WordPress Intro | ODEA

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WordPress Intro

WordPress is currently powering 30% of all websites. Yeah, we’re picking our jaws up off the floor too! This 30% is a melting pot made up of small business websites, personal blogs and larger business websites like Sony and Vogue. At ODEA, WordPress is our go-to choice for content management system (CMS) when developing a website for a client. So, what makes WordPress one of the coolest kids on the block? Versatility.

In this week’s episode of Brain Lava, Stephanie Cosgrove, graphic designer at ODEA, discusses stats and the future of WordPress with our resident CMS guru, Emil Wisch. Check it out!

 

Prefer to read instead of listen? We’ve got you covered. Find a transcript of this episode below!

Stephanie: Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Brain Lava ODEA’s podcast dedicated to marketing and technology. I’m Stephanie Cosgrove Graphic Designer here at ODEA and today I am talking to our technical project manager Emil Wisch about WordPress. Emil, tell us about your background.

Emil: Thanks Stephanie. Hi everybody, my name is Emil Wisch. I’ve actually been working with WordPress in some capacity for a little over 10 years now and I came in to ODEA to help manage those sorts of projects and other technical projects. We’re going to talk a little bit about why we’re using WordPress.

S: Tell me and everyone listening, what the heck even is a content management system. Why do I need that or want that?

E:  A content management system allows an end-user, somebody that’s making updates to their own site, to make updates to your own site without the help of somebody who actually knows how to write HTML, CSS, any kind of code. Once you have your WordPress system in place you can go ahead and update your own content and that’s one of the great things about WordPress. It empowers you to be able to make those changes on your own in real time without necessarily having to make requests to get that content updated.

S: That’s awesome and less scary of an endeavor for our clients. When we tell them that we’re kind of handing over the reins to allow them to make updates to their website I can see they’re a little bit nervous about that, actually it’s pretty smooth sailing. I know a lot of times we use WordPress, why is that one of our preferred CMS’s (Content Management Systems)?

E: WordPress has been preferred in my experience. It’s just very user-friendly, very popular, so there’s a huge community around it. There are many businesses that help to support whatever you really want to do with WordPress including ODEA. We support our clients with whatever they need to do with their marketing efforts and how they want to manage content online. One of the biggest things is allowing people to do it themselves, when they can. A lot of people want to be hands-on and it really allows people to do that.

S: You mentioned that there are other companies and individuals who are constantly making improvements to the technology of WordPress. That sounds magical, tell us more about that.

E: WordPress Itself is open source, which means it’s freely available to everyone. Everyone can review it, look at the code base, edit the code base, redistribute it and that’s what allows us to take it and customize it for whatever the business need is, whatever the website is, for whatever we need to use it for. A lot of people have done that, a lot of people have gone in and found other uses for it, that’s what has created this trajectory for WordPress itself with people coming in. In the beginning you weren’t able to create a portfolio.

S: It being an open source platform, allowing everybody to use it and make it what they need it to be and be hugely popular. Over 30% of websites use WordPress?

E: Yep, 30% of all websites and that can be as small as somebody that just has a hobby like knitting or motorcycle engine rebuilding to a marketing company or construction business who needs to show their portfolio to their clients or huge companies that have tons of content like the New York Times. It really can do it all and that includes forums, membership websites, e-commerce. It’s as simple as blogs and your regular business presence sorts of websites.

S: Oh my gosh. I love knitting. Maybe I’ll start my own knitting website with WordPress, which is pretty exciting to me! What is exciting to you about WordPress? What does the future look like? What kind of new things are expected?

E: There’s one thing in particular that’s already come out that can be installed, it’s the Gutenberg version, that is a new update allow the end users to have even more control of their own content. I think we can look forward to that. It’s there, we are able to use it, we haven’t used it yet, but we’re going to. That’s just one of the new and exciting things that has come out that isn’t fully and widely adopted yet.

S: What makes it so even more easy to use?

E: You’ll be able to do more natively with WordPress out of the box instead of just having fields that you can drop your content into or write your content into. You’ll be able to recall blocks of content so you can decide what type of block that you want to use so it can be an image gallery, it could be a block of text, there are other different ways to structure content.  You’ll be able to control that a little bit easier without necessarily needing a customization from a third-party business that uses WordPress as the core of the structure of your website.

S: I think that’ll be really interesting. A lot of the ways we have been planning our websites recently have been these blocks of information. It’s really kind of amazing because instead of needing to design the entire page and what that would look like, you’re really just designing this little segment, this block of content, so that’ll be really helpful. Emil thanks for chatting with me about WordPress and Content Management Systems. It’s been a pleasure, can’t wait for next time talking about plugins. Thanks for tuning in everybody, you’ve been great we really enjoy recording this podcast, so please tune in to our next episode of Brain Lava.