• Web Design
  • 08.07.22

Why Our DC Web Design Agency Uses WordPress

At Design in DC, one of our biggest priorities is to tailor a brand-new or refurbished website to each client’s needs, which is why we absolutely favor one content management system (CMS) over all others: WordPress. When it comes to web design, even if you’re not an expert, you’ve most likely heard of WordPress, and for good reason—it is the world’s most popular CMS, used for more than 40 percent of hundreds of millions of websites.

So the big question is, why WordPress? Which begs these questions: What, exactly, is WordPress? And why, when it comes to web design, is WordPress development so useful to the entire spectrum of businesses—informational, educational, e-commerce and marketing included?

The simple answer: When it comes to web design and maintenance, WordPress is extremely easy to use. It is also open source, meaning, in its most basic form, it’s free—which is why so many novice designers use it to build their sites.

But web design, these days, is far from simple. If you want a website to both protect and fuel the growth of your business, there are nuances—like graphics, animation, functionality and search engine optimization (SEO)—that no novice, even intermediate, designer can master and keep track of.

Which is where Design in DC comes in. Our web design teams are topnotch pros who ensure, during the WordPress development phase, that we’re building or rebuilding a site applying WordPress in all the right ways, by creating something that may look like Versailles but is secure as Fort Knox.

So, again, back to that big question: Why do we love WordPress?

WordPress is Easily, and Commonly, Used

WordPress started in 2003, as a blog platform, a place where people with little to no tech experience could easily create websites to express and share their knowledge, products, experiences and opinions. Originally intended to democratize online publishing, WordPress is also free, open-source software. So if you want to use it to build the most basic of sites, you can do just that at no financial cost.

But over the past 20 years, WordPress has become much more. It’s now a web design juggernaut, serving as the CMS of choice for millions of people, businesses, institutions and creative agencies like Design In DC. One big reason—WordPress is considered one of the most accessible, and reliable, CMS platforms. It doesn’t require prior coding experience, is easy to manage on a daily basis and makes adding, modifying and editing content, almost literally, kid’s play.

WordPress also makes updates to its software regularly, allowing you, essentially, to install them with the click of a button.

It’s only when you want a website to truly represent your business—and help expand its scope and revenue-earning potential—as our clients do, that a team of web design experts is needed to push WordPress development to its outer limits.

Flexibility and Customization in Web Design

What makes WordPress so easy to use also allows for its incredible flexibility. Both in-house and third-party web designers, using a variety of tools, have created myriad types of sites with WordPress, ranging from artistic to e-commerce to auctions. And some of the biggest brands are using WordPress, among them: Sony Music, Playstation, TIME magazine, CNN, Disney, The Rolling Stones and WIRED.

Why? Because WordPress is almost infinitely customizable. The software’s popularity means it can draw from a mountain’s worth of WordPress-friendly resources enabling businesses to pick and choose those features which say something unique about their brands while also offering practical services, such as demo requests and newsletter subscriptions.  

First and foremost, WordPress offers thousands of themes, also known as “skins” or website templates, providing a variety of aesthetics and functionalities. Many themes were designed with specific goals in mind. Artists, for example, can share their portfolios, auctioneers their lots. But each theme is not set in stone. WordPress allows webmasters, even content editors, to lay out pages that push the limits of each theme. Bottom line: With relative ease, you can tailor a theme to meet you and your business’s needs.

Aside from themes, WordPress also offers a huge library of plug-ins, software add-ons serving specific functions. While this may seem overwhelming, like a child walking into a supermarket for the first time, a great web design team can serve as a guide, so that, theme- and plug-in-wise, you’re using only what you need. And you can always add or remove plug-ins at any time.  

This flexibility applies to all forms of web design: desktop, tablet and phone. The latter, in particular, is key to marketing. It means your site is, literally, at customers’ fingertips wherever they may be—commuting, traveling, at a barbecue, just hanging out. Via WordPress’s responsive design, we can tailor your website to any screen and help you reach the broadest audience possible. And during the WordPress development process, we share what we’re working on with clients, who can comment, critique and help tweak the design, if need be.

