NC Web Design

NC Web Designs launches a new website...

Hope you are enjoying my new website. It was time I redesigned it. If you have any comments, please send them to me. I would love to hear your thoughts.

NC Web Designs Blog

This year I decided to research various Content Management Systems (CMS) in order to provide clients a way for them to edit websites that I design for them. After looking at Joomla and WordPress, two very powerful CMS solutions, I ventured onward with WordPress.

Why did I choose WordPress? There some very good reasons why, but the main reason is because it was very obvious to me that WordPress was user friendly in the eyes of someone who might not have very much experience in editing websites. I'm very sensitive to how intimidating it can be for someone who may not know HTML, or have time to learn a new control panel. That's all you want to do when you barely have time to keep your site updated anyway, right? I would like to keep this explanation in a tone that many people can understand that are reading my blog. So here are my top reasons for choosing WordPress:

  • Numerous WordPress Plugins, applications that enhance a website or blog, are available to use. WordPress Plugins extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine and increase capabilities of a website or blog. There are also numerous WordPress developers and designers using WordPress that offer these Extensions or Plugins and provide support. These communities of resources and support are ideal for developers and web designers. This keeps the costs down in terms of development time and how much effort is spent designing a quality, custom website.
  • Build Blogs, Websites or both. What's a blog and how is it different than a website? You are reading my blog and can view it as an example. Blogs may not weigh high on your list to have, but in today’s internet savvy market, they have now become SEO tools to increase visibility to your website. With WordPress you can create a blog or a website with ease. You can even build both. You can use your blog as much as you want or keep it simple and make it something manageable for you and your time. I've had many people ask about blogs, and WordPress allows you to brand your blog along with your website. Branding is very important to some clients and WordPress can incorporate your blog as an extension to your website to increase visitors and most importantly, build SEO.
  • Ease of use in the Dashboard for clients that want to be able to quickly update their site on their own. I found WordPress much easier to navigate in, and simply put, I think my clients will too. The dashboard (which allows you to edit your website) is very user friendly! I've had experiences with Drupal and Joomla, other common CMS solutions, and WordPress is on top when you just want to click and go! If you can easily navigate in Microsoft Word, you'll find WordPress just as easy.
  • Do you have a backup of your website or database? This is the first thing I will ask you. WordPress allows this. So many clients don't know they should have a backup, maybe never thought about it before, or just assume there is one somewhere. There’s gotta be a backup of my website, right? Please don’t assume this. As a web designer, I can tell you about why this is important and why it's a priority, even though it might not be high on your list of things to do.

Are my days over for Adobe Dreamweaver? Well, no. I still find a valuable place for it and it's still a very important tool for a web designer, as well as the other Adobe applications I'm so fond of. As a web designer, WordPress has some limitations and in order to create a custom website, there's absolutely place in a web designer's toolbox for Adobe.

Do you need to know PHP? Well no, not to just update your website with WordPress. Did you just ask yourself, what's PHP?  I understand how that goes, so to find out, click here. Which brings me to this...I would like to extend a great big thank you to my partner in website solutions. As I set out to redesign my website in WordPress, my venture did need some support (you know who you are), the games began, and we rolled up our sleeves and dove in to PHP.  Always, being very good at setting me straight when I need another eye, thank you very much! Simple, we just made it happen!

If you have comments, please let me know. Again, thanks for visiting and don’t hesitate to contact me.