Nearly half of all Internet websites are now based on the WordPress platform. There are many reasons for this dominance: ease of use, search engine friendliness, open source code, low costs, and an almost endless selection of functional add-ons to turn your website into a marketing powerhouse. We recognized the power of WordPress more than 10 years ago and realized that instead of reinventing the wheel for every client, we would be able to offer more functionality for less cost if we based our work on this super versatile platform. In fact, we’ve been extending WordPress on our own with flexible, page layout themes integrating content blocks and styles for years while only in the past few years has WordPress addressed this type of need with the Gutenberg editor.
Plugin Pros
Bending WordPress to our needs is just one way we bring added value to our clients. Knowing what solutions already exist in the form of plugins is another. Plugins are add-ons that can do everything from add a slideshow to connect your form with an e-mail campaign. Hundreds of thousands of free plugins exist while thousands upon thousands more are available to buy. So how do you choose which plugins are right for your needs? You leave it to us. We test them, decide what works best, and we’ll even work with the plugin author to make changes if necessary. Some plugins, such as the WooCommerce e-commerce shop plugin, is just as complex as WordPress, but we’ve been using it for years so we know how to adapt it for our clients’ needs. In the end, using a solid plugin can save our clients thousands of dollars, speed production, and make their website more flexible for the future.
WordPress is free, so why isn’t my website free?
There’s a perception that WordPress is free or should be inexpensive because many of the components used are free or low cost. The fact is that using WordPress can be low cost if you know what we know, but you don’t and that’s why you have to either pay for our expertise or get a pretty worthless website. That may sound like grandstanding but it really isn’t. There are lots of wrong ways to do things that will break your website, get it banned by search engines or just make it useless or ugly. Most businesses want an attractive, functional website that helps them make money. Even a fairly basic website requires hundreds of lines of styling code to be written, correct options to be selected, plugins to be configured, attractive art to be generated, engaging copy to be written, functions to be tested across multiple browsers and screen sizes and operating systems…and that’s just scratching the surface. And all that takes time and if you’re in business, or you’ve hired a doctor or plumber, you realize that time is money. But with AIM you get even more expertise than the technical know-how of how to build a great website. You would be hard-pressed to find an agency with the background we bring in marketing, publishing, IT, design, writing and editing, systems integration and good old creativity. Building on the strength of WordPress, AIM has created powerful, unique business solutions for clients all across the country. We’d love to see how we can help you, too.