My Story in a Nutshell:
Years before I started building websites for businesses I played around with websites for fun.
The first website I experimented with was a WordPress.com website (meaning I didn’t have a unique domain name, like with WordPress.org which I currently use). It was basically an online resume for me to show off my nerdiness and landed me a job in online advertising just a few quick months after I graduated college. I didn’t know much about how to make it look nice back then but I enjoyed learning the different functionalities of the site.
A few years later I started a blog and used Weebly to build that site. It was a little easier to style the pages through their templates that showed me where to put things, which I appreciated. But I’d get so frustrated when I couldn’t do exactly what I wanted and had to settle with what they provided.
Even though I had some experience with websites, I wasn’t confident enough in my skills to take on the task of building a bigger, better website for a family business venture my dad and I started. I had a professional build our website and they used WordPress with the Divi theme. My little nerd brain was so excited to hop in the backend of the site and see everything they did! I learned how to edit and style the pages by reverse engineering what they built.
With my next business venture a few years later, I knew I could build a website but I was so busy doing everything else that needed to be done for the business, we decided to have that site built for us as well. The professional that built our website also used WordPress with the Divi theme. So again, I was able to dissect what that expert did and learned a lot from it.
Eventually, a friend asked me to help them finish out a site built on WordPress. Which led to building a site from scratch for their friend. Which led to me starting my own website building business.
I chose to stick with WordPress because I’d seen what you can do with it. All the customizations, functionalities, and integration with popular software. I knew that I could build a strategic website to work for a business 24/7 and that design possibilities would not be limited.
I’ve learned more and more about WordPress over the years and it turns out that there are many more advantages to WordPress than endless design possibilities! This article from Quicksprout.com sums it up pretty nicely but I made a quick list of why I love it.
Why I Love WordPress
People ask me all the time why I use WordPress and not one of the easier website builders. My eye usually twitches as I remember the times I have tried to make basic adjustments in those easy website builders but had to accept that it just couldn’t do what I wanted. I usually tell people when they ask that, “I can do more with WordPress.” But here is a more in-depth, yet concise, explanation…
- I know how to use it. The simple and honest truth. I’ve been using it for years so I’ve had experience with different plugins and integrations. I know what works well and what doesn’t. I’m part of several online communities and group coaching programs with other website designers that can help me learn anything I don’t know.
- It’s safe. I truly care about doing what’s best for my clients. I’ve heard horror stories of sites being hacked and I knew that was something I’d have to safeguard against for my clients. WordPress is always being updated to remain secure. And there are integrations I add to my sites to reinforce them even more.
- I don’t like limitations. The WordPress community is large and passionate about web design. There are hundreds of thousands of plugins that can make a website do just about anything.
- I’m obsessed with the Divi theme. I use this premium theme for all my websites because it has tons of modules that make a website do some really cool stuff. It also has a lot of ways to customize each page to fit any brand’s style. I’ve invested in multiple add ons to the theme to make it do even more really cool stuff!
- It’s been around forever. To me, this means a few things… It’s trusted. It’s continually improving. It’s got a big community of designers to learn from. It’ll stay around so I don’t have to worry about losing content.
- It can grow with your business. You can start out with something very basic and when you’re ready to add more tools, pages, integrations, functionalities – you just add them in. Versus starting on a basic website builder and then having to move everything over to a whole new CMS (content management system) when you want your website to do more for you.
So I think it’s fair to say, “I can do more with WordPress.”
If you want to see what I can do for your business with WordPress, request a consultation and let’s see how we can work together!