In fact, our teams at Design in DC have helped numerous clients customize their websites so that specific tools are available to them, including (to name just a few):

  • clickable maps
  • hover effects
  • custom searches
  • forms
  • lead-generation features
  • payment acceptance
  • log-in capability
  • client scheduling
  • calendar integration

Finding the proper host for your website is also easy with WordPress. Because of its popularity, many web host providers offer reliable and managed WordPress hosting services. WordPress is also a very good fit for many existing managed hosting providers.

And WordPress seamlessly integrates with third-party businesses you may want to partner with for specific tasks, such as analytics (Google Analytics), CRM (Hubspot), marketing (Klaviyo) and surveys (Mailchimp).

If you’re looking for even more, additional tools are available to create custom content, which we’ve done for many clients. Testimonials, team member profiles, video and motion graphics—an A team specializing in WordPress development can do just about anything. And if there is no existing plug-in matching your requirements, we can create them for you.

SEO-Friendly WordPress Development

All of this means nothing, of course, if no one’s hearing that veritable tree fall in the forest. Your new website absolutely must attract visitors—which is why search engine optimization, or SEO, is so important.

WordPress, it turns out, is a search engine magnet, ranking much higher than most content management systems. Its elegant, high-quality code makes content on WordPress sites easy to digest and analyze, drawing the likes of Google and other search engines straight to it. It offers several other SEO-friendly features, including alerts automatically sent to Google each time you update your site, which helps, for example, recent blog posts move up the ranks in search results.

But with a team like Design in DC on your side, you can truly optimize your site’s magnetism, so to speak—by providing every page with tags, meta descriptions and URLs making specific words and phrases ultra-searchable. Site speed is another consideration for Google and other search engines. The faster, the better, and WordPress sites, configured just the right way, tend to load quickly. They’re also equipped with a link structure shared by many websites. Because Google et al. are familiar with these types of sites, it’s easy for them to locate your web pages, then index and rank them accordingly.

And don’t forget social media—a great way to drive visitors to your brand-new site. Our web design teams make sure that social media integration is a primary feature of any WordPress development project.  

The end game with SEO is simple—funnel increasing amounts of traffic to your website, ratchet up your ranking and beat out your competitors. At Design in DC, our SEO specialists and web developers work closely to ensure that WordPress development adheres to best SEO practices.

Secure Web Design

With a new website, you also want to prepare for possible attacks. A hacked website can do all kinds of damage. Hackers steal info and passwords. They install malware, which can even be passed on to your customers. The potential end result—damage to your revenue and your reputation.

Fortunately, WordPress was developed—and is constantly updated—with security in mind. Just at its most basic level, it’s one of the safest, most secure CMS platforms in existence. And because it’s used so widely, it’s continually audited by scores of web developers.

That being said, a lot of additional work can be done by a qualified WordPress development team to keep your website as secure as possible. Just as the management and scale of a business website demand a different level of attention, so does security.

The web design teams at Design in DC adhere to a long list of best practices, ranging from accessibility guidelines to security protocols, and we keep up with all of the latest security tools both within and outside of the WordPress system. We also offer clients security monitoring and support services as well as backup measures to ensure a website’s contents are saved elsewhere should a breach occur.

Summary: WordPress + Design in DC, a Dynamic Duo

WordPress is Design in DC’s number one choice for web design because it’s the best CMS platform out there—in terms of ease of use, flexibility, creativity, management and security. Bare bones, it already offers a lot, but in the hands of a topnotch WordPress development team, its potential is virtually unlimited.

For these reasons, we highly recommend WordPress as the CMS for your business website. And we offer our expertise and incomparable services, which have won us numerous web design awards in the past few years. WordPress and Design in DC are an unbeatable duo that’ll turn your website into a stunning, highly functional, revenue-earning, virtual storefront.

Now that we’ve acquainted you with WordPress, we invite you to learn more about Design in DC. We’re a creative agency offering a wide range of services, and we’ve created and upgraded websites for brands across several industries. For more info, check out our website, and to learn more about what we can offer your business, reach out to our team.

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