If you’re contemplating creating a website for your elder care business, you probably already realized there are many choices out there. Squarespace, Weebly, Wix…these are all examples of CMS software systems. WordPress also falls under that category but we believe it offers many more positive benefits than the rest. That’s why we only use WordPress for website design here at A Servant’s Heart Web Design and Marketing. The statistics don’t lie. According to Torque, WordPress powers nearly 27 percent of the Internet, making it by far the most popular CMS on the web. It’s popular for a reason: its market share is about 60 percent, and its closest competitor (Joomla!) is used by just 6.3 percent.
Another interesting stat: WordPress sites get 22.17 billion monthly pageviews and 46.6 million comments each month. If you’re going to pay for website creation, it should be WordPress. Why?
Versatility
You may be looking at completely custom CMS software and custom hosting for your elder care website. Some popular platforms for this include Squarespace, Weebly and Wix. However, this type of creation is only available from the CMS vendor. That means the site can only be built by the CMS vendor or by a consultant. Other sites, like FusionCMS, can only be built by the CMS vendor. This poses many restrictions on you as a growing business.
Here are some important negative characteristics of these systems to consider:
- You cannot migrate away from them without completely discarding the investment that you have made in them, other than the content. You are just renting your site; you do not own it.
- They are not as extensible as WordPress: ultimately there are things that you may want to do that just simply cannot be done, or done at reasonable expense, because these systems all eventually reach a point where they cannot be modified any further.
- You are completely at the mercy of the vendor with respect to pricing, terms and all other aspects of the website operation.
protect your investment in your company’s SEO and online marketing: ownership and control of the domain name under which your company’s website is indexed in Google’s database, and ownership of the content, design, files and programming of your website.
With websites that are essentially directory listings, you are simply renting that space on their servers and any improvements you make disappear if you decide to leave.
Availability
CMS software that is not completely custom or proprietary is becoming more and more of a niche market because fewer consultants currently work with or are entering the market to work with it. Joomla! and Drupal are examples of software companies that target specific markets and therefore don’t represent the wide-spread scalability that WordPress offers.
When we take a look at systems like Joomla! and Drupal, we discover several negative characteristics of these systems, such as:
- Limited availability of consultants, compared to WordPress, may mean wait times for system enhancement and maintenance. There is also little or no competitive pressure to keep consulting rates affordable.
- Limited availability of third-party plugins or other extensions, compared to WordPress, may make customization and additional functionality more expensive or completely unavailable.
- As WordPress continues to eclipse these in popularity and support, it may become increasingly difficult to find the resources necessary to migrate to new hosting sources and other third-party support. You may not be renting your website, but you may find yourself with an increasingly non-maintainable website.
A Powerful Platform
Not only is WordPress easy to use thanks to one-click installation, it gives you access to plenty of plug-ins, add-ons and extras so you can truly customize your home care website. It also happens to be open source and up to date on all SEO standards, which means you can use it to improve your organic search rankings. Above all, WordPress is highly flexible and versatile enough to meet all your needs via features and extensions, says Entrepreneur.
Whether your business encompasses elder care, senior living, assisted living, or nursing homes, WordPress features easy navigation buttons that are clear for your core demographic to get where they need to be. Easy flow is imperative. Forbes says your site should be clearly laid out with a few key features to direct visitors; if you try to cram too much in there, it becomes too busy and difficult to navigate.
Having a well-organized site will provide a two-fold benefit: users will find what they are looking for faster, plus it will help crawlers better understand your site’s content and purpose, says Search Engine Land.
Contact A Servant’s Heart Web Design and Marketing
WordPress is our platform of choice here at A Servant’s Heart Web Design and Marketing, for all the reasons mentioned above and more. Contact us today at (760) 227-2720 to learn more about our WordPress web design and get a free consultation.
