by “proprietary platforms” is that these are systems which use proprietary programming and cannot easily be customized or extended to anything outside of the template. Proprietary platforms are inherently limited because it is difficult or impossible to extend their capabilities using custom programming. Also, the features offered by these platforms are limited to only the features that have been created by that company.
This is in contrast to “Open-source” platforms like WordPress. Open-source, means that you can view, edit, change, and extend the programming that creates the features of the platform. This is why WordPress has become the most popular website platform in the world. Hundreds of thousands of “plugins” have been created by developers throughout the world to customize and extend the capabilities of the WordPress platform; and most of these plugins are FREE!
The image above shows an example of “templates” that you can choose from when building out a website on WordPress. However, the template is just the beginning for WordPress websites since, once the template is in place, you can begin to customize it to do virtually anything with the use of plugins. For instance, let’s say you want a simple website today, but in a few months you may want to turn that simple website into an online store; no problem, just install the online store plugin. It’s that simple.
Furthermore, let’s say you want the website to do more sophisticated things like be a membership website that sells access to special content and features. Just install that plugin and you can have a website that sells products, and sells memberships to exclusive content. You could even sell products only to members… and so on.
Finally, let’s say you want to customize a plugin that someone else made or create a plugin of your own to do something nobody has thought of. No problem, James Web Design has programmers that can turn your ideas into reality; all because of the extensibility of WordPress.
