Relax and breath deeper! Can you smell this? Mmm..what a sweet fragrance! Yes, it’s love flying in the air. Everyone is expressing their sincere feelings, exchanging Valentine’s cards and give tons of kisses and hugs. What a romantic atmosphere!
On this occasion, we’ve decided to ask the most influential WordPress users what are their relationships with WordPress. We’ve prepared 3 questions and requested top WordPress experts to make an input and express their minds:
- When and how did you start your “relationships” with WordPress?
- What was your “ex-CMS platform” (if there was one) and why did you quit?
- What do you like WordPress for most of all (things/features for which you can recommend this CMS to everyone)?
Enjoy the results!
Brad Dalton, WordPress Consultant, founder of WP Sites, who loves to blog and travel
I started in 2010 when I was looking for an easier way to update a business website with new content.
I was using Microsoft Publisher but found it challenging to customize the design and add new content which is why I went looking for more user-friendly software.
What I like about WordPress the most are its ease of customization, community support and a large range of themes/plugins.
Jennifer Bourn, mother of Bourn Creative, blogger, speaker and an award-winning designer
I began my relationship with WordPress after a particularly trying interaction with a client who was demanding immediate content changes to their website late a night. Their site was using a content management system, but it was so cumbersome that the client didn’t even want to bother updating it themselves. I was at my wit’s end and began looking for another solution. In my search, I came across WordPress and when I realized just how easy it would be for my clients to make their own content revisions, I was hooked.
The CMS platform I used before WordPress was LightCMS and while it got the job done, it was cumbersome, inflexible, and not very intuitive. It required clients to jump through too many hoops to make simple changes and the monthly fees weren’t loved by any clients.
The thing I love most about WordPress (besides the community) is that it can be as simple as you want it to be. From a basic blog or a simple site without a blog to a business website or massive media site, WordPress is flexible and extensible and can meet the needs of almost any project and still maintain it’s ease of use.
Alex Denning, a digital marketer who is doing marketing for WordPress people, solving the marketing problem they don’t want to deal with
I first used WordPress seriously at around version 2.5, roughly a decade ago! I remember at the time thinking the vibrant community made it an obvious choice, and I’m very glad I was right 🙂
I’ve tried a handful of CMS platforms over the years but always come back to WordPress: it has the right mix of customisability, extensions, and simplicity.
WordPress’ community is its strongest asset: this is what drives its innovation, its incredible array of themes and plugins, and its support network. Attending your local WordCamp or meet up is a great place to start – have a look at WordCamp Central.
Ivica Delic, a person who loves everything related to technology, especially WordPress, freelancer tools problem solver, a loving husband and father
I started with WP back in 2011. One of my acquaintances asked me to create a Facebook business page for his family business. After a few months of using it, he was so pleased with the business results that he asked me to create a website for his family business. As I am not a coder/programmer, I was searching the Internet for an appropriate CMS for his business and my level of beginner knowledge for building CMS websites. After I found and read the information about WordPress – I immediately fell in love with it and made them a site in the next couple of weeks! The rest is history 😊
My wife was using Joomla on a daily basis at her work in a non-profit Association. However, it was so time-consuming and such a slow process for publishing posts that she was looking for a much simpler solution. She has found it in WordPress. Now, she built websites in WordPress and simply enjoys it. 🙂
P. S. Unfortunately, we didn’t know about aisite service at that time so we could have easily switch CMS technologies, but we now surely know it for the future 🙂
The fact that even non-coders can create beautiful websites all by themselves full of additional features attracts me in WordPress most of all. I also like the WordPress plugins concept where you can extend the out-of-the-box power of the CMS website building platform. However, I simply adore the WordPress Community that is so non-selfishly helping WordPress users. This open source spirit is simply amazing and so inspiring to all of us working with WordPress!
Ilona Filipi, Founder and Managing Director of Moove Agency – London based WordPress Agency that builds and supports high-performing websites
I started to work with WordPress as a freelancer more than 10 years ago. I was new to the CMS world and did an extensive research into which CMS to choose for my projects. My research indicated that WordPress is the best platform to use for my client websites. 10 years later I can safely say that I have made the right decision and WordPress truly is the best CMS platform out there!
Back in the days when I started, many developers and agencies used their own bespoke/propriety CMS developed in-house. This practice is now almost entirely gone as supporting your own platform is incredibly expensive and time-consuming when open-source alternatives such as WordPress deliver new updates and system improvements every 3 months, completely free of charge!
