It’s estimated that over 90% of UK businesses over £5m turnover are “locked-in” to their current web development company. In a world of open source and digital portability this is rather staggering. And worrying.
A new world of fast deployment and agile delivery is opening the way for greater supplier collaboration and portability yet so many companies remained locked into a traditional supplier model due to poor supplier management and platform selection.
We’ve been using WordPress as a development platform for nearly 6 years and, whilst it’s fair to say it doesn’t fit every scenario I’ve yet to come across a digital project that it doesn’t fit.
The adoption of WordPress has been so fast that it’s caught the market out entirely and a large percentage of companies are now waking up to the benefits using WordPress to deliver their digital services.
Using WordPress to underpin your digital services has a number of key benefits:
Universal Adoption
Nearly 20% of Internet traffic now lands on a WordPress platform! everyone from the BBC, the British Government, Sony and Apple now underpin their digital services using the WordPress Framework.
Faster, cheaper development
The WordPress framework is fast to deploy and even quicker to evolve using fewer (expensive) programmers. Much of the “development” is devolved away from IT and traditional software development teams and put into the hands of those that are skilled in content, marketing, operations and sales.
The beauty of a well set-up WordPress installation is that folks can focus on the needs of the business and ignore the tedious web-development bit. With the right level of planning and design, a full mobile-first platform with great content management and best-practices SEO can be built and delivered in weeks – not months.
Less time spent equals less money spent and a more agile deployment approach gives greater flexibility to deal with challenges and take advantage of opportunities.
Open Source, greater choice
The open source movement is often misunderstood, sometimes labelled as “free software” and used to carry the stigma of being unsuitable for commercial use.
That’s wrong. Open source software, such as Linux, Ubuntu, Apache, PHP, MySQL and WordPress now power a multitude of commercial applications. Many in-car systems, plus Google’s Gmail and half the web servers in the world now use Open Source material.
The added flexibility of being able to adapt the core of applications and being liberated from (gravy train?) license agreements has speeded up innovation ten-fold in the last decade or so.
Many Open Source applications inter-operate simply and it’s now as easy to build complex systems as it is to assemble Lego bricks – and limited only by the imagination of the creator.
Commercially robust
WordPress offer a scalable, secure development environment that agencies, companies and development companies can easily and quickly use to build secure, reliable applications.
More and more development agencies are turning to WordPress to deliver high-value applications and the growth of WordPress Development Agencies is assured until the end of this decade.
In fact, there are very few serious development agencies left who aren’t turning their skills and experience to focus on WordPress. It’s very much the “platform of choice” in today’s development world.
Futureproof, built in
Support for mobile, responsive, cloud, HTML5, CSS3 are all built into the core of WordPress and it’s extensible nature means the adoption of newer technologies is a simple as installing a plugin – a 10 minute job.
The community of WordPress developers, such as Connected, ensure that WordPress will continue to meet the needs of businesses for years to come, and in an open and flexible way.
Reduced risk
There is a massive community of WordPress developers, designers, theme creators, plugin developers and specialists just a Google search away.
By adopting WordPress as your digital platform, you gain access to its community of experts, removing the dependence you might have on your existing, legacy suppliers.
The flexibility to switch suppliers inherently reduces the risk of change and encourages innovation and adoption. It also places the emphasis of innovation on suppliers and removes all that negative “defensive selling” that pervades the traditional agency world.
I trust that, in the immediate future, WordPress is top of your list for development platforms and that you elect to mix and match your choice of suppliers inline with the needs of the business.
If you want to speak to a WordPress development agency with 6+ years of WordPress know how then, “hello, we’re just a phone call or email click away”.
Welcome to the future of web development platforms, welcome to WordPress.
By Martin Dower, CEO
