WordPress has revolutionized web design

In the past websites were all coded manually every time a change was needed, this means that you had no choice but to use a web design expert for everything, as a result most sites were rarely changed and rarely had new content. The importance of regular fresh content grew as Google gave more importance to it in its search engine algorithms and at this point web designers started including CMS (content management systems) into websites: these meant that almost anyone who had used a word processor and internet explorer could edit a webpage and add new content. These early very basic CMS systems though were quite expensive, often they would be custom built and even when they became cheaply available on a license the price from a web design company for a CMS system remained remarkably high. This high price stayed right up until they became open source, it became increasingly difficult for web designers to charge for something that was free but they still charged a reasonable amount to integrate a CMS system into a website. At about the same time that CMS started becoming popular SEO also became increasingly understood by business owners and marketing departments as something they should be doing: those that didn’t know would be convinced of it by a web design salesperson anyway. Those web designers who truly understood SEO and understood how to build a well optimized site, of which a CMS was often an important part, therefore kept on bringing in large amounts of income for what are by current standards very simple websites.

What WordPress has done though, and is still doing, is taking the bottom out of the market for either SEO or CMS focused websites. For most small businesses all they need is a website to give them a web presence and to make sure they appear above competitors for key but niche keywords in Google and other search engines’ results. WordPress gives small businesses, and actually a lot of quite large businesses, far more features than they really need, not that the control panel has to be cluttered. A basic WordPress website with a CMS and pages that are entirely visible to search engine robots can be set up in an afternoon by someone. The value a web designer can still offer when building a WordPress site is firstly graphic design skills. WordPress has plenty of free themes that look great but you do see the same ones again and again online: this also gives away that a site is a WordPress site that some businesses may want to avoid as they are still associated with amateur bloggers; a great looking site can be designed for WordPress though and look unique still. There are still some web designers building very expensive new breed websites at the cutting edge of what the web can do and these people make a lot per website; WordPress can do more and more though with more and more plugins that allow a E-commerce site, jobs board and various other niche site types to be setup and run through WordPress.