Here are the things I love about WordPress most of all:
- Easy to use – WordPress is so easy to use and intuitive that it’s the best choice for anyone who is not a developer themselves. We work with clients who are short on time so having a CMS that simply gets the job done, fast, with no upfront training required, is of a huge importance.
- No license fees, no vendor lock – Anyone who was ‘stuck’ on other propriety CMS platforms will especially appreciate this very important aspect of why choosing open-source CMS should be considerate a business decision first and foremost.
- WordPress SEO – WordPress deserved a reputation for being the best CMS for SEO optimization and content/inbound marketing. Our clients who are marketing managers love the inbuilt SEO features that WordPress brings out of the box.
- There’s more – There are many more very compelling reasons why to choose WordPress. For anyone interested to learn more about WordPress and why to choose it over other CMS systems, I recommend a recent post on our company blog: ‘15 reasons to use WordPress to power your website‘.
Mohamedkadar Ibrahim, Webmaster, blogger and internetpreneur
I started with WordPress 3 Years ago. Initially, I had no experience with web development and WordPress was the first CMC I used.
So what made me start with WordPress when there are many Content management systems out there. Why didn’t I start with laravel or Joomla?
Honestly, the only reason I turned to WordPress was that I had no coding skills.Many of the frameworks I researched about required a little bit of coding know how and that was a put-off. I needed a platform with which I can learn on and make mistakes. WordPress was the ideal CMC for me.
Another reason I probably chose WordPress was that of the community. The WordPress community of developers is simply the best.
I started working with WordPress in 2008, before I would make websites with straight PHP/MYSQL/HTML/CSS/JS. I also made few sites with Flashback in the days…
When I 1st tried WordPress it wasn’t still what it is today, but it was love at 1st sight. Creating a website was a lot faster, I started creating simple themes and/or customizing popular themes for my projects.
Since I started using WordPress I never looked back, nor around.
I believe the huge community and the extensibility (hooks) are what makes WordPress superior to any other open source CMS project.
A few years ago I met Stiofan in a WordPress theme shop support forum and we started working together.
He is 100X the developer that I am (I’ve rarely written any code since I met him) and we started developing and selling WordPress themes and plugins. Him developing and me marketing.
Now we have a team of 8 between developers and support specialists, for 3 freemium plugins and several free plugins and themes used on over 100k active installs.
Brian Jackson, an entrepreneur who loves SEO, SMM, blogging, WordPress & growth hacking
I started building HTML+CSS websites back in the 7th grade. This was in the good old days of dial-up and nothing to choose from other than cPanel for a hosting control panel.
I played around with Drupal a little and finally stumbled across WordPress. At the time, it was still in its early days and typically still viewed as more of a blogging tool. But the more I played with it the more I realized I could make it do whatever I wanted.
From there it was a match made in heaven and I’ve been using WordPress ever since.
I now work for a managed WordPress hosting company, and also develop plugins on the side. So you could literally say, I live and breath WordPress on a daily basis. And I love it!
The first thing I like about WordPress is the versatility. You can easily create a blog, an ecommerce site, a photography site, whatever you want. Secondly, thanks to the thousands of plugins and themes out there, you really don’t even need to know how to code to be successful. I know WordPress agency owners that don’t know the first thing about code, and yet they’ve carved out great little businesses in the niche. You can really run with WordPress and take it as little or as far as you want to.
No matter what industry you’re in, WordPress can be the perfect fit to simply spend more time growing your business, instead of tinkering with your website.
Jeff Nichols, Web Design and Marketing Specialist
My first and VERY short-lived CMS was Drupal. I worked with a developer who was in love with it and still successfully uses it for some pretty big clients.
Drupal and I just couldn’t get along. It seemed so counter-intuitive to my sensibilities and ways of building websites, AND.. part of my design client pitch was (and still is) that I can train you or your staff to EASILY maintain your website. I could not get comfortable quickly enough with Drupal and so I looked elsewhere.
With increasing use of smartphones for the searching/surfing the internet back in 2012, I liked websites that were being produced using WordPress Responsive themes. So I converted my website to the platform and liked it and then started using it for new clients and then I started pitching existing clients were not mobile-friendly yet.
I have been using WP for all of my builds since 2013 and look forward to keeping clients happy using it for the next 10 years!
You see how many people gave their hearts to WordPress for its user-friendliness, incredible set of themes and plugins and warm community support. In case you are not in this super friendly WordPress family, do not waste a minute and make the first move to your website’s bright future!
Do you like our “Experts’ insights” series? Do you have something to say about your relations with WordPress? Feel free to write a comment!
