There are dozens of approaches you can use to build a dental website for your practice. But when it comes to a combination of cost, flexibility and ease of use, WordPress is the hand-down winner. Add the fact that WordPress allows us to build almost anything our clients need, from minimalist designs to complex overlaying graphics and video, and it's no wonder that we build 100% of our website with WordPress.
Here's a quick summary of why WordPress is the best approach for your small business website:
One of the major advantages of working with WordPress is that sites that run WordPress are as simple to edit as writing an email or using Microsoft Word. One simply logs into the website's control panel and from there content, images and other changes can rapidly and easily be made. You can easily add, remove, and edit pages and blog posts without having to have specialized technical knowledge or web design skills.
WordPress is designed to make editing and changing the look and feel or your site an easy process. So if you initially start out with one theme and later on you re-brand or simply want a fresh design, updating your site's theme is a straightforward process. Think about it like this -- with other systems if you want a new website, you need to knock-down and rebuild the building. But with WordPress, you keep the building and only have to redo the interior design.
WordPress is expandable and allows you to add features to your website with small programs called "plugins". While adding certain features to a non-WordPress site may be expensive and take many hours of customize coding, there are large array of free or low-cost WordPress plugins that allow you to add features to your site. Some of these features include the ability to add a Facebook feed or email signup form.
In our daily use of WordPress for our clients, we use plugins that save an incredible amount of time and add powerful features. These features include: security hardening of the website and the ability to have interactive forms (contact form / scheduling form) and image galleries (for a business tour or before/after gallery). And we can't forget performance optimization, as the page speed of your website (loading time for users) is now a ranking factor in search engine listings.
WordPress powers almost 40% of the websites on the Internet, and this fact means that there are tons of developers and designers out there who can help you with your website if needed. For our clients, it means that they can manage as much of their website as they want, or as little as they want, and contact us only if they have a question or have a specialized task they want to accomplish.
While not all of our competitors make this fact public knowledge, at Short Hills Design we make it very clear to our clients that they own their own websites, and if they wanted to - they could easily move their websites to any other vendor. Of course we don't want our clients moving to other vendors, but we believe that it builds trust with our clients for them to know that they are making an active choice to continue to work with us because they want to, and not because they are locked into a long-term contract or can't move their website without rebuilding it first (see item 2 above).
You have many options when it comes to building your company's website, but for the majority of small business and professional websites, WordPress is the easiest, most cost-effective, and and best way to go. Have questions about what we can do for your business with WordPress? Drop us a line and let's talk!